Out of the Fridge and Into the Fireplace

I just got home after a 7 hour drive from Northern California. The weather up there was beautiful, though a little cool. It was about 50 degrees when we left at 5:30 this morning, and about 45 degrees when we stopped for fuel in Santa Nella. We had clear skies and easy sailing down I-5 until we got to within about 10 miles of the bottom of the Grapevine. Then it started to get interesting.

We had been following the fire and wind situation back home on TV over the weekend, and picked up a Los Angeles radio station when we were still 400 miles away. As we drove we listened as they described fire after fire ravaging Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego, and when he heard about a new fire in the Saugus are, we were concerned that it might mess up the freeway as happened to us in 2006. We probably passed 20 CDF fire trucks which were headed south to help out. God bless 'em.

We had no wind until our fuel stop at the bottom of the Grapevine, and down there it was blowing 30+ with gusts to 45 or more. It was really howling. Going up the big hill we really fought the wind and starting watching for the first signs of the fires.

We passed three different fires in the next hour. There was a large plume of black and gray smoke billowing up west of Castaic, and then a little further on the other side of the freeway we could see the Saugus and Santa Clarita fires. There was pretty heavy smoke in the Santa Clarita area.

Heading down into Orange County the winds were calm until we got just past Disneyland and then everything really picked up. The sky is a dirty brown color, it smells very strongly of smoke, and there are little bits of ash falling. We have two different fires burning in Orange County, both within 10 miles of our house though neither is a threat to us. We're just getting a lot of smoke and ash and the wind is still blowing pretty strongly. It's a little hard to breath with all the crud in the air.

This very much reminds me of 2003 almost to the day in October when we had identical weather conditions and numerous large fires broke out around the Southland. One of them caused the evacuation of the Regional Air Traffic Control center in San Diego which created more than a little chaos for me.

That weekend my quartet had been in Virginia for some concerts and we were schedule to fly home on Sunday afternoon. When we got to the airport we found out that all flights into Southern California were being canceled, which meant our connecting flight from Phoenix to Los Angeles wasn't going to go. I called Budget from Dulles Airport and booked a car one way from Phoenix to L.A., and it's a good thing I did. By the time we arrived in Phoenix all the rental cars were gone and the poor saps who didn't have a reservation were stuck. We ended up driving 8 hours from Phoenix back to the L.A. area.

There are big fires in San Diego once again, and in fact as I write this 250,000 people have been evacuated. There is fear that this fire could surpass the Cedar fire from 2003 which to that date was the largest fire in San Diego County history. It looks like the fires down here won't get much better for another day or so until the wind begins to calm down.

To their credit the media in Los Angeles is going wall-to-wall on the fire coverage without commercial breaks. They're providing excellent coverage. It's far from over.