Gov. Declares State of Emergency!

[azsnowman]

Az's Gov has declared a State of Emergency due to the drought, folks, this is SERIOUS stuff, I am scared to DEATH about this upcoming weekend, with all the careless campers and numerous other nimrods, if we make it through this weekend, it will be by the Grace of God!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... ght23.html

Dennis

[weatherlover427]

:o Geesh it must be real bad again! Stay safe Dennis!

[Aslkahuna]

are right back where they were this time last year while a small part is getting there after minor improvement during the Winter. The declaration will allow AZ to get 232 million Federal dollars to undertake mitigation efforts-which may be a case of too late and not enough since conditions are so bad I don't seen how you will be able to bring power tools into the areas they want to clear.

Steve

[azsnowman]

It's called *Hoot Owl*, cutting from 0445 till 0730, once again from 1530 till 1930, not much time to fall but then again, these old boys that fall trees for a living can dang sure get a LOT done in those short hours!!!!

Dennis

[southerngale]

Oh boy Dennis...it's a lot worse there than here even though we haven't had rain in many weeks. I really hope ya'll get relief soon.

[azsnowman]

It's terrible, the ground is *WET* with sap from the Ponderosa Pines, it's worse than it was last year. When a Ponderosa gets stressed like they are now, they send sap to the needles to *seal* them off to prevent any further loss of moisture, I have never, ever seen them do this to THIS extent. That's one reason for the EXPLOSIVE fire conditions we are seeing, the sap is SO explosive, one cig butt, one spark from a car, ATV, one lightning strike *BOOM!*, there's goes the rest of the forest!

Dennis

[Aslkahuna]

that we don't see something like 1994. That year was bad for fires as well. After a false start which sucked the NWS forecasters in PHX into declaring the monsoon as having begun (despite the fact that the pattern set up was not truly monsoonal), we went into oven mode which saw the highest temperatures ever recorded in AZ (and the US) in June as a 610 Dm H5 High parked right over us. Incidentally, false starts are something monsoon forecasters need to watch out for-we could get one this year as we are running a bit like 1994. Mid level moisture running around the High plus the intense heating resulted in high based (bases about 18-22000 ft MSL) dry boomers with LOTS of CG in the nighttime hours. Many fires were started and some in the Chiricahuas and Rincons were left to burn until the monsoon REALLY started on July 15th. These fires also helped themselves with pyrocumulus thunderstorms producing even more lightning. Since the early and mid 90's were a relatively wet period here in AZ, imagine what could happen now if we had a similar scenario. The biggest fire locally in 1994 was in early June in the Huachucas and it was, surprise-NOT, human caused.

Steve