Just another quick installment in the saga...
Things were pretty good early Monday evening, but by about 9:30 or 10:00, things were looking ugly again, so we (the neighbors and I) hightailed it out of there once again for a couple of hours. I dropped off the dogs at my friend's house, then went back to our picnic spot to watch and wait. (LOML was again staying with another friend with the third dog. She did drop by the house Monday night for a while, but she left when we evacuated about 10:00 PM.) As I got a half mile or so from our houses while delivering the dogs, I was able to get a better feel for the location of the fire, and saw that it wasn't as close as it had looked from our front yards. Still, we just cooled our heels for a while until we were comfortable going back. It also helped that the neighbors across the street are good friends with a captain on the LA Fire Department. He happened to drop by our picnic sidewalk and let us know the latest from their perspective. The big flames we were seeing were slowly working their way to fire breaks, where strike teams were waiting for them. He assured us that we should be fine for the night.
Anyway, here are a few random pics out of a couple hundred or so that I've taken recently.
Remember the spot fire I showed a couple days ago that worked its way up the hill? Here's what that hill looked like Monday morning. The spot fire was in one of the three draws you see at the base of the mountain:
And another shot of that part of the mountain, to get a bit more perspective for size:
While I was in the next-door neighbor's back yard getting those two shots, I saw this guy and couldn't pass up the chance to take a shot of him:
By late morning Monday, we had another mandatory evacuation order. Evacuation orders have gotten a lot of media attention here due to the poor choices made by a few people. Earlier, I was told by a police officer that about the only thing "mandatory" about them is it's mandatory for the cops to come tell us. Beyond that, there is no action they can take to force people to leave. They give the orders to hold the City harmless from liability claims. Of course, you see and hear about the people who make the (often poor) choice to stay and fight the fire. None of us are of that mindset...that's why we've left three times already. But we also feel more comfortable being home to protect our property, and we have gotten repeated reassurances from the police that, in our particular location, we are making a prudent decision, and they agree with it. On the other hand, there's a small subdivision right around the corner from us called Alpine Village. (It's the yellow rectangular evacuation area above "Sunland" on the fire map I posted a few pages ago.) They don't have a good exit route if things get ugly, and the same cop that said we were fine told me "they'd be idiots" to stay there. (And indeed, Alpine Village was completely empty last I heard.)
Anyway, as promised to Frank, here's a picture of the sidewalk picnic we had. This is Perry and Mary in the foreground, and Dave and Jeannette in the background, with Perry's dog Duke in the middle. (My dogs were helping me take the photo.) Dave and Jeannette have a pickup-mounted camper that they moved around the corner to the school Saturday, and it's our off-site waystation. Nothing to do but wait, so why not bust out the chairs and cooler chest?
After a few hours in the sun, we were ready to go home. We'd seen the smoke and flames recede a couple ridges behind and above Dave and Jeannette's house (across the cul-de-sac from ours), so we drove back home. Through the rest of the afternoon, tensions went back up and down with the flames up the hill. Things would get hot and exciting, then calm down for a while. Eventually, with a lot of water drops, they seemed to have things under control. I was unable to get any shots of the water drops behind their house because of tree cover and the ridge, but I did get a number of shots of the choppers flying over our houses getting into position to drop:
While this was going on, things were also picking up across Big Tujunga Canyon, which is right off our next-door neighbor's back yard. I was able to get a few water drop shots from there as they fought that flank of the fire a mile or so away:
By dark, things were considerably settled down. I even told LOML things should be fine for her to come home for a little while so she could see everything was still OK for herself. (It's been real nerve-wracking for her to be away while all this has gone on, but on the other hand, she'd be more of a wreck if she had to stay here and deal with it.) Almost as if on cue, things started picking up again after she arrived. Before long, things looked like they were getting pretty close to the ridge behind Dave and Jeannette's house again. And while most of the fire outbreaks we'd seen had been relatively small, this one was looking bigger than any we'd seen before:
So, once again we loaded up to go back to the "picnic grounds" by the school and wait. Here's a shot I got while we were there as a stream of 8 or 9 firetrucks came into town from the hills. (I'm guessing they were headed for a much needed break.)
As it turned out, the reason the flames looked so big Monday night was not because they were close, it was because they were huge. They were also spread out over a large area of the mountainside. While we were waiting things out, I went to grab a sandwich for dinner, and shot this pic on the way back. The white lights are the local high school football field, which is being used as an evacuation center for animals. You can see the extent of some of the multiple fires on the mountains in the background, a mile or so away.
Pretty much anywhere you look on the mountain right now, there are multiple fires burning. It's mesmerizing and scary all at the same time. I've seen SoCal fires every year for the past 18 or so, but never anything this close and widespread at the same time. A 50 acre brush fire usually makes the lead story on the evening news out here. This one's over 105,000 acres. About the size of Las Vegas or San Francisco.
And one last shot for this installment, showing the hills east of our house (and about the same distance north of my old house).
That's it for now. I need to try to get some sleep. I hope Tuesday is a little less exciting than Monday was.
hang tuff vaughn