Santa Rosa, Sonoma, Napa Fires
As you may have heard recently, there have been some devastating fires in the Northern California wine country, including Santa Rosa, Sonoma, and Napa. DigitalGlobe, a company that collects satellite imagery of the Earth, has published some imagery collected after the fires so local authorities can assess the damage to structures.
The link to access the imagery is here:
Before you look through the data, it might help you to understand how to interpret false color satellite imagery. False color imagery includes imagery collected from the near-infrared part of the spectrum, shown below.
Near-Infrared imagery is very useful for vegetation analysis, and is particularly useful for identifying burned areas as shown below:
When structures burn, they leave their concrete foundations, plus anything that won’t burn like brick fireplaces. Also the burn site is covered in white ash. When you are looking through the imagery, zoom in, and look for areas like those shown below.
When you look through the imagery you will find damaged structures in a lot of places. Entire residential neighborhoods were wiped out. Thousands of homes were destroyed. One of the hardest hit areas was the Fountain Grove neighborhood:
It is possible to find houses which didn’t get burned down too, but they are in the vast minority.
Another hard hit area was Coffey Park in Santa Rosa.
The devastation is almost beyond belief. Many structures up in the hills were destroyed in addition to the residential homes. Thousands of structures have been destroyed in total. This was a fast moving, very deadly fire. Survivor reports are coming in. Survivors say that there was no alert from the state or the municipality, and little to no warning.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/12/tubbs-fire-why-didnt-sonoma-county-send-a-cellphone-alert/
Current death toll sits at 35 (2017/10/14) with hundreds still missing. The death toll will certainly rise once cadaver sniffing dogs can identify human remains in the burned structures.
Extremely high winds (80+ mph) caused the widespread devastation and loss of life. Authorities had no warning and didn’t activate alerts. Residents had no warning. The fire was upon them as they realized they had to evacuate.
This couple describes jumping in their pool to survive (6 hours):
http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-sonoma-fire-20171012-htmlstory.html
Natural firebreaks like highway 101 had limited effect because of the high winds. This is how the fire was able to jump from the hills to residential neighborhoods.
“These fires happen in the hills, in the rural area, not a neighborhood,” said David Kay, 54, clearly stunned as he returned to his home in the Coffey Park neighborhood Monday morning and found nothing but rubble for blocks and blocks. “You think you’re safe in a neighborhood.”
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/09/santa-rosa-fire-how-a-sudden-firestorm-obliterated-a-city/
It will take some time to grasp the full scale of this deadly disaster. We can only hope that the high winds die down and the area gets some rain. Containment still only sits at around 25% at the time of this writing.