Word: ana
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...very grateful that the loss of life was far less this time than in previous fires. I praise the local authorities for using reverse-911 calls and making sure people were out of harm's way. Nevertheless, there was a lot of property damage, thanks to the Santa Ana winds and very dry conditions. You cannot win against Mother Nature--whether you're confronting hurricanes in the East or fires and earthquakes in the West. You can only do your best to save people and the things that are important to them...
...Santa Ana winds begin cold, gathering power and mass in the high desert between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Air pressure pushes the winds up and over the San Gabriel Mountains, westward toward the Pacific Ocean, until gravity takes hold. The air becomes compressed as it drops, growing hotter and dryer, stripping moisture from the ground, accelerating - sometimes past 100 m.p.h. (160 km/h) - as it squeezes through Southern California's many canyons...
...state of shock right now," says Dr. Zab Mosenifar, director of the Cedars-Sinai Women's Guild Pulmonary Disease Institute in Los Angeles, who was preparing for an influx of smoke-inhalation victims at his hospital. "This is beyond thinking." Beginning overnight on Oct. 20, unusually fierce Santa Ana winds stoked fires that quickly burst into life throughout a dry, hot landscape. By midweek, more than 20 separate blazes formed pockets of fire running from the Mexican border north to Simi Valley outside Los Angeles. In many places, the heat and smoke were so intense that the 7,000 firefighters...
...relatively wet winter in 2004-05, which let trees and scrub grow densely, followed by extremely dry weather since, which turned the vegetation to still more fuel. In fact, this past year has seen the worst drought in Los Angeles' recorded history. Adding to the tinder were those Santa Ana winds, which strike regularly in the autumn but rarely with the power of the past week. "They usually come in small, medium and large," says Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "These were Godzilla winds...
...frightening possibility is that the October wildfires may be only the start - not just of future fires in future seasons but of more to come this year. The Santa Ana winds have just begun and typically peak in the winter. What's more, there is not likely to be much relief from drought conditions. The National Weather Service predicts a La Niña pattern this winter, which occurs when sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean are cooler than usual. La Niña usually translates to dryer and hotter weather in the American South...