This last Friday and Saturday, in my neck of the woods, we started having thunder and lightning. Some people love this, it is awesome to watch. However, I don't like it when there isn't any precipitation to go along with it. That's what happened here - no precipitation but lots of lightning strikes. We started out with 90 fires caused by these strikes. From what I understand it is now around 135 fires. Because of all the other fires in the state there aren't enough fire fighters to go around. Some of the fires are burning "unattended". That's scary to me. All of the smoke is settling in the valleys. We experience strong winds in the afternoons and evenings, but it can't blow the smoke out. It's probably just causing more fires.
Anyway, I took a few photos in the parking lot last night when I left work. This will show the kind of air we are breathing in my part of the state right now. First off, there is hardly ever any smog in our area. This isn't like the southern part of the state or the central valleys where they are used to bad air.
This is what it usually looks like in our area:
Here is a shot of the same view last night:
Here are a couple more from another part of the parking lot. You can usually see hills in the background behind the ones still visible:
This afternoon and evening it was a little better, but with the fires still burning it won't be back to normal for quite a while. The last I heard, we might be breathing this for at least a month.
