Mono Monday. : : Looking Down

To begin with...in the interests of full disclosure, I took this picture back in September of 2012 before we moved from Berkeley to Santa Rosa, while I was hiking in Tilden Park. I have changed it to mono for today's challenge, but the funny thing is I could have taken almost the same picture today. I had no idea what was going on when I took this picture, but now I know exactly what they were doing.

If you look closely at the picture, there is a man standing on the skids of the helicopter with a long pole in his hands. Note also the big power transmission tower to the right of the shot. We got a phone message from PG&E today saying that there will be helicopters in our area this week checking the transmission lines. The first time they did that here we got no such message, and the first thing we knew about it was when they flew about ten feet above our house circled a couple of times and slowly flew off up the canyon. Nobody knew what they were doing, but many of us thought perhaps they were searching for a fugitive or a lost hiker. We don't live in Los Angeles where helicopter searches are a common occurrence, but everybody knows about the Huey1 helicopter belonging to Cal Fire, has seen it landing on the roof of the hospital downtown and read about daring rescues of people who fall down the cliff at Bodega Head or break a leg riding bicycles in Annadel State Park.

We found out later that the helicopter flying low over our house was not Huey1 but belonged to PG&E and was checking the transmission lines that run from Hood Mountain just behind us across the Sonoma Valley.

I haven't heard the helicopters here yet, but all was suddenly made clear when I ran across this picture, taken long before turning off the power to prevent fires and needing to check all the lines before turning it back on again was a 'thing'. When they do fly low over our house this week,  we will know all to well why they are doing it.

It has now been a long time since it rained, despite the fact that this is the rainy season. The words 'drought' and 'fire' are now being spoken out loud. We were awakened the other night by a fire engine pulling up across the street. It turns our that our neighbors spotted a fire across the creek from their house and called them. A person living in a homemade shelter had apparently set it on fire, perhaps trying to keep warm. The shelter and whatever contents in it were completely destroyed and the occupant had disappeared. 

There is no doubt in anybody's mind that PG&E has a lot of deferred maintenance to do, but it is also clear that there is more than one way to start a potentially catastrophic fire.