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A lawsuit aimed at turning back a recently created California wildfire fund ran into some skepticism from a panel of three judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Monday.
“In my opinion, you haven’t shown us why this belongs in federal court and that’s your burden,” Judge Ryan Nelson told Michael Aguirre, a San Diego attorney who argued that significant portions of Assembly Bill 1054 should be tossed out.
Passed by the Legislature, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and approved by the California Public Utilities Commission in 2019, AB 1054 created a $21 billion insurance fund the state’s big three investor-owned utilities can access should their equipment ignite a wildfire.
This has never happened : California s only wildfire research center makes scary discovery
When the fuel moisture is high because plants are lush and water-filled, wildfires don t ignite and spread easily. When it s low because vegetation is dry, parched, even dead, wildfires start easily and spread rapidly. Share Updated: 9:39 AM PDT Apr 12, 2021 By Amy Graff/SF Gate This has never happened : California s only wildfire research center makes scary discovery
When the fuel moisture is high because plants are lush and water-filled, wildfires don t ignite and spread easily. When it s low because vegetation is dry, parched, even dead, wildfires start easily and spread rapidly.
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(David Kay)
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The Patch reports the Fire Department investigation found the source of the March 23rd brush fire in the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve to be a homeless encampment in the area of origin. The fire was accelerated by strong winds.
While the causes of these incidents are always concerning, there is another important part of the story: an ecological and historical one. Why did an intense brush fire burn at all in a wetland? After all, wetlands are supposed to be wet. The reason is that Ballona is different, thanks to a century of human interference that has altered the natural ecology, creating a cascade of increasing fire and endangered species risk.
This has never happened : California s only wildfire research center makes scary discovery sfgate.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sfgate.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
CENTRAL VALLEY â Dry conditions that have prevailed in the Sierra Nevada and the San Joaquin Valley since fall have sliced into the Kings Riverâs runoff outlooks for this springâs annual snowmelt period, April-through-July. A gloomy annual total can be expected when Water Year 2020-21 concludes in September.
Kings River Watermaster Steve Haugen reports the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) estimates the riverâs natural runoff during the peak April-through-July period will be only 400,000 acre-feet, just 33% of average. Even worse, if Kings River watershed precipitation falls short of average during these four months, the April-July total could be even lower.