I got a Facebook message from a friend telling me that it is smoky back home. Made me feel good and bad simultaneously. Good that I’m not there, bad because everyone else is.
Then I saw a comment on a post, from a couple days ago, linking to an article about how the smoke from some grass fires in Eastern Kansas has blown all the way up to Omaha Nebraska. The title of the piece was “Smokey Kanas fumes clogging the area”. Man, if they think their area is clogged, I’m not sure what word to use to describe the area closer to the actual burning.
80% of the reason that I’m not in Kansas right now is because of the burning. I’m trying to skip out on it and see if I don’t go through the normal March-May funk that I’ve been experiencing recently. So far, so good.
From the picture below, it looks like yesterday was an optimal day to burn. It sort of goes in waves and for sure, on the weekends, it is worse. I’ve ridden the Bazaar Road Race when you have to ride through mile stretches of pure smoke, the grass burning right up to the edge of the road. We usually call a timeout to get through the smoke.
I have written a bunch on the whole burning thing. I understand the importance of the burning for farmers, but from my observations, at least half of the burns are lazy, pyromaniac types, that are burning their ditches and other underbrush. It isn’t 50 percent of the smoke, but it is a significate amount.
I feel bad for all my friends back in Kansas that are having to deal with this right now. California has its issues, but nothing compared to the air quality, or lack of, that is going on right now back home.
At night, the fires can be beautiful.
This is the satellite photo. Notice how much burning they are doing just Southwest of Topeka. Some mornings, going out to get the newspaper, I can hardly see down the block.
They burn vast amounts of land, thousands of square miles.
Good choice on staying in California right now. After a week training in the wonderful salt air along Miami Beach, I came back home (Flint Hills in Butler County) to find that the burning is really ramping up. My asthma, which hasn’t reared its ugly head in months, is now reminding me that it wants to play. It is really tricky figuring out how/when to ride. My smarter half made me bag Friday’s workout, as the visibility was probably down to a mile or two. Pure soot haze. Yesterday’s air wasn’t much better. As I told someone else, the air tasted like smoked meat. Today will be much better, as the wind is gusting to near 40mph, so no one is burning. We’ll let you know when the haze lifts and its safe to come home.
They outlawed the burning in Oregon a few years ago. There main export is grass, the kind in your yard, not the other. The burning was horrible, Eugene where we lived is at the end of the wallamit valley and so the smoke just hung there for days or weeks until the wind changed.
Here in Dubai, its the sand storms. Nothing to legislate
Wallamit?
The satellite doesn’t do the close up scene justice. We rode past at least 8 different fires on Saturday afternoon on the way to 60+ miles. Light winds meant most of the smoke went straight up so not too bad breathing, but did smell like a meat smoker like Trey alluded to.
They have not banned burning in Oregon. There is plenty of agricultural and wildland burning in Oregon. They have changed the methods of burning along I-5 because of a bad crash some years ago. But agg burns in Oregon really have no regulation.