Black Plants and Trees "Stovepiping"



I have a double-header today. The picture above is for the second item so you will have to patiently read the first part before you get to that. Stay tuned. I was sitting at work today when all of a sudden, everything went dark. Let me remind you I work at a power plant. If we go dark, something has gone pretty wrong.

Turns out, someone had been fixing some fuses and pulled one he thought wasn't vital. It was vital. Screens went dark, lights extinguished, and the comforting hum of machines slowly died off.

I walked up to the control room and I have to say, it's pretty awesome working with an experienced team of operators who stay cool in the face of what looked like something out of a movie with alarms going off and warning lights blinking. They had things rectified in short order and we moved on. Pretty cool. Public Service Announcement: Don't pull fuses you aren't sure about.

To the picture. This is a tree burning from the inside. A good friend of mine in the National Guard returned from service in the Brookings, Oregon area where a major wildfire burned an insane amount of acreage. He explained to me what "stovepiping" was. Trees have cracks and void space inside the trunks where the fire can travel and work it's way up the tree. Some of them can spout fire out of the top of them, catch the upper foliage on fire, and then fire can travel from tree to tree above the ground.

It's pretty incredible. I hate using the word awesome to describe something so devastating, but its pretty awesome what can and does happen in nature. My thanks to all the servicemen and women who serve on the public's behalf.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rain is Awesome

As if some switch has been flipped, it has begun to rain in Oregon again. We had a dry summer with record-breaking wildfires all over the state--including one started by some punk teenagers that roasted some of my favorite places to hike, thank you very much. Yesterday in particular, we had torrential downpours that turned the streets into makeshift streams. The skies were dark and I knew I was back home where I belonged. I am a Northwesterner. One thought that occurred to me as I was staring out at a deluge of precipitation was how much weight the water represented. If you added up all the rain from that one downpour, why, the weight must be terrific! How does a cloud carry it all? How do planes fly through them? It's pretty cool when you think about it. Thank goodness for umbrellas, houses, covered areas so kids can run jog-a-thons, and cars so we can pick up mom and kids as they walk home from school in the rain. There are few things better than waking up in the morning an
Read more

I Met the Governor of Oregon

Last week I had the opportunity to meet the Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown. I was invited to a small party held at an incredible house in Portland. Now, let's be brutally honest. I met her for all of like one minute. It didn't change my life. It was another interesting experience in a life full of them. She was likewise unchanged, and I'm sure has forgotten me. I think what's most interesting about this experience though is how incredibly out of place I felt. I'm lower management in a relatively small company nobody has heard of. I'm not a minority in any sense but as vanilla white male as they come. Other than chatting with a former co-worker for a few minutes, I conversed more and enjoyed talking with the valet than anyone else. We talked about the weather, politics, things we'd learned, and how neither of us felt like we belonged at the party--he as the help and me as the odd guest there to slush government a little. Nobody was unwelcoming by any mean
Read more