California Fires – Lindsay Lohan Goes Swimming

While wildfires burn parts of L.A. to the ground, Lindsay Lohan kept her freckled bones cool in a white bikini at the Sunset Marquis pool a few days ago.

Such a carefree life we have.

I will admit, despite having no hips and being a complete and utter mess — the girl is still looking good in a bikini!

As if the raging wildfires near Los Angeles weren’t bad enough, there’s a new frightening twist: fire tornadoes.

Video captured by ABC News on Monday shows columns of fire stretching toward the sky and moving laterally.

The Angeles National Forest, just outside of Los Angeles, has been decimated by the fires — over 53 houses have been destroyed, 164 square miles of land scorched and millions dollars of damage caused — and fire tornadoes are typical in a fire of this size.

Fire Tornadoes — aka fire whirls, as they are technically termed — occur when intense heat combines with low winds causing a column of flame to stretch dramatically upwards.

Unlike tornadoes, which form from the clouds downward to the groud, fire whirls form upward toward the sky. They usually occur on the lee side of a fire. (In a fire on a mountain with winds coming from the west, the lee side would be the eastern slope.)

“When those things happen you just have to stand back and let them do their thing,” said Chuck Redman, a fire weather meteorologist with the National Weather Service Office in Boise. “They’ll send spots everywhere, across fire lines.”

The lack of strong winds “doesn’t allow the heat column to shear apart. Once the whirl moves to a cooler patch of ground, the heat dissipates and it gradually dies off.”

The National Weather Service in Oxnard/Los Angeles could not immediately confirm the existence of fire whirls in the current round of wildfires.

However, Jamie Meier, a meteorologist with the office, said she “would not be surprised” if they were occurring.

“I would expect that with a fire of this magnitude, and with the rapid growth that this particular fire is showing, that [fire whirls] are a typical behavior of this type of incident,” Meiers said.

source: California wildfires, with dry timber and high heat, spawn fire tornadoes [ny daily news]

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