Glad you and the family are safe, Guap and hopefully the home too. The same wishes to anyone else here caught in the fire path.
Scary stuff, hope everyone remains safe.
Brief video of one of the fires.
It’s bad. School was cancelled here in the bay area for the last two days due to smoke and air quality issues, and we’re fifty freakin’ miles south of these fires (and across a substantial bay / river).
Yeah, one of my podcast cohosts lives in Fairfield, and pre-emptively evacuated a few days ago. Hopefully the winds don’t kick up today.
Yeah, it’s nasty. Every time I go outside I do a double take from the smell and the haze, and I’m in the south bay. Friends in the north bay say it’s even worse there. It sounds like you’re in the city, wumpus?
Out here in Concord: it was seriously unpleasant here yesterday. I was outside for an hour or so and actually got a little dizzy.
It wasn’t quite so bad today, though still not great. Tomorrow might be the worst day yet, if the wind patterns hold up.
It sounds like NorCal got a by far worse fire. Over 200 still missing. What a terrible thing.
Here in SoCal, we are back and safe and the fire is headed away but getting more contained. We were astonished to see the fire got to within a few hundred feet of our backdoor. You can see out houses there in the bottom left of this pic. Fire came to the crest and was stopped by the firefighters. Well done gentlemen!
This pic is sideways for some reason, stupid tinypic.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaayum
I am 200 miles from the fires and the high school football teams were not allowed to practice outside on Thursday. They were able to play the Friday games though.
The weather may come to the rescue as they are predicting at least some rain by Wednesday-Friday.
There seems to be progress. The Atlas fire my friend fleed last week is about 70% contained, so he can hopefully return to his house soon.
Supposed to be rain out there soon, is there not?
http://cdn.smosh.com/sites/default/files/ftpuploads/bloguploads/laughing-gifs-jonah-jameson.gif
Hahahah rain…hahahahahahhahaha…
Here’s the forecast for my friend’s town:
A video from a responding fire crew.
That video is just astounding. Thanks for sharing it.
In the wee small hours of last Monday, I was awakened in my bedroom in the heart of San Francisco by an acrid smell. I got up and checked the stove, the alarms, the hoses behind the dryer — nothing. I realized the smell resembled lighter fluid, and I looked out the windows to see if bums or young drunks were having a 3 am cookout — couldn’t tell. Went back to bed.
Got up the next morning and the smell was stronger. Did my early teleconference and headed for the door. Outside I was shocked to find that 1) the eastern sky was the color of orange juice and 2) the world smelled a lot more like lighter fluid than my place did. I got to work before I read about the fires.
Every day since then, I’ve seen and more more people wearing N95 respiration masks on the street — suddenly everyone knows about respiration masks. One of my old hookups who now lives in Sonoma reports that a river is between her place and the fire, but she’s had to keep her dog shut up in the bathroom for the sake of his lungs. A few of my very rich work colleagues have had vacation homes burn down up there, which was an interesting way to learn that they had vacation homes. Meanwhile many in the city are worried about the devastation to the North Bay marijuana industry, which was getting read to go legit post legalization.
Meanwhile, one endures.
That’s the smell of turpentine burning out of the pine trees.
I’ve been a firefighter for 20 years. That’s more fire than I’d ever want to face.
Props, man. Your profession saved my house. Not pictured there are trails in the brush where it was obvious a hose had been dragged through. Also obvious they used tools to clear a path.
I kind of want to see that Josh Brolin movie now to see some of the mechanics of firefighting.
Yeah geez the firefighters had this Herculean job, just incredible that more life wasn’t lost in these massive fires visible from space. Huge respect.
!!!
Now there’s a big fire to the south of the Bay Area as well, in Santa Cruz. From where I’m sitting in South City I can usually see across the bay to San Leandro on one side, south over SFO, and west to the hills that slope down to Pacifica on the other side. Today I can’t see shit, because of a heavy layer on all three sides of something I can now easily distinguish from fog, and I can smell it too through the ventilation system. That shit is smoke.