Well, we've been actually sheltering in place in the Yellow evac zone now all night (we were
this close to bailing), which is shorthand for "You might want to think about leaving at some point soon. Y'know, just in case it takes longer to get folks, pets, etc. to your vehicle(s), and hopefully before the roads clog up too much." We are staring down the barrel of Reds ("GET OUT NOW, IDIOTS!") close by, but nothing too -- well, I was gonna say, nothing too close yet, but that would be less than the truth. We can definitely smell smoke (which I'd been doing since Tuesday, thinking: "Hang on; I smell smoke...that can't be good, here..."), and I feel compelled to wear my last N95 mask even in the house. :-/ We'd known about the fire in Pacific Palisades, which was sad, but it's very hilly and/or mountainous, with a ton of brush that no one had either bothered to do much about or let Nature have her way with it, most of it shooting up in the last year or two with abnormally heavy rains (fun fact: we've had NO RAINS HERE since like last summer, when it doesn't rain anyway...). And one of the issues with living in exclusive-ish neighborhoods is that there's usually very little in the way of ingress/egress for any vehicles, let alone fire trucks. :-/
I think the thing that freaked everyone out is how AWFUL the winds had been; pretty much
Santa Ana winds on steroids. We get fires in the hills here and there just about every year, but holy carp, never threatening and/or actually burning anything directly in any of the big cities. For pity's sake, a lot of the damage in the Eaton fire was places burning just north of Pasadena. :-/ The Rose Bowl is in one of the Red zones now. :-/
EDIT: The Rose Bowl is out of the Red, and into Yellow!
There's some debate about the Hollywood fire in the hills there (yep, we have green areas around the Hollywood sign; I've ridden horses up in that area), whether it was far-traveling sparks from one of the two biggies, or arson, or spontaneous, which can happen; the native vegetation for our area is fire-evolved (the Native American folks here called the L.A. Basin "Land of 1,000 Smokes"), but all the non-native, "ooh, but it's so much
prettier!
" plants don't help, and the overall climate chaos isn't helping anyone. X-P
Thank all the gods there are that the damn winds died down enough to let liquid-dropping helicopters, at least, to come in and bomb the crud out of the worst areas; Hollywood's fire looks smaller, and some of the Reds in Pasadena have dropped down to Yellows. I don't think we'll be able to relax at all, though, until we're not Yellow any more. :-/
Uwk
still huddling in place, so far; thanks for all your warm wishes!
