Another good opportunity to send the drone up and capture the lights of the city. I took some longer exposures and was pleased to see the lights of Winter hill on the horizon. I've included a couple of pics of the area below the drone and picked up trailers from vehicle lights.
This has been an exceptional year for the peppers with almost perfect conditions. Low humidity, good warm weather, tons of sunlight and minimal interference from the various things that like to disrupt the seasons growth. No moulds, almost no aphids or whitefly and incredibly robust growth on all of the plants. Out of the 14 pots, two were 15 litres and they produced huge crops. Even the 3 and 5 litre pots produced bumper crops. The heat level of both types is typically punchy and particularly flavoursome. Tomorrow I start processing. I'm going to smoke half of the Habs and see if I can get them to ferment, I believe it can be done if you use half smoked and half unsmoked.
The majority of the fires had been extinguished but emergency fire fighters were still present at Crowden. The new larger plume was away from the main seats of fire. We'd just come down the Woodhead pass from Stockbridge side and the drone picked up a single plume of smoke at the top of the pass. You can just see it in the first pic. We learned later that a vehicle had caught fire and that the fire had spread onto the moorland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y4ly7q54xo
The people on the ground are doing an incredible job to control the fires in extremely challenging conditions. I have the greatest gratitude for the emergency services and want to thank them for their hard work and professionalism. We are so lucky to have them watching our backs. Without their hard work we would be in serious trouble by now with the moorland fires.
A few pics of the Woodhead valley fires. The teams working to put the fires out are under immense pressure and are working incredibly hard to get the job done. It was blowing a hard wind down the valley and you could see fires in a number of places. Where the guys were creating a windbreak you could see sudden surges of the fires on the hill near Highstone rocks above them. The helicopters were doing a non stop circuit taking water from the reservoir and dumping it on the fires around Highstone rocks. The size of the fire damaged area is vast. It looks like the whole of Tintwistle low moor and Tintwistle Knarr down toward Crowden, up towards Laddow rocks and beyond toward Chew valley and Dovestones is utterly destroyed. It will take some serious human intervention to try and restore this moorland. If the moorland is left alone then erosion will be a major problem leaving it susceptible to flash flooding in wet periods. This will reduce the peats capacity to hold water making incidents like this occur more frequently in dry spells.
I was curious to see how bad it was and the best vantage point was from my dji mini 4k. There's a lot of peoples health being affected by this smoke and there doesn't seem to be any real grasp of that fact by our local authorities. Just be aware that the wind will continue from that direction for a while yet. Try and minimise the amount of time you're outdoors until it passes. To the emergency services involved in controlling the fires, take care, don't take chances, everybody must come home safe.