A compilation of things written in various places:
It's about 90F outside, 11% humidity. Santa Ana wind conditions, and a fire a few miles directly upwind. I woke up thinking it smelled rather ashy out, knowing the winds had been blowing all night (it was a mere 83 when I got home around 0100). The sky's given everything a nice bronzey colour all day. About an hour ago it was dark enough that my neighbor's "on at dusk" security lights turned on, just past noon.
2008-11-15 13:40:13
.....
Well, I bailed for the day, simply because I couldn't breath. Winds were kicking up the night before, and I shut my windows as I left for the night, as I know I'll find a fine layer of dust all over if I don't. I hadn't opened them all night as the winds were still strong when I got home around midnight or so. By 1100 Saturday, the house just smelled of burning, and that with the dryness was giving a major headache.
.....
First time I saw Jetboy play live, the wrapped their show with "Feel The Shake" and at 0300 the next day the Northridge earthquake slammed SoCal.They finished with it again last night, but today the sky is bronze from the fires just up the road from me. I took this out my front window about 10 minutes ago:
Note there is no colour retouching or light levels edited in that pic at all. That's what it looked like. About 30 minutes before when the smoke was more overhead, there was a slim margin of blue over the roofs, and the sun was filtered through the smoke so everything (like the bright white house) had an amber tint to it. It was all so very surreal.
Anyone reading this in a timely manner can go to:
http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/?zip=92866&magic=1&wmo=99999
Click the box labeled FIRE at the bottom. I'm about an inch SW of the big cluster of fire, right inline with the wind.
This is what the fire map looked like early yesterday:
Note the small amount burning. The big green blob that normally represents "clouds" is actually "smoke". Yeah, gross. I wish I had captured a pic from late last night when the smoke trail per the map incidcator (the gray rectangle running to the SW was almost solid black and covering most of the map.
From there, we look at the map as of right now:
That's a lot of fire, right there. More of what I've written about this:
The wind's not as bad as yesterday, not by a long shot. I'd go so far as to call it "calm" by comparison. That's a huge boost for firefighting efforts.
My usual batch of links:
This is impressive for two reasons:http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/11/celia-ordaz-a-7.html
A) The dude is The Man.
B) People were not soaking their roofs pre-emptively. Garden hoses, people!
One article as of 0300 today states:
"There have been 7,373 acres burned so far. The good news is that the Fire Authority says that there is a 5 percent containment, but there are still over 1,000 homes threatened."
5% is *good news*? Sure, it's better than 4%, but 5% is nothing. This is almost a replay of the canyons last year that I wrote about here, but when they burned only... 200 homes max could've been threatened, perhaps. This is massive. Over 40,000 evacuations across three counties already, 140 residences lost, as well as the main building of the local high school. The wunderground link above still is valid, just check the 'fire' box at the bottom. Another more basic map from CALFIRE:
If you click the link for Yorba Linda (Freeway Fire) they're reporting 10k acres burned, 0% contained, 3500 structures threatened.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7732389.stm
And this bums the fuck out of me:
"We just started losing homes. We didn't have enough units," said Mickey Hansen, a safety officer with the Orange County Fire Authority. "There were just so many fires. There wasn't enough (resources) to go around."
Same song as 13 months ago. :(
2008-11-16 12:29:00
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