Normal Illinois Fire Department – Facebook:
By now, you have undoubtedly seen the devastation of the wildfires in California this week. It’s hard to imagine the situation that they are facing, but this may help put it in perspective.
The last estimate of the Palisades fire shows more than 31.2 square miles completely destroyed. That’s 2.40 times the size of the Town of Normal. Here is the outline of the Palisades fire, scaled, and placed over the Town of Normal.
The systems needed to fight a fire on this scale do not exist. No municipal water supply is designed to handle the kind of strain that the firefighting efforts in California are putting on it. When a fire hydrant is opened, it takes a large volume of water out of the system rapidly, which affects the remaining supply and lowers the available pressure elsewhere. Eventually, the pumps that refill the tanks won’t be able to keep up with the water that is being pumped out and pressure will drop.
This is an area larger than the corporate limits of the Town of Normal with thousands of structures burning simultaneously. That’s what they’re fighting with out there… Not to mention the 80+MPH winds creating a firestorm through homes and dry vegetation. Firefighting on the ground is virtually impossible in this scenario, and the aerial tankers (planes and helicopters that drop water and retardant) initially couldn’t fly due to the high winds.
Remember, this is just one of several major fires burning, too.
There is a plenty of misinformation being spread, so we encourage you to get information from multiple sources and from experts. In a 24-hour news cycle, there is a lot of time to fill, and sometimes there’s a LOT of filler and opinions and not a lot of actual facts being shared.
This fire is eight times larger than the Great Chicago Fire. It’s a disaster on a scale that is just hard to comprehend. We are thinking of all of the firefighters, and everyone trying to mitigate this disaster, and our sympathies go out to the lives lost, and those that have lost everything.
Sorry, but US Presidents should not be on the ground when a major emergency is taking place. The White House has all the best information resources at hand, and they can do more by using the power of the Executive Branch and media messaging. They can discuss issues very well with a Zoom call (as with Helene), and don’t need to be further disruption with Air Force 1 and their entourage.