This morning we can sniff smoke in the air, and it’s going to be very hot today, but the atmospheric
low off the coast has dissipated and the winds gone. The worst of the Day Fire may be over.
Much credit goes to the Ventura County Fire Department, the "Hotshots" teams, the prison hand crews, and many many others…but also to the technology (including a jumbo jet!) that has been dousing the fire with water and fire retardants for the last three weeks. From the LATimes:
Kit Stolz 
Wow. All my sympathies are with you and your family, and I hope you are able to ride it out without harm, although breathing in smoke and ash every day has got to be horrendous.
Your spinach essay fascinated me too, and possibly the best article I’ve read in the blogosphere was a reprint on Susie Bright’s blog of a piece by Andy Griffin who used to farm organic spinach. Here’s a link to his piece:
http://www.ladybugletter.com/articles/spinach.html
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Here’s another website for the fire data minded, it’s not updated every day but contains a lot of fire management info:
http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/fire/south/fwx/operations/osc-archive/sitreport.html
-Bill Pratt
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Thanks Mike for that very interesting “ground truth” from Andy Griffin. I agree with him on many points, especially the big one: our desire for convenience is a big part of the problem. If we could only bear to take a little time to wash the spinach ourselves, then it wouldn’t need to be packaged in little plastic bags, and quite possibly could be grown locally, instead of adjacent to huge cattle operations, and thus, chances are, would be less likely to become contaminated.
But! We still cannot forget the menace of this particular type of E. coli. Virtually everyone in the country is exposed to E. coli in its usual form, which is known popularly as “food poisoning,” even though it’s quite mild. But 0157, with vicious irony, is a bacteria that actually does put out a “Shiga” poison that can perforate guts and destroy kidneys.
Our convenience is part of the problem, but 0157 is a real killer. And as Griffin hints, although the vector was spinach, the disease could easily show up in association with other foods.
The good news out of this is that, according to the LATimes, now a lot of health experts and even some public officials are calling for source labeling…which food health advocates have wanted for years.
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That’s an interesting site, Bill. Seems much more thorough than the InciWeb site, with more raw data.
Good to know…
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