NASA | Los Angeles Wildfires

Poor LA, burning again.

The Station Fire, mid-morning on Aug. 30

From the NASA website:

This image was acquired mid-morning on Aug. 30 by the backward (northward)-viewing camera of the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. The image is shown in an approximate perspective view at an angle of 46 degrees off of vertical. The area covered by the image is 245 kilometers (152 miles) wide. Several pyrocumulus clouds, created by the Station Fire, are visible above the smoke plumes rising from the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles in the left-center of the image. Smoke from the Station fire is seen covering the interior valleys along the south side of the San Gabriel Mountains, along with parts of the City of Los Angeles and Orange County, and can be seen drifting for hundreds of kilometers to the east over the Mojave Desert.

Four years ago, I was shooting a wedding in Westlake Village, about an hour north of Los Angeles. The wedding was directly downwind from the raging Simi Valley fire at the time. It was like shooting during the apocalypse with the sky on fire, ash raining down and it was so dark even in the middle of the day, that I had to push all of my film. As a friend said when looking at the photo below,

Where was the reception? In Hell?

Heather & Chris, 2005; Simi Valley wildfire; Nikon F5, 35-70mm, Fuji Pro NPZ © Doug Kim

doug