Random Bloggish 10/30

10/30/07 12:30 a.m.

Well, I haven't been on a reportable fishing trip in a while. I was invited on one last week, but turned it down, due to the fire being in full effect. Took a little bit of guff for that too, but you gotta make up your own mind, and fishing just didn't seem like the thing to do at the time. So, this is a filler. A holdover blog.

San Diego County had the worst fire in its history last week. I guess there are still fires burning, actually. My sister sent me a text message last Sunday morning, from Annapolis, MD, asking me where the fires were. I had no idea. I turned to a news channel and it was Malibu. We made a few dumb jokes back and forth, via text message, about our Malibu homes homes, and the celebrities we had watching them. A few hours pass, and I'm flipping through the channels and it turns out a couple of fires have broken out in San Diego. But they hadn't when my sister asked, and weren't yet big enough for Annapolis to have heard about them. But the big Santa Ana we were having was fanning these brush fires into a serious threat. I actually walked to a grocery store a block or so away to get some stuff I needed for beer brats, and by the time I got back my throat was sore from the smoke in my neighborhood.

Quick side story: As I walked up to the front of the grocery store there was a cashier, and a customer out front talking about the smell in the air. The obvious, inescapable, smoke smell. The cashier asked the other woman if she smelled the odor. The woman said "the smoke?" The cashier said, "No, it's something else." Then the cashier asked, "Is there a fire?" and the other woman said... No. What-the-fuck-ever. I resisted the urge to bring them up to date. I'm trying to live by a less-is-more philosophy these days. Let. It. Go.

Back to the fire. I texted my sister back, to let her know of the coincendence, of our earlier messaging, that in fact there were fires in San Diego now. By now the local channels were starting to devote their time to the fires. I had shut up my doors and windows and focused on the news of the fires. Many friends of mine were pretty close to the Cedar Fire in 2003, and "The Witch Creek Fire" wasn't too far away from where the Cedar started.

The morning the Cedar Fire came to my attention, I had just shuffled out of my bedroom to an orangish glow in the living room, and my room mate and his girlfriend staring at the TV. Another Santa Ana, 3 days shy of 4 years earlier than this one, had funneled all the smoke and ash from the Cedar Fire through downtown, where we lived, and turned normally mild, beautiful San Diego into a horrible, sooty city.

Amazingly, San Diego (the official, municipal San Diego) had taken heart, and learned from the chaos of the Cedar Fire, and something now known as "Reverse 911" warned people well in advance to leave their homes. Evacuation shelters sprung up immediately, at schools, shopping centers, and eventually, most famously, Qualcomm Stadium. Luckily, and probably due to the opposite natures of fires and hurricanes, it wasn't a gruesome fiasco like the Superdome turned into. The evacuation shelter at Qualcomm was well organized and efficient. Within hours donations and volunteers poured in. It was pretty impressive. Lessons learned.

The entire city of Ramona was evacuated on Sunday night. 40,000 people. Including three families of close friends of mine. All three sheltered in different place, safely, and were eventually allowed back to their homes, on Friday I think. It wasn't until last night that water was available in Ramona, and they still can't drink it.

My friend, Eric, took his oldest son, Brendan, and snuck up to the house to see how it weathered the fire (there hadn't been any reports of damage in his area). He text messaged me that the house was "full" of ashes.

I'm going to go to bed now... I'll pick up later. I just felt like putting something down.

7 hours of sleep pass.

10/30/07 10:00 a.m.

I'm awake now, have coffee, and having just reread part one realized I don't have a lot more to say about the fires that raced through San Diego County last week.

Though many, many families lost homes, people perished as a direct, or indirect, result of the fires, nobody I know lost a home, or family member. Which is great. On Saturday, the 27th, we even got a little unexpected rain and cool weather. When I say unexpected, even the weather folks on TV were caught off guard. And here on Tuesday morning, the weather is cool and cloudy, and comforting.

In a case of cyberspace being intruded upon by actualspace, a fishing/smack-talking message board I used to frequent lost its server in the Witch Creek Fire and the site was down for a few days. Now it's slowly rebuilding from scratch. Which, for that site, is a good thing. A lot of stupidity was erased from existence. But so were some good reports and articles. The founder/owner/creator of that site, had sold a house two months ago that burned down in the fires last week. That's timing.

Being that the Cedar Fire of 2004, and this 2007 fire didn't have a heck of a lot of overlap, let's hope the long-standing, explosively dry fuel has been expended, the ecology of fire can do its thing, and there isn't too much more to burn so massively next time. There will be a next time. It's not getting wetter in Southern California. Santa Ana winds aren't going to stop. Fortunately, it looks like the county has systems in place to deal with it.

So there's that. Fire.