There’s a panoply of flowery quotes about why humans love storytelling as they do. All of them boil down to our need to answer these tangled questions:
Why do people do what they do, and why do things happen as they happen?
The Camp Fire is the most impactful thing ever to happen to my family and our community. As a storyteller, doing my part to tell this story is impossible to resist. Why we all acted as we did on November 8, cowards or heroes, valiant or vain… these I’ll answer in time.
But as our team works, conducting interviews and research, gathering everything a person could know, sometimes we come across something we feel the need to share now. This is one.
It comes from a company called Simtable a company which makes animations and simulations of complex physical events based on real data. This one shows the progress of the Camp Fire. The embedded version below is eye opening, but the link below might be easier to see.
To see the progression at a slower rate, click the link below.
https://www.simtable.com/apps/fireProgression/CampDayOne/CampDayOne.html?playback=240
For me, the best view was found clicking on the Map Base Layer button and choosing the Bing Hybrid option. It allows you to see road and landmarks laid over satellite photos of the actual landscape.
Something about seeing minute by minute (the timestamp can be seen in the lower left, going minute by minute) is both comforting and goulish. I can’t explain it, awful as it is, some part of me wants to see what actually happened when our lives were all hurled off course.
Now I know my home was destroyed around 12:30 or 1:00 p.m.
Nothing to add to a sentence like that.
Is there a way to increase the duration of the simulation, perhaps by another day or two?
As this is SimTable’s animation, I cannot make that change. However they do have another animation for the rest of the fire which I will try to post later.
Hi Chris. Where did you post it?
Yes, I would like to see the progression of the fire through Magalia as my family lived near the end of Ponderosa Way. Thank you.
It would be great if the map kept going. It’s not accurate at the time that it stops. Our house in Magalia as well as many others burned down but according to this map Magalia was barely touched. I would like to have a better idea when it burned. We think it was on 11/10.
You are correct, but I have found another animation that shows the rest of the fire. I will post that soon.
Where did you post the SimTable animation for 11/9 and later?
From my roof on Carnegie it sounded like the end of the world had arrived at around 1230 until 0530 am when winds died down at sunrise.
Inaccurate. It should extend past Cory Creek and Cory Canyon. You stop short of the actual south western edge of this fire. I know. I lost my home.
I’m sorry to hear about your loss. I’m not sure I put this in the main body of the post but this animation is only from 6:44 AM on November 8 to midnight. This does not show the spread of the fire from 12:00 AM November 9 until the The fire was put out.
My house was gone by 8pm on November 8, 2019.
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is the yellow the fire or the pink or red?
On the slow motion version is the yellow the fire or the pink or red?
Thanks for posting this Chris – and explaining some of the features! Looking forward to Three Days in Paradise!
Absolutely inaccurate for Concow. Our home on Charqui Ct., off Eleran in Concow was already burned to the ground at least 45 minutes prior to this simulation. We know because we fled as it burned and the house was surrounded by fire on all sides. We had to drive through a wall of fire to get out.