Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 01-10-25_FRIDAY_7AM

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Greg Roberts from Rogue Weather Dot Com joins me for the hour and a deeper dive into the LA fires, the similarity and differences to our own Almeda blaze, response and more.

The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at clouserdrilling.com. Here's Bill Myers. Greg Roberts joins me, and every Friday we talk outdoors and activities and weather and all this sort of good stuff here. And Greg Roberts, of course, holding down the fort at rogueweather.com. Hey, Greg, welcome back. Good to have you on.

Good to be on, Bill. Well, I'll tell you, a lot of talk about fire, a lot of thinking about fire, a lot of opinions going every which way. And before we get to the fire here, why don't we just do a quick look at what we're looking like here in Southern Oregon and Northern California over the next few days. Is it going to be drier or colder? Are we going to be getting some wetness back here? How do you see this playing out over the next few days? Is it going to be drier, colder? Are we going to be getting some wetness back here? You know, how do you see this

playing out over the next few days? Let's start with the last one, the wetness part. The wetness part looks a little easier to define. There is going to be a weak system clipping through later today, and weak is the operative word. And unfortunately, I guess, you know, in terms of rainfall, it's mostly going to be concentrated to, you know, say, Coos, Douglas counties, Cascades, north of Crater Lake, northern Klamath County, Deschutes County, you know, anything even remotely close to us, that's where it's most expected. There is a slight chance we could get some rain spilling over Unquad Divide, get into the northern portions of Jackson County. You know, that's at least within the realms of realistically possible. But the further south you get and away from

Douglas County, the drier it winds up looking. So I don't think this is anything that really shakes up what we've settled into for a pattern. And even if it did, you know, it's basically going to last about 18 hours before we get right back into what we've been in with that blocking ridge, creating the low clouds and the fog in the morning in the valley. So that means more of the inversion and chewy air, unfortunately, right? Exactly. That's exactly what we're talking about with degraded air. Now, unfortunately, this high-pressure ridge that has given us our low clouds, fogs, degraded air, is exactly the high responsible for generating the Santa Ana winds in Southern

California. So the only really good news is the high has weakened. It's not as strong. It is moving a bit further to the east. That is giving them some relief from the really high winds down in Southern California. The bad news for all of us is we are expecting to have ridge re-establish over us. It's going to be gaining in strength. It's going to be moving back into the position it was in when it started generating the winds. And right now, timing on that looks to be Monday night into Tuesday morning. But by the time we reach that point, it unfortunately looks like we're going to see another round of Santa Anas develop in Southern California. Oh, boy. It's not good to hear from them.

I mean, it's a tragedy we're hearing about this. And it was so weird. It's like when this broke out the other day, I was just thinking, it's like shades of that feel of Almeda. Of course, Almeda started off at a 60-mile-an-hour wind event and started off as an arson fire. You know, it's at least the initial. That's not necessarily the case with what's going on down in Southern California, though. Although they did arrest one alleged arsonist last night. I guess he had a propane

flamethrower of some sort. And the Kenneth fire, which some friends of ours actually, when the evacuation warning went up, they saw what happened with the Palisades fire. And they decided, well, we're going to get out now before they order us to, because we don't want to get stuck in gridlock. Well, fortunately, the Kenneth Fire situation, they secured it enough that they did drop the evacuation warning. See, California does it quite a bit different than we do it here in Oregon. And evacuation warning in California is essentially our level to, you know, make sure you're prepared and ready to go if we order you to get out. And that's the point that our friends were in Oak Park, and they decided to get out.

You know, again, they feared the traffic jams, everything that they saw happen with Palisades. So they did it right. They did it right. They did it smart. And then when the evacuation warning was dropped back to California's version of level one, be ready. They returned to their house, but they said, you know, everybody down here now, this is all they're talking about. And hey, Greg, could you hold that thought just a second? I just wanted to give a quick breaking news here. It just happened, the announcement of President Trump's sentencing. He was sentenced or convicted, you know, that kind of thing, of the unconditional discharge that had been talked about. So no prison, no probations, no conditions.

But, you know, the left ended up getting what they wanted. They just wanted to be able to label him a convicted felon so that's yeah by their definition of it but it's completely ludicrous because it is this isn't even speaking politically this is talking about and being familiar with what they charged him with oh yeah you have to have a victim this was this There was no victim here on this. It was just insane. It was absolutely insane, the whole thing. This is the most bogus thing. And honestly, I would say this if this had been Republicans doing that to Democrats.

Yeah. Okay? But that's not the way this country has worked. And if you know anything about the legal system, if you've studied it at all, this just only, the only other place you ever see this happen, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba. And frankly, what we use the term banana republics, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, that sort of thing in which you go after your political opponents all right that's the way it goes now what's going to happen is that uh you know this will go on appeal and then it will go away because it was it was a bs charge to start with i'm kind of surprised that the supreme court allowed that to move forward

but you know i guess there i really was too but then again then again, nothing the courts do anymore surprises me. Yeah, well, nothing that happens in the United States these days surprises me. So anyway, all right, so I just want to take it back here. You were talking about the Palisades fire. By the way, how many fires are there down there right now? How many different fires are there? At last count, there were six majors that they were engaged on. There have also been dozens of smaller starts that have occurred that now that they're resourced up and more resources, including from here in Oregon, have arrived, the initial attack on the new starts is pretty ferocious.

They will take resources off of, say, Palisades and Eaton. And the Kenneth fire yesterday was a great example. When that fire got going and our friends called us and told us what was going on, I started checking a couple of different things. One of those things was Flight Radar, the app that allows you to track aircraft. And it was pretty amazing watching what they were doing with the air resources that they did get up yesterday on these bigger fires, Palisades, Eaton, because the winds decreased enough, they could finally use them. But when the Kenneth Fire began, they immediately pounced all over it with air resources. And, you know, yeah, I could see fixed-wing air tankers, especially the Cal Fire

S2s hitting it. But it was amazing. At the point I looked at it, they already had 10 helicopters of varying sizes, meaning being able to drop everything from 2,500 gallons of water all the way on down to Bambi buckets of 200 gallons of water. They had 10 of those already over the fire, and I counted eight others en route from the other fires, from Palisades, from Eaton. So I think a big part of the reason why the Kenneth fire just didn't turn into the next Palisades or Eaton was simply the fact they could bring a lot of air resource to bear on it like they just couldn't because of the wind with those fires. And also, California is invested heavily in the technology that allows helicopters to operate at night. So they have continued their attack on that fire throughout the night.

All right. Now, philosophically here, there's been a lot of drama, a lot of finger-pointing going on through this. And it's pretty clear that los angeles is is running competently of course everything out on the west coast seems to be running incompetently you think that maybe there's a little too much stretching of uh of blame you know going on because i look at these things and i remember what even happened here in almeida in almeida yeah there's a certain amount i mean we've talked about this before that gosh it almost matters that wouldn't matter how many firefighters you had or how many fire tankers you had or how many fire aircraft you had if you're looking at 80 to 100 mile an hour wind events in canyons with fuel and and and heat and gosh i don't know what there's there the first thing right there. It's the wind and,

you know, our event here in September, 2020 on my birthday, in fact, September 8th, the wind, that was an unprecedented, very historic, uh, 100 year plus level event that I, that's one of those along with seeing a snowstorm where we sustained inch per hour rate snowfall in Medford for nine solid hours. You're anybody listening to this likely will never see either one of those things happen again in their lifetimes. Santa Ana's in Southern California are especially a concern from October through December. They're not usually a concern in January because usually by this time, rain has come in even down in Southern California. This year it hasn't. The northern end of the state has turned very wet, Sacramento North. The southern end of the state is still historically

dry, and that's the other part that helped fuel that. They've had that persistent drought down there, and everything has dried out. Then when you get a fire moving through urban areas being driven on 50 to 100 mile an hour winds, just like we saw in Alameda, buildings become to the fire a tree or a bush. It's fuel. Oh, yeah. And it doesn't matter how fire resistant the material is that you used. And we can clearly see this. I mean, it's just going to take off on a run. And you look at the before and after pictures of Pacific Palisades,

and it's just unbelievable the kind of damage. It's almost atomic bomb nuked-looking damage, and it's the entire city. I was watching, there was a video that some security camera was set up, and it showed a McDonald's in one of these areas by Palisades. And it's just a McDonald's. It's out there. There's a few cars going by, and there aren't even visible embers in the air that you can see. You can't even see anything like that.

But the wind is just roaring, and then you can just see, you've got to figure that that air is probably superheated, you know, going into that. And it's blowing around the boxes, and then you see a little bit flare up from the grass, and then the grass then starts burning up the pole, and then the McDonald's ends up taking some and catches on fire. It's just kind of like, and this is all within about 15 to 20 seconds, that sort of stuff.

It's just astounding. And the embers really trigger everything. You watch the video, and you don't see them, but all of a sudden, boom, you've got flame. And it happens like that. I mean, embers aren't these huge glowing things that are always readily apparent to the naked eye. Sometimes they're not. And, you know, there's a lot of times

where you just can't perceive and pick up on it, but you see, watching through videos, you'll see the progression. So you know what happened there. An ember came along. It was something you couldn't the progression. So you know what happened there. An ember came along. It was something you couldn't even see. Naked eye or the video didn't pick it up. And then poof, it catches something and it gets into dry grass or gets into dry brush or it lands up on a building and there's debris up on the building. And in our area, debris, what I'm talking about would be pine needles, dead leaves, things on the roof.

Yeah, stuff that catches on fire very easily. That's the way it goes. Man, it is – there are forces of nature, and I guess that we humans, we don't like to think that there's not everything about nature that we can't control or something about nature we can't control. And that's the problem, too too when it comes to fire people think well they put out fires all the time we can put out every fire no that's not true and no matter what smoky bear tells you or any other source tells you fire is still one of the essential elements of earth. Earth, wind, and fire is not just the name of a great band. Although it's a great band, it's true. Oh yeah, very great. But that element, the fire element, when you throw wind into it,

when you throw very dry conditions into it, that's an element that, you know, sometimes we have success in being able to contain and put out, and sometimes you won't. We saw that with Almeda. We're seeing it again in Southern California. When the wind gets behind it, there is nothing you can do, no matter how many resources you have, until the wind drops. You know, I wanted to ask your opinion on some of the stuff. Alameda was a perfect case of that, by the way. Yeah, and I get that. I wanted to talk to you, though, about the fire hydrant issue there.

And I've had a few opinions, and I've been looking around. Not that I'm any particular expert on it, but, you know, I can look stuff up like anybody else. But we'll continue this conversation here in just a moment. little bit of an extended talk why not it's friday and uh this is the top of mind for everybody here greg roberts rogueweather.com uh 729 at kmed and 99.3 kbxg when paul simon released the song slip sliding away in 1975 he lamented how we can watch our destiny pass by us. Millette Construction thinks it's also a good reminder that if the ground is slipping and sliding beneath your house, it may be nearing a destination where there's cracks in walls and sloping floors. Give Millette

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your next adventure you're hearing the bill myers Show on 106.3 KMED. Now Bill wants to hear from you. 541-770-5633. That's 770-KMED. Greg Roberts, Mr. Outdoors at RogueWeather.com and we're kind of noodling into the fire world. Of course, Greg has a lot of experience in the fire world here too. And Terry, you had a question for Greg about the fire crew sent from Medford down to Los Angeles. What do you want to know? Yeah. Yeah, Greg, I was wondering if this is a true story. I heard it.

Anyways, I heard that they made these guys pull over in Sacramento to go through inspections when, like, every second, every minute counts. Is that true? Did that happen? Whether it happened in Sacramento or whether it happened in Los Angeles, yes, that is true. But that's kind of a critical element. They want to make sure everybody's properly equipped. But the other thing that they're doing when that happens, they are switching their radio frequencies

so they can get to the frequencies and be able to communicate with everybody on the Southern California radio system. So that's actually, that's a standard procedure. I went through it my entire time when I was fighting fire. That's nothing new. That's actually a very important safeguard. Well, how long does it delay them? So, I mean, can't they do that while they're driving down? Can't they get on the phone and say what you need to do? No. I will put it bluntly, no.

And it isn't really that much of a delay as it sounds. Well, I know that when I heard about this, like they're inspecting our firefighters, it almost sounded like it was almost like a punitive little bureaucratic BS kind of thing. Is that what you're thinking, Chris? Or Terry, rather? I'm sorry. Oh, I think he took off. I guess. I think he did.

But I will tell you that is definitely not the case. It's a very critical, important safety feature. And as I just said, that has been going on for decades. Okay. We'll just leave it at that. The entire time I was a firefighter. Okay, so that's routine. We'll just let it go.

All right, let's go to the next one. Hi, you're on with Greg. Who's this? Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. It's Jim from Jacksonville. Hey, Jim.

In the 70s, I was heavily involved with L.A. County Fire, L.A. City, and there's a couple things that have changed in both organizations. But one thing that's changed is typically when I was growing up, we'd have downslope winds up to and including January and parts of February. We'd go up to the Malibu area, and that has now changed. The other thing that's changed is the executives of the L.A. City and L.A. County Fire Department have gone completely woke. There's a lot more to this background that I don't have time to share with you guys now,

but I'll send you an email. But Greg, you know MoveUp started as far away as the fire center up in Boise, Idaho, and they've been moving up people and assets. Don't get this done, but this is a created problem. That's an interesting take on that. Appreciate the call there, Jim. Greg, what part does woke play in this? Because I know that this has been a political talking point as of late, in your opinion here from viewing. And I know you got to step, I understand you got to step gingerly, okay?

There's varying degrees of it now throughout the fire service, whether we're talking municipal departments, whether we're talking state fire agencies, federal agencies. It has definitely overspread every bit of firefighting is the paralysis of safety. And I will put it as I see it most definitely in how fires are engaged now, especially when they move out of the real initial attack phase from the time they're first reported until six hours into the incident. As soon as it moves into extended attack, and especially with the federal agencies, the engagement on the fires really changes. Is it becoming more timid because of safety concerns? Passive. Passive.

This is where you start hearing indirect, big box. You start hearing terms like this. They will say we're aggressively fighting the fire. And I'm always going to go back to this because this is the perfect example of it. Chet Cobar. They were saying they were aggressively engaging and fighting the fire when there were two crews on it. One on the west side of the fire, six miles from the fire. The other one on the east side of the fire, six miles from the fire.

That doesn't sound like you're really aggressively fighting it. No, definitely not. So there is a lot of this. Everybody in the fire service world, but especially when you get into wild land, they are haunted by the memories of Storm King, Yarnell, but especially the 30-mile fire up in Washington where the incident commander was eventually criminally charged in the deaths of firefighters. Okay. So people are being very ginger. They're gingerly fighting fires then, in other words. type 2 ia ground crew an engine and tenders to support us depending if it was tough terrain and we would directly engage and stay on the fight on those fires all the time and we'd have rollouts and we'd have all kinds of things happening that we stayed and engaged in the

fight we dug cup trenches we did what we needed to do. We also had our lookouts, everybody keeping a sharp eye to yell the warning when we were having rollouts. You get rollouts in this country now, and they're going to pull the fire crews. Oh, you see, I bet a lot of people don't realize that is what's going on. And I understand, but you know, it's like the entire country has been under this cult of safetyism. And I'm not that I'm saying that you just want to routinely kill firefighters. I'm not advocating that. No, you don't.

Yeah. And in my whole time fighting fire, I came home from every fire. When I moved up on the command side of it, I thank God every day because fire, the fire ground situation, the threats, the hazards, how things can go wrong so quickly. I thank God every day, every single firefighter under my command, everybody went home safely. We had some minor injuries. We'd never had anybody seriously injured. And thank God we never had any deaths because Storm King was as close as it got for me directly because I knew 11 of the 14.

So this kind of feeling, though, this culture, though, it's kind of spread throughout the entire firefighting world. Is that a fair way of looking at that? Then California makes it worse. And this is now getting well documented. I want to get to the hydrants thing because this is critical and it could happen to us someday. All right. Yeah. And the hydrant issue has been a big deal. And I just want to be clear that there has been some news that has come out that is clarifying some of the empty hydrant story. Okay. Right. When I first heard that hydrants were they were

cracking them open there was no water I had assumed given the size and scope of what they were dealing with down there they were running into with what we ran into here with the Almeda fire meaning they cracked so many hydrants they put so much demand on the system it couldn't keep up with it then the other thing that's happening and this is a fact, some of these buildings, when they're burning away, things that once contained water, toilets, bathtubs, sinks, pipes, when the buildings burn up and you have water that hasn't been shut off, the real odd thing is sometimes you burn everything away and there's water pouring out of the ground. Oh, yeah.

I was talking about that. I've been talking about that a lot the last couple of days because I remember that was a big issue with Almeda. The connection to Phoenix from Medford Water, I think, was capable of running two hydrants if everything else was kept shut off. But naturally, every time a building burns down, there's one pipe that melts open, and then it's spilling out water, and then another one, and then another one. And your water system is death by a thousand cuts, essentially. That's what happens. And hydrant systems are designed to deal with, sorry, deal with isolated incidents. They are not designed for big, wide-scale, Palisades-Eaton type. Or a firestorm. They're not for firestorms. That's

just it. Yeah, they're not. And no system is going to be perfect. But here's what I now found out from multiple sources in Southern California. When SoCalEd shut the power off, there went the power that also was getting water into the system for the hydrants, and that was a huge reason why hydrants were dry. Yeah, boy, yikes on that. And, of course, why are they shutting the power off? Because of the liability and the billions of dollars in lawsuits. And you have to look at where Pacific Power has found itself in. Look at all the shutoffs in talent.

And that was all about liability and liability issues. And so the same power that pushes water through the hydrant system got shut off. There is no backup. Oh, boy. I was talking to a Southern Oregon County Commissioner last night directly about this, and I said, you do realize that the same thing can happen here. Sure. PPNL may shut the power off. And if they do, the pumping stations to get water into the system are not going to have power. And there is no redundancy plant. There's no backup. You know, it might be worth our time here, Greg, to talk about maybe emergency backup generators for key pumping stations. Would that be a good idea?

That is exactly what they're doing right now in Southern California, at least the stations that haven't burned up. Yeah. They are bringing, that's one of the first things the California National Guard did. They're bringing in these huge generators, getting them set up and make sure they're charging up the water pumping system. Boy, there are all sorts of little nicks and cuts that end up being multiple single points of failure on these kind of things. You realize how complex the infrastructure can be. You know, something that I was – and, you know, I was talking about this on Facebook.

I've talked about this on the air too, though, is that, you know, we have plastic piping on these homes. And I don't think we're going to be going back to copper piping, which would be a little more fire – well, much more fire resistant, you know, in a firestorm sort of situation. Plastic is very useful, easy to use, and gosh, you know, it's everywhere. Might it be time to start looking at though? And, and, you know, I'm not one of these guys that every time there's a major problems that we need another law, I'm not one of those kinds of guys, but the more I've looked into it is that, um, the simplicity of even automatic line break and low-pressure shutoff controls going on to residential and business places might be something to start thinking about.

I was looking at this. I went up and looked up one that was manufactured by Emerson, and they were mechanical. They're kind of preset so that you'll preset it to, all right, if the water pressure is falling down to 50 pounds or 60 pounds per square inch, it'll cut the main off to the home. Because it's kind of obvious then that there is a massive leak in the place, like the house burned down in a certain case. And I don't know, maybe we start talking about things like that to be able to keep pressure for firefighting in larger events. I don't know if that makes sense or not. It does, you know, but again, you move into these bigger scale type events, Palisades, Eaton, I just think the overwhelming combining factors of wind pushing fire through a very dry landscape.

Yeah, well, you can do a lot of things. But at the end of the day, I still don't know that anything is ever going to be effective at stopping a true firestorm situation like what they've had in Southern California and what we had here with Almeda and Open Chain. It just doesn't. Yeah, other people would ask me, well, why don't we have just a separate parallel water system, you know, feeding the hydrates? That would be nice, but boy, that's expensive too. That'd be huge.

Exactly, and especially now to go back and do it as, you know, for lack of a better term, retroactively, horrendously expensive. Yeah, it would have been great if we had been doing that at the time, you know, back when maybe pipe was cheaper, but that's the way it goes. Everybody's like, well, we should have been in grounding our power supply system decades ago. Yeah, we should have. Oh, yeah, but you mentioned the insane cost. I think it's, what, five or six times the cost to do it underground?

Yep, it is. It's amazing. But the reason they're doing it now, it's reached the cost-benefit point. Is there a benefit to engaging the cost? Yeah, the liability. Because of the liability. Because of the liability. Yeah.

It gets passed on to the rate payers. All right. Hey, we're talking fire and more here on the Bill Myers Show, KMED. Hey, hang on. We'll take some more calls, Greg. Can you take a couple calls in just a couple minutes here? All right. And you want to talk about it.

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This is Randall with Advanced Air, and I'm on KMED. Will is on the line here. He's getting ready to go into work so we can make this quick. You had a question or comment for Greg? Greg Roberts here. Go ahead, Will. Yes, I was saying about 12 years ago when I was working for FedEx and I was in the Williams area and there was an outfit over there called Pacifica. Well, that Pacifica caught on fire and that fire was out of control and it was pushing towards the residents. And there was an old timer, one of my customers, that was out there fighting that fire with his hose. So I pulled over and grabbed the other hose on the other side of the house, and we were wetting down the house. And then all of a sudden, everything's no more water because Pacific Power shut off the power to that whole area.

So water's everything. Power's everything. I've got to go in, but you guys have a good day. Hey, thanks, Will. Thanks for taking the time. Well, he's exactly right. And then you want to talk about really stupid. Here in the state of Oregon, and we saw it happen here in Jackson County, they will cite you, they will throw you in jail for building a pond on your property to collect water that the primary use of it month? Gary Harrington, I want to say.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, people acted all outraged and everything, especially when they found out what he was doing it for. Guess what? Nothing changed. That law is still on the books. Well, the whole idea is the state of Oregon claims ownership of the water. And if you're doing anything without your permit, there you go.

You find yourself sideways of it. Let's grab another call for Greg here quickly. Hi, good morning. You're on with Greg, Mr. Outdoors. Who's this? This is Ed and Bill. Hi, Ed. How are you doing?

Hello, Greg. Well, just a couple of comments that, you know, what we have to do is proactively look at this as an example. We experienced it in the Almeida fire, but a lot of people don't understand the lack of water, what the roots of it was. And the roots of it was is that there was a process going on to pipe water from Medford to Ashland. Okay. Wow. Now, they put in a pipeline. You mentioned it, right?

It was called the TAP project, Talent Ashland Phoenix. Okay. So now what you have is there's engineering concepts that we allowed inexperienced people to use and build this thing with the idea of sustainability. Okay. So our children, we have to save the water for our children. And it led to the ultimate catastrophe that we had because the pipeline that you were talking about could only handle 4,000 gallons a minute. That was the capacity of the line. You know, the water line of a size and dimension only holds and can handle so much water with the pumping that they have.

So they were pumping this water up into there. Now, 4,000 gallons a minute, the research I did at the time, was capable of doing on its own four fire hydrants. Oh, four fire hydrants. Correct. Okay. Yep. Okay. Now, when you had 2,000 structures burn, all of those things, like you said, they were bleeding water everywhere. And then the first responders, as we call them, would pull up and they had no water.

But the point I'm trying to make is, as citizens here, we can't allow these people to engineer these things because they're not experienced enough to understand. And this is where the emergency manager is supposed to be having a planned attack for this. Now, thank God, the Medford pumping stations that they use or the pumping stations were on a line that didn't get shut off to even get any water up there. But the realities are we, the cost of a fire, look at the total cost that we have to start thinking like this and look at people that aren't experienced, keep them out of the picture, start commenting on this. Yes, and also ripping the term of sustainability out of the construction of something

which is such a key piece of infrastructure as the main pipe that supplies not just drinking water, but also firefighting water to the South County, for crying out loud. 4,000 gallons permitted is not very much in the grand scheme of things. I know it sounds like a lot. Ed, I appreciate that. Logically, you're pumping this water uphill. And you start looking at it. It was absolutely ridiculous that there wasn't a separate line put in at the time because that's where your cost is cheaper. Your cost is cheaper to plan for that if you're going to do it.

Now, at the time, this involved our congressmen. There was a big, big memorandum of understanding. There was all of this stuff about piping all this water. But they were talking budgets of $500 million, okay, to pipe all of the water. But the best that they could come up with was one line that that handled 4 000 gallons a minute at that moment was where we were bent for the destruction of phoenix and talent that is a very interesting point on that ed mr x i appreciate you checking in here wow uh i can't that guy right there bill that guy right there ed mr x that guy does his homework. He is one of the best, most knowledgeable people

that understands the government operational procedure that I've ever met who is outside of the government operational procedure. And yeah, I can't disagree with a single thing that he just said. Yeah. And in other words, it's policy and it's policy choices. And when you have ideologies about restricting and not having abundance of something as critical as not just drinking water but also firefighting water, a lot of things were baked in the cake during those conversations and those budgeting processes. Well, and, you know, and of course we find all kinds of interesting ways to keep making the situations worse. You know, obviously we've just talked about a lot of it.

I still believe in my heart of hearts taking those dams out on the Klamath someday is going to have a very disastrous consequence. Something's going to happen where all of a sudden we're going to realize, oh, if we had the dams and the reservoirs on the Klamath, that might have made a real difference. Yeah, and it might be when or if the monument ends up burning down to the ground someday. We'll see. I hope not. It's already come close to doing that on several different occasions. Klamathon Fire, Oregon Gulch Fire. I mean, the clock is just ticking now.

Greg Roberts at RogueWeather.com. Greg, I really appreciate the call, and thanks for taking the extra time because, like I said, I know you've fought a lot of fires in your day. And so, yeah, keeping up on this kind of stuff. We'll catch you next week and uh hey relax this weekend hopefully okay we'll see you yeah well we'll see but you know at least from the weather point of view it looks very peaceful enough that relaxation should be possible but life is nothing if not full of surprises yeah i'm just loving the fact that the news around here in spite of all the

other drama down there is relatively boring we can We can handle some boring. It's okay. All right? Most definitely. We'll see you then, Greg. Greg Roberts over at RogueWeather.com. It's 8 o'clock. This is KMED, KMED HD1 Eagle Point, Medford, KPXG Grants Pass. And we're going to be talking about some immigration issues here.

We'll have some more open phone time here. And, oh, by the way, the Outdoor Report every Friday is sponsored by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority on Airway Drive in Medford. This is Bob at Father...