22 October 2007

Fire!

San Diego County is on fire. Already, officials have evacuated 250,000 people, 5X as many as were evacuated in the 2003 fire that was so bad. Humidity is in the single digits and wind gusts have ranged from about 20 to 100 mph - perfect conditions for a fire when coupled with our driest year in 130 years. Even beach communities have been evacuated and one fire looks set to burn right to the Pacific. Baja California has fires south of us. Orange County has fires to the north of us. Hwy 15, which runs north east out of town, is closed. The 8 fires now burning are all east of us. The weather is not forecast to change for another day or two. They say that the biggest fire is 0% contained. We've not yet been asked to evacuate and hopefully won't be - but voluntary evacuations have already begun east of us and the winds are blowing west ... I'm not sure where we'd go if we do have to evacuate and have visions of bobbing off the coast in a life preserver, watching the fire turn our beaches into glass.

And most of the day, unbidden, I've had the chorus of this old Ohio Player song running through my head. (A chorus I remember perfectly from 30 years ago by virtue of it being perhaps the only one word chorus I know.) The whole thing is a little distracting.

5 comments:

Life Hiker said...

I've been around some house fires as part of a responding ambulance crew. Houses go up like bombs!

I'm sorry for what California is going through. It's hard to imagine losing everything.

Good luck, Ron. I hope you don't have to evacuate, and I hope you are able to help someone who's not been too lucky lately.

Anonymous said...

Best of luck to you. I'll say an extra little prayer for you this morning.

Anonymous said...

Stay safe.

I've found no correlation between the number of unique words in a song and how awesome it is. That song is terrific.

Dave said...

I thought of you while watching the news. Be safe.

Ron Davison said...

Thomas,
Thank you. Seriously.

Ben,
I'm so glad that someone else thinks that this dated song and group still sounds great.

Dave,
Thanks for your thoughts. Thomas's prayers and your thoughts seemed to have worked ... this time. :)