Glad to hear you are doing well! We had the Bighorn Fire here in Tucson earlier this year that caused us plenty of grief. What is weird is when the lightning hit and they knew about the fire not much was done until it got to 40 acres. Then the wind picked up and it went like crazy. It was so weird watching Mount Lemmon burn night after night. At least no homes or businesses were lost but it has definitely changed the landscape there with 80,000+ acres burned. Then the Rincon Mtns catching fire then other side of town. For a Midwesterner it is definitely eye opening.
I hear ya. The Riverside fire got to about 20 miles from us (with a major river separating--so that's good). Right now it's at 135,401 acres and is about 3% contained. It's not moving in our direction anymore. Like a good number of the west coast fires it was cause by human action, but not, as a lot of propoganda news sites claim, the work of any protest group...and thankfully to my knowledge not the result of one of those dumbarse gender reveals like that California fire. No new reports on the amount of property damaged, but there is some. We're under a don't waste water order to spare water use for firefighting. There also wasn't widespread looting.
For perspective the whole county the last 2 weeks was under at least level 1 evacuation orders (a.k.a get your crap together), my wife's job work which was about 10 miles away was level 3 (a.k.a. GTFO NOW!!!)
The smoke's gotten better as well. For the 1st time in a week we're down to "Very Unhealthy" with ~250 AQI. It's been into "Hazardous" with a peak of 638 AQI. I don't think it'll get much better until we get some much needed rain. I really hope the Bighorn fire didn't put the AQI into hazardous for you down in Tuscon. That crap got really old really fast.
