LEBEC, California — The skies in Lebec, right outside “The Grapevine” incline that takes travelers upwards towards Los Angeles, are bright blue at the center — and speckled with increasingly darker shadings of brown stemming from the bottom of the horizon.
The winds blow — winds strong enough to fan spreading fires. Which is what they’re doing.
Starting as far North as Stockton, you see more emergency vehicles such as firefighting trucks on the road as usual. And the further down towards L.A. you drive, the more you see a virtual caravan of emergency fire trucks — often pale green trucks. One count at one point: six of them.
Inside the Starbucks here in Lebec — the busiest Starbucks in North America –you can see ash alongside the trim of the cafe’s walls. You can feel the accumulating ash on the floor. The laptop on which this is being written has a notable coat of ash on the keys and surface, because each time a customer walks in, more ash blows in.
In Malibu, radio reports chronicle yet another Mother Nature crisis for a city favored by fat-cat business people and movie stars who apparently don’t bother reading newspapers and don’t realize what a risky place it can be if you want to hold onto your property for a long period of time. In San Diego, many local schools have been canceled for the day due to fires spreading there. The I-15 highway that leads from San Diego all the way North (the road you take to Vegas) was closed for a while today. Now it is open again (but for how long?).
We won’t use the trite phrase “it’s deja vu all over again” but Southern Californians have been there, done that, seen the region suffer a massive financial and environmental blow, with property destroyed, families homes wiped out, shelters popping up to house displaced residents, and forests burned black with horrific tales of animals dying in fires or being trapped to bleed to death on wire fences as they fled in terror. This summer some resident friends noted that the naysayers were wrong..why, you could now see the burned-out areas steadily turning green again. Will the fire put them back to singed square one?
It hasn’t reached that stage yet…again…but there are fears it will. The fires have the potential — as Southern California residents learned several years ago — to damage the region for years.
Everyone is potentially impacted. For instance, your-truly does anti-drug programs in schools the last two weeks of October. Schools slated for tomorrow require a trip up the I-15. Will it be open? Or will the shows have to be canceled because the trip can’t be made? At the end of that day, there has to be a quick trip to San Diego to do a program for military families. Is there a chance the road will be closed while up North and a return to San Diego will be difficult or impossible?
We take highways for granted...but highway travel is NOT guaranteed amid spreading fires and high-velocity winds that could spread fires to within inches of the highway (during the fire several years ago, I traveled at night to do a school and the highway was open but raging flames not too far from the edge lit up the road).
The news isn’t good.
The Los Angeles Times:
Unrestrained fires stoked by gale-force winds raged across San Diego County today, forcing more than 250,000 people from their homes and scorching 100,000 acres, a county official said, in the worst of more than a dozen blazes racing across Southern California.
“If you see a fire, please evacuate immediately. Don’t wait to be told to leave,” San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders said at a news conference this morning.
Among those evacuated were hundreds of patients at Pomerado Hospital and a nursing home in suburban Poway, officials said.
Qualcomm Stadium and the Del Mar Fairgrounds opened as evacuation centers, and officials made 120,000 “reverse 911” calls to tell people to evacuate. Schools throughout the county and at UC San Diego were closed. At least a dozen homes were lost. County Supervisor Ron Roberts gave the latest totals on evacuations and acreage.
“I could see the flames when I was trying to get the cats in the car. I couldn’t breathe unless I pressed my face into the car. I’d just take a deep breath and run back into the house to get more things. It was very scary,” said Shannon Spilman, 31, who had evacuated to Escondido High School north of San Diego late Sunday night.
Hundreds of people were pouring into the school this morning.
The Witch Creek Fire in the northeast part of the county and the Harris Fire near the Mexican border were burning out of control, just two of the fires that scarred many tens of thousands of acres in California from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara County. At least one person was killed and about 20 injured Sunday.
And Reuters reports this:
Ten wind-driven wildfires raged across Southern California on Monday, keeping thousands of evacuees from returning home for a second day, while authorities forecast two more days of extreme fire conditions.
At daybreak in the seaside celebrity enclave of Malibu, flames licked up against the sides of palatial homes and helicopter reporters estimated at least 20 homes were in danger. Ten buildings were lost on Sunday, including a landmark castle and a church.
“It’s been very touch-and-go for the last 24 hours. It was literally right up to the doorsteps yesterday afternoon,” Malibu resident Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, told Reuters.
“I’m in Chicago right now so I don’t know the latest, but it’s obviously very, very scary for all of us out there.”
To the south in San Diego County, where one person died on Sunday and 17 were injured, fires multiplied overnight to seven including one along the Mexican border. All 36,000 residents of the inland town of Ramona were ordered to evacuate.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for seven counties from Santa Barbara down to San Diego. He was scheduled to visit communities affected by the fires on Monday.
Fire officials speculate that the Malibu fire might have been sparked by power lines downed by the wind, while in Orange County, Fire Chief Chip Prather said a big fire that threatened the city of Irvine was arson.
NOTE: There are some major posting problems here which eradicated part of the headline and the post. If there is an update, it will be later. The signal keeps going down.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.