utenzi

Here's three more pictures from Thursday. I posted yesterday about the red-alert causing smoke here in the Triad area of NC. The first two pictures below illustrate what it looked like in my back yard. This first picture looks over from my backyard to my neighbor's side yard (behind the hedge of trees). The yellowish aspect of the atmosphere in the picture was real. The air looked like that. You can see just a glimmer of the sun through the smoke. The low light made it seem more like 8pm than 5pm. This second picture illustrates how the visibility dropped off with distance. You can see the trees in my backyard quite clearly, the shed in the next yard starts to get fuzzy then the neighbor's house across the street is fuzzier still. And the trees behind that house get quite indistinct. Not quite pea soup but the effect was as strong as the morning fogs we get here most days. ...and for those crazy folk that like cats, this one belongs to my neighbor across the street from me....

It's Friday the 13th today. Yesterday saw this area banked in with nasty smoke from wildfires near the coast. They'd been suffering the effects of those fires for nearly a week but it was our first taste of it here, a couple of hours away from the coast. I can't say I liked it. But since today's a lot better, I'm wondering if it was Thursday the 12th that was unlucky--at least in this area of NC. It was quite murky here in the Chapel Hill area but just 30 miles to the East in Raleigh apparently it was dark enough to force people to use headlights while driving : Many drivers switched on their headlights in the middle of the day to help negotiate streets around Raleigh and be seen by other drivers. "Most of the cars have their lights on today. I noticed it in commuting across the city," driver Dave Bamford said. The smoky conditions definitely got everyone's attention on Thursday. The smoke prompted more than 300 people to call Wake County 911 on Thurs...