(TNS) - Fire watchers tasked with helping prevent wildfires in Orange County will use virtual monitoring due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Orange County Fire Watch is using the virtual program in conjunction with its normal in-person monitoring activities.

OC Fire Watch is managed by Irvine Ranch Conservancy for OC Parks and the cities of Irvine and Newport Beach.

Tony Pointer, the conservancy’s fire watch manager, said the new system is crucial to keep volunteers safe, while maintaining adequate wildfire monitoring.

Silicon Valley’s innovation engine has been slow to produce useful new tools to help firefighters like Dave Winnacker extinguish the deadly blazes that each year fill California’s skies with smoke.

Winnacker, a fire district chief who led a team against the 2017 fires that scorched vineyards in Napa and Sonoma Valley, is interested in tools that can spot fires early and ease evacuations.

(TNS) - SAN JOSE, Calif. — The heavy smoke from wildfires that choked much of California in recent weeks was more than an inconvenience.

It was deadly. And it almost certainly killed more people than the flames from the massive fires themselves, health experts say.

Between Aug. 1 and Sept. 10, the historically bad concentrations of wildfire smoke were responsible for at least 1,200 and possibly up to 3,000 deaths in California that otherwise would not have occurred, according to an estimate by researchers at Stanford University. Those fatalities were among people age 65 and over, most of whom were living with pre-existing medical conditions like heart disease, diabetes and respiratory ailments.

(TNS) - The COVID-19 pandemic has largely been a story of numbers.

Daily reports tell us the number of new cases, the number of hospitalizations, the number of outbreaks and the number of deaths.

The numbers are a dispassionate, point-in-time measure necessary to track the footprint of the deadly coronavirus as it continues its advance into homes, businesses, churches, even hospitals.

But they can't quantify the sense of loss that has pervaded life since the pandemic began six months ago — the loss of intimacy, tradition, confidence, and economic well-being.

A wildfire burning through brush and timber from the mountains to the desert northeast of Los Angeles threatened more than 1,000 homes on Tuesday as crews across the West battled dozens of other major blazes.

The Bobcat Fire in Southern California was advancing at one to two miles per hour at times and threatened the Mojave Desert town of Pearblossom after burning into the Antelope Valley foothill area, across the San Gabriel Mountains from Los Angeles.

The blaze that began Sept. 6 has destroyed or damaged at least 29 homes and other buildings, with the toll rising to perhaps 85 when damage assessment teams can complete their work this week, authorities said.

California companies must warn their workers of any potential exposure to the coronavirus and must pay their employees workers compensation benefits if they get sick with the disease under two laws that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed last week.

Newsom, a Democrat, signed the laws over the objections of business groups, who have said they are “unworkable.”

One of the laws makes people who have the coronavirus eligible for workers compensation benefits. It takes effect immediately and applies to all workers in the state, but it treats first responders and health care workers differently than other employees.

Rains may bring some reprieve to those suffering from massive blazes in the Pacific Northwest in the next few weeks, but forecasters don’t expect any help for wildfire-plagued California anytime soon.

That’s according to briefing call on Friday morning held by AccuWeather and Plume Labs looking at weather and air quality forecasts for the remainder of this year’s wildfire season.

Residents in the Golden State have been living for weeks with grayish, choking air and widespread ash from North to South, with numerous lives lost and thousands of evacuations, while hundreds of thousands have been on evacuation alerts in Washington and Oregon from numerous wildfires.

(TNS) - The monstrous North Complex fires claimed another seven lives in Butte County, bringing the death toll to 10 on Thursday as search crews looked for 26 people who have not been heard from.

In one case, investigators asked relatives of a missing 16-year-old boy to provide DNA samples, which helped confirm that one of the dead was their loved one, Josiah Williams, of Berry Creek.

“We are at a complete loss for words right now,” his aunt, Bobbie Zedaker, told The Chronicle late Thursday night.

(TNS) - Shrouded in near darkness, beneath a gloomy, orange sky, Fabian Rios worked to repair a fire hydrant late Wednesday morning.

Working alongside the headlights of his truck, the Bay Area utility employee said the lack of light wasn’t troubling him.

“The real problem is the ash falling from the sky,” said Rios, who works for the city of Mountain View and was wearing a surgical mask. “I am just getting covered.”

As fires rage up and down the West Coast, the skies over California have taken an apocalyptic turn — choking the air with ash and smoke in some regions, while snuffing out sunlight in others. Rarely have so many Californians breathed such unhealthy air.

Wildfires have burned a record 2 million acres in California this year, and the danger for more destruction is so high the U.S. Forest Service announced Monday it was closing all eight national forests in the southern half of the state.

After a typically dry summer, California is parched heading into fall and what normally is the most dangerous time for wildfires. Two of the three largest fires in state history are burning in the San Francisco Bay Area. More than 14,000 firefighters are battling those fires and dozens of others more around California.