https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/RLGCmnX_yH4?version=3&hl=en_US&hd=1
In New Mexico and Arizona we are waiting anxiously for some rain. Arizona’s July 5th wall of dust known as a haboob seems to have marked the beginning of the Monsoon. These walls of dust moving into the Phoenix area are not new, I remember them nearly every year when I was growing up. This year it was a particularly large one.
The weekend outlook from the NOAA shows the seasonal shift in winds and moisture from the south.
Wired.com’s article “Megafires May Change the Southwest Forever“
The plants and animals of the southwestern United States are adapted to fire, but not to the sort of super-sized, super-intense fires now raging in Arizona.
The product of drought and human mismanagement, these so-called megafires may change the southwest’s ecology. Mountainside Ponderosa forests could be erased, possibly forever. Fire may become the latest way in which people are profoundly altering modern landscapes.
The two closest fires to me are still burning. The Las Conchas Fire in the Jemez Mountains near Las Alamos is at 92,735 and is close to being the largest fire in New Mexico. The Pacheco Fire near Santa Fe and the Pecos Wilderness has burned a measly 10,000 acres and is 24% contained.
The Donaldson fire is much more south of me but has burned over 43,000 acres.
We are getting signs of Monsoon weather.
I figure it was only a matter of time, with the dry windy weather conditions, that there would be a fire in Jemez. The official name of the fire is the Las Conchas Fire and it’s putting on a spectacular smoke display (and not in a good way).
The Pacheco Fire continues to burn near Santa Fe.
The La Conchas Fire now has a Inciweb entry and is already at 3500+ acres.
The Pajarito Mountain ski area web came has live video of the fire.
Reddit user DamnColorblindness posted a picture titled “This was waiting for me by the front door this morning“.
I thought maybe the photo was in some tropical foreign country, but this centipede is located in Austin, TX. These are called Texas giant centipedes or Scolopendra heros. Though these can be found in New Mexico, I have never heard of a centipede this big in the Albuquerque area.
Reddit user Jozer99 says centipedes hate you.
Careful with centipedes. I did some graduate research on these little beasts, and came away with new-found fear and loathing.
Snakes only bite you if they feel threatened by you. Sharks want to eat seals, don’t look like a seal and you are A-OK. Tarantulas are more afraid of you then you are of them. Bees are just defending their nest from perceived threats.
On the other hand, centipedes hate you. Not just humans, you in particular. Centipedes are remarkable in that they have a special individual loathing for every creature on the planet, as well as many inanimate objects. If a centipede can sense your presence, it wants to do nothing more than to fuck you up. You don’t have to poke it with a stick, or step to near its nest, you just have to be somewhere nearby, and a centipede is more than happy to kamikaze you. It doesn’t help that many centipedes have poisonous front legs that have evolved into giant needle like pincers, and despite having several dozen legs, many larger centipedes are capable of moving at close to 10 miles per hour. They are also armor plated and are nearly impossible to squash. Centipedes spend their lives wandering around and picking fights with whatever creatures they happen to meet, be they insects, spiders, birds or even small mammals. They usually win, munch on their victims a bit, then move on to the next helpless victim.
Stay the fuck away from centipedes.
While common in Austin, they have painful but not deadly venom. I will take the occasional scorpion over one of these.
On Flickr, I posted a video of a centipede I found while walking on the sidewalk at work in Rio Rancho, NM. It’s 1/1000 the side of the one pictured in Austin.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/de21nEfXvmc?version=3&hl=en_US
The Raton Track Fire has burned more than 27,000 acres and caused 500 people to be evacuated, was caused by ATV spewing exhaust.
New Mexico State Forestry says exhaust particles from an ATV in the area is what most likely caused the dry brush to catch fire.
According to findings from investigators, the ATV driver or drivers trespassed onto private property then headed onto land owned by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.
The Track Fire is 98% contained.
Say hello to New Mexico’s newest fire, the Pacheco Canyon Fire In Santa Fe. The fire was visible from my house in Rio Rancho on the day it started but I haven’t been able to see it since Saturday. On Sunday there was too much smoke from the Arizona Wallow fire to see much of anything.
InciWeb says the fire has burned over 3000 acres and describes it as extreme.
In Albuquerque, we haven’t had a whole lot of smoke in the last few days. It’s mostly been blowing south of the city. InciWeb says that 32 residences has been destroyed, which is impressive considering this is now the largest fire in Arizona’s history at over 500,000 acres.
The 4000 people fighting this fire deserve far more credit than I can possible give.
My parents didn’t work at the 52nd street Motorola plant (now a superfund site), built in 1956 near 48th Street and McDowell Road in Pheonix, Az but I think my Grandfather did. The EPA is still testing near the site nearly 30 year later.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials told about 15 residents at a community meeting Wednesday that their preliminary test results from some spots in the Lindon Park neighborhood, near 48th Street and McDowell Road, show some soil samples had unsafe levels of two industrial cleaning chemicals.
The chemicals were used at the former Motorola plant years ago to clean machinery and other equipment.
EPA scientists said the risk to residents’ health probably was small, but they believe they need to test for chemicals inside some homes to be sure.
“The kinds of soil vapor or the soil gas concentrations that we’re seeing do not lead us to believe that you would have the kinds of levels or exposure that would cause extreme health effects,” said Gerald Hiatt, an EPA toxicologist. “We may have some exposures inside homes that are high enough to create a (health) risk over long-term exposure, but I would be very, very surprised if we saw exposures that would create acute health effects.”
The neighborhood is the focus of an EPA Superfund monitoring and cleanup effort that has been under way for more than 20 years.
Apparently there was chemical tank that leaked into the soil in the 1980. It doesn’t surprise me from what I heard from my parents and what I saw working at electronic companies in the early 1990’s in Arizona. Companies were not that concerned about such safety issues.
The factory is now owned by On Semiconductor. It’s been remodeled and I couldn’t find any pictures of what the factory originally looked like except one on the semiconductor Museum’s page.
The view of the Sandia Mountains from my front window the last few days has been obscured by smoke from the Wallow fire near the New Mexico border in Alpine, Arizona. This fire is affecting the Albuquerque area by creating a cloud of smoke which besides the smell has caused some ash to fall from the sky.
Normally I have a clear view of the Sandias except when we have a storm.
It’s bad enough that the last two nights I have had to turn off the cooler because it was filling the house with the smell of forest fire.
This is going to be a bad year for fires unless we get some rain, which the Albuquerque area hasn’t received a significant rain storm since early this year.
The Arizona Republic as a good FAQ on the Wallow Fire and An image from the NOAA shows the smoke plume (I don’t know if the NOAA has a direct source to this image).
Update 06/07/2011: The trend for the last few days is the smoke goes away during the day and settles back in during the evening. It feels like a nuclear winter. Here are a few pictures I took from the office building last night, note the red dot which is the sun.
While the smoke here in Rio Rancho and Albuquerque is bad, it’s not nearly as bad as for those who actually live where the fire is. The local paper The White Mountain Independent has information about all of the evacuations in the area.
Latest map from the NOAA.
From local TV news station KOAT “Man Shaken Up After Slamming Into Cow“
A Rio Rancho man said he’s lucky to be alive after his car crashed into a cow that walked into a busy street.
Action 7 News has detailed the cow crossing problems in Sandoval County for years, but reports of cow incidents have spiked in recent weeks.Last Friday, Action 7 News reported on several cows that’d been getting through a cut fence line near King Boulevard in Rio Rancho. That cut fence line is just down the road from where Gill’s accident occurred.
Hard to believe that there’s enough out in the desert of Rio Rancho for cows to eat, but there are many of them out here, epecially near this area which is which is supposed to be downtown.
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