With all due respect to all... a couple of points raised here by our firefighter herd members need to be emphasised re: wind and chemical debris in the air.
Those who have fought wildfires know:
FIRES CREATE THEIR OWN WIND AND WEATHER PATTERNS. I won't clog the board to describe how in detail, even though I know, I'll just cite enough of it to illustrate my experience here in the Bitterroot Valley where I live.
Fires in Idaho, a rugged mountain range and 100 air miles from my house, can be a news event only and our air as clear, here in Big Sky country, as ever. The fires might burn for weeks - a line is established and a wind shift - all of a sudden it's blowing absolutely the wrong, non-typical, opposite, unpredicted direction at gale force - and within a couple of hours, we're inundated.. We see the smoke not as the plume reaching 30,000 feet altitude in Idaho and then hitting air layers where it flattens out and moves the opposite direction from the winds that put it up, but as a dark shroud that conceals the mountains entirely from view, driven by winds that shift like a vertical churn as the heated air rises, and pulls ground air with it, and then has to move other - sometimes opposite - directions.
Prevailing winds and weather predictions at that point don't mean a damn thing.
At some point all that airborne particulate has to come down.
Will SOFI be smoke-free on Monday night? Maybe so.
And if so, I'd expect some "See there?" commentary.
I don't care. I'm not here to argue; I'm just trying to provide information based on better than a half-century of firsthand experience, living around wildfires, forest fires. I often see them from my back deck, just a few miles away. I hunt and fish with firefighters and have learned, from them, a great deal about fires.Living and working in the outdoors I've made it my business. Had to make it my business.
The guys here on this board who are firefighters know what I'm talking about and I thank you for chiming in. You know:
What you think is predicted, or what you think is some percentage of containment as reported on the evening news, can literally blow up in your face.Or, will SOFI look safe Sunday and my Monday evening be in a fire-created wind pattern that produces a fallout of measureable fly ash or invisible poisonous chemical fog that makes the stadium a dangerous place to be, much less for young athletes to play football?
We simply do not know that, either. We cannot know that.
And because we don't, the safe and wise thing to do is
MOVE THE GAME.
