He Can Send Stuff to Mars But He Can't Get Out of His House

Lots of folks having these kinds of problems in So Cal today:

Henk Postma fell asleep Wednesday certain the last person he’d be hearing from was his friend, Wes Kuykendall.

Kuykendall, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who had just arrived from working on the Mars Rover launch in Florida, was sleeping in the Postma guest house while his own house was being sold.

But Postma, a physicist at Cal State Northridge, was awakened by a phone call from Kuykendall.

“I can’t get out,” Kuykendall said.

An enormous eucalyptus tree had toppled from a neighbor’s yard onto the 300-square-foot wood-frame guest house, buckling the walls, smashing its roof and a nearby lemon tree.

Postma’s property on Ladera Street in north Pasadena stands amid some of the worst of the wind damage the city sustained. Trees and large branches were dropping all across the neighborhood.

Pasadena and Sierra Madre were just hammered by this windstorm. As the winds shift around to the Northeast this afternoon and evening, some of that damage may shift to other areas. We've still got another 18 hours or so of strong winds to go.