Forest fires a result of cloud-seeding?
As received from Rep. McKinley
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Diane MacMillan <dmacmillan@evcohs.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 10:38 AM
Subject: Colorado Wildfire
To: wes.mckinley.house@state.co.us
Dear Representative Mc Kinley -
It is well known that ponderosa trees will not burn if they have enough winter moisture.
It is well known that ponderosa trees will not burn if they have enough winter moisture.
The fire in the Black Forest in Colorado Springs is proof that all the reasonable mitigation efforts, outside of cutting all the trees within 100 feet of your home, killing all the grasses within 100 feet, will not prevent a fire from destroying 502 Homes and 14,280 Acres with two deaths.
Many of these families will receive some gratuity for their former home. That is just a portion of their losses. It will never be the same. If they didn’t die in their fires, they have nothing but memories. They have lost their pets, horses, cattle, their neighbors. Most will never rebuild in that neighborhood. Who would want to.
In the ‘90’s, I was standing along Highway 285, watching the fire come up the hill, burning everything in its path. In disbelief, I mumbled to the stranger standing beside me, “What is this all about?”. He said “Cloudseeding”. At the time, that didn't make much sense, but it wasn't long before I found a Division of Weather Modification in our Colorado state government. And one call has lead to hundreds over the past fifteen years. I have acquired daily documentation from every avenue available.
You can locate all the wildfires, since the ‘90’s, 50 acres and over, and find that to the west of each of these fires, cloud seeding generators and their target areas are located. I have made such a map. In the ‘70’s, each of these western states wrote a statute that, whatever moisture moving over their state, belonged to that state.
In Colorado, their cloudseeding purpose is to drop the snow on the ski areas for increased skiing conditions, later to drain into reservoirs serving our cities via tunnels under the Continental Divide. This is not new water produced by cloudseeding, but a relocation of the water that was intended to be dropped naturally beyond the target areas, now known as “the burn areas” crusted from the heat, that will take over 80 years to restore to some semblance of vegetation.
Our water comes from the Pacific, like a large bucket, it is carried over California, Oregon and Washington. In a 2007 presentation, members of Pacific Gas & Electric Company reported that with 15 cloudseeding generators , in California, Pacific Gas & Electric produced one million acre feet or 325,000,000,000 gallons in just two reservoirs for the purpose of making electricity. That was in just two of the many reservoirs and cloudseeding programs in California. Then there is Arizona, Nevada and Utah that takes what they can capture, leaving little for the rest of the states inland, New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming. Colorado has over 127 cloudseeding generators west of the continental divide. These generators using silver iodide are not producing moisture either, they are just putting it in a different place, 25 minutes beyond the generators, for the advantage of ski areas and cities, to the detriment of Colorado’s Front Range forests.
Is there no guilt for the loss of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots that died in Arizona? They know. Prescott Wildland Fire Chief Darrell Willis, who helped form the Prescott-based team, was recently quoted in the Denver Post, ”This is the most extreme fire behavior I have ever witnessed”. An “extreme” is not the norm and needs to be studied. Every state in the southwest is cloudseeding and knows. Just lay out the fires and you will find the cloudseeding programs laid out to the west, south west or northwest, where our major weather patterns come from, capturing that moisture before it can naturally drop in the areas beyond, which it has for hundreds of years.
These fires are costing everyone, nationwide. Our taxes are going towards fighting the fires, buying more planes and equipment, etc., to fight these fires, restoring and thinning of our forests. Let alone more regulations, and the raising of our home insurance. Isn’t it ironic that water districts are now getting muddy water from the burn areas, raising the costs of their drinking water and still calling it a drought. All in order to gain more so-called water for our cities that are now building new subdivisions and aquatic parks. This was once prairie with a small river that you could walk across.
We are now eating beef raised in South America. Our ranchers are no longer raising beef, because there is no feed or water. And in Southeast Colorado, there are sand drifts two feet deep over their wheat crops.
Maybe our highest priority should be to stop the winter cloudseeding, let our pastures, fields and forest recover and give our ranchers and farmers their well -needed water back. And give back to the taxpayers, the expected expenditure of two billion dollars planned in this year’s budget to suppress our fires and the 30 million dollars for thinning and restoration of our forests.
This can only be blamed on the winter cloudseeding programs depleting our fields and forests from receiving their normal amount of winter snows. The Conifer area in Colorado, was once called the snow corridor by the local Realtors. It has since, lost thousands of acres of ponderosa forests, hundreds of homes, along with many deaths. Many stands of ponderosas were previously killed by the beetles. These ponderosas needed their winter moisture in order to push the beetles out with their pitch and stay healthy.
Down in the Salida area and along Hwy 285, there was a picturesque ranch that had beautiful green pastures, huge haybales and hundreds of black cattle, with giant cottonwoods surrounding the ranch for shade. A sight to be seen. A couple of years ago, I drove by, the cattle were gone, the pastures were dead grass and the Cottonwoods were dying. Last year I stopped and asked what had happened. They had sold some of their water rights to the City of Pueblo and the city sprayed all their grassland, killing it to gain more water.
I spoke recently to the project engineer in Wyoming regarding their test program. While he was pleased at the amount of water produced in their target areas, there was no testing for the lack of water normally received in the areas beyond, to the east of the program. It was written off as a drought area and have had their fair share of fires as well, during their testing period.
As I sit here watching and listening to Music and the Spoken Word, watching the beautiful photography of our beautiful country, wondering, what’s the point? Am I wasting my time? I remembered recently of my grandfather writing many years ago, to Senator Humphrey, asking him to not allow the dumping of tailings from the iron range north of Duluth, into Lake Superior. We had a cabin on the North Shore. The first thing we did when we arrived was to run the pipe down to the Lake for our drinking water, like every other cabin along the shore as well as the City of Duluth and Superior. Well, Grandpa Behrens efforts were all in vain and soon the train loads of tailings were dumped into Taconite Bay. Not long after, it was discovered that the water of Lake Superior was filled with asbestos fibers. At one time, Lake Superior was the largest purest body of water in the world. But no longer. Now I have to wonder if he is not making me write these letters.
Please reconsider these cloudseeding programs. It is affecting us all, one way or another. Stop messing with Mother Nature. Thank you.
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