I know so many of you are just getting back home, or trying to get home… if you have a home left to go to. People with attachments to this land have lost so much. Please don’t read this post as minimizing how the Dixie Fire has been terrible for our communities.
In the spirit of hopefulness and looking forward, I’d like to offer some insight based on what I’m seeing on the maps in this post. There will be many, many stories about the good things that the Dixie Fire accomplished. Parts of our forests were sick for lack of fire and they may have just experienced the good fire needed to survive the next big one.
Take a look at the satellite imagery slideshow below, taken at noon on August 22. The maps are colored to show where the fire burned hot and killed most of the trees compared with places that still have a living canopy. There are many reasons some areas burn hotter than others and we’ll be talking about this fire for years, using the data we’ve collected to better manage our forests and create fire resiliency in the land. Tools like this are great for taking a ‘big picture’ look at where we live.
Red areas are relatively barren, green areas have surviving canopy.
Click an image for a fullscreen slideshow and then use arrows to advance images for best viewing.
