And Now, the Weather...

It's 7pm and fires are still raging all around Southern California - 16 at last count. It's 79 degrees here, 14% relative humidity, and winds are steady at about 20 mph with gusts 40+. Not real good weather to fight a fire in.

Today's experiences just show what a few determined terrorists armed with nothing more than a match could do to Southern California when we have a Santa Ana windstorm like this. With a little planning multiple large fires could be started almost simultaneously that could bring the emergency services from Santa Barbara to San Diego to collapse.

If you're worried that I'm giving terrorists good ideas, they've already thought of it according to some documents that were found long ago. This sort of thing doesn't really appeal to terrorists because they're really not that interested in destroying large amounts of property - they want to destroy large amounts of lives. Wildfires like we're having today occasionally take lives (including an illegal alien in San Diego County today), but for the most part if there are losses of life they are often fire fighters who have to do the dangerous work of getting in front of these fires and getting people out of the way.

San Diego is having the worst time of it, though the L.A. media isn't spending much time on what's going on down there. If you look at this map you can see that there are large swaths of San Diego County that have been affected, and other areas that are currently under evacuation orders. At last count some 250,000 people have been ordered out of their homes, and traffic reports on the radio indicated that traffic was almost locked up from Oceanside north to San Juan Capistrano - most of those probably being people fleeing the fires to find refuge elsewhere. It's going to continue to be tough down there for the next day or so.

So far the big Orange County fire hasn't taken any homes but it's gotten very close. A friend of my wife is under a mandatory evacuation, so it 's not done here yet. Stay tuned.