SoCal Fire
As the Santa Ana winds build into the area they will interfere with the “sundowner” winds [on the coast the wind changes from onshore to offshore around sundown] which have been pushing this fire.
The Los Angeles Times has good coverage of the Montecito Tea Fire with a video segment, and a separate photo gallery.
It is expected that a closer inspection will reveal that the number of homes lost, currently 100, will probably double.
The Santa Ana winds building in and a continuing forecast of dry weather just increases the fire danger in the entire region.
UPDATE: Jill of Cookies in Heaven and skippy the bush kangaroo has been evacuated and is camping out with friends, so her coverage from ground zero is probably limited by bandwidth and power restrictions.
Update 2: The Santa Anas are complicit in the Sayre fire in Sylmar near Los Angeles that erupted last night. It is going to be a bad time in SoCal.
5 comments
Looks like things are looking up for us…evacuation orders have been lifted in several areas. Electricity is much, much better. Water availability is coming back…but for those living near the fire area who are able to get back in, there is a “boil water” alert.
Man have I never wanted a shower so much in my life. I smell of smoke. Everything smells of smoke.
Glad to hear from you, yesterday and today.
The Montecito Fire District had a water warning on their site – essentially stating that they were using so much water that levels are way down. There are probably inlets sucking mud or air right now.
Unless something changes radically with the weather patterns, desalinization is going to be the only viable path to the future. The fires are destroying the watershed, so, even if the rains do come, the water will just run off, and not soak in. The area will begin to look like Haiti and have the same problems every time it rains.
We HAD a desal…then they voted for “state water” and they dismantled the $6mil dollar desal plant. They got some tourist bottled water out of the fiasco.
My heart goes out to all those people. And I have a connection with that area; I spent a week at the Mount Calvary monastery in 1978. It was a beautiful place.
The good news is that desalinization has seen a lot of progress. The bad news is that an existing plant could have been updated, but building a new one will take a lot of time and be many times more expensive.
Yes, MB, “was” is the operative tense, as several sources have reported the entire area was engulfed in flames.
The latest reports on the Sayre said that 500 mobile homes were destroyed. Fire officials were quoted as saying the heat was so intense that the trailers and the road signs in the area melted more than burned.