How it’s gone

Finally, some time to actually sit and write. First off, status. We’re fine, and we’re in Anaheim, which seems to be one of the few places not completely covered by a smoke plume (it’s still hazy though!). We are probably here for another day, just because of air quality and waiting for evac orders to lift for our area.

So, there we were at Legoland, the kids enjoying a day with grandparents. We were driving back and stopped off at Fry’s (they’d never seen one). While there, I got a call from my mom — in Florida — asking if we were affected by the fires. “What fires?” I said. Nobody there knew what I was asking about.

Then we took 15 south, and saw the giant plume of smoke. We drove right into it to get home, and at the house, which sits near the top of a hill in southern Rancho Bernardo, we saw a basically gray and yellow sky, with occasional ash falling. Here’s a pic from the back yard — normally, I can see to Escondido, fifteen miles away. We then went to the TV and the net to try to find out more about the fire.

We were actually camping out near where the fire started, just two weeks ago. On that trip, they had asked us not to do campfires because of the risk of fire because of anticipated Santa Ana winds. Well, two nights ago the Santa Anas were in full force. On our hilltop, gusts were hitting at an easy 30-40 mph. The grandparents went back to their hotel around 9pm, asking for a call if there were any updates. Around 1am I decided that we needed to pack up our belongings and stack them in the entry hall for easy loading. At 2:30 we went to bed, with the idea of checking on things in a little bit.

At 5am I woke up, and went outside. I could see the fire line creeping over the hills on the far side of Poway , somewhat to the northeast. Trying to go back inside, the wind was gusting with hurricane force (I know, I have been in one) and I had toruble closing the door. Later I saw they were reporting 70mph for some gusts. Trees were whipping around like crazy. We had some hanging potted plants and I had to take them down. The patio chairs were getting slid around by the wind, and my chest was hurting from breathing the air. I snapped a few pics, then decided to get serious instead… the pics don’t get it across at all, because it looked like lava moving over the hill — it actually advanced quite a lot further down, then retreated, then flowed back over, like liquid. For reference, the lights below that are basically the pricey part of Poway and Rancho Bernardo. If you’ve been listening to the neighborhood names, it’s stuff like Bridlewood, Lake Poway, that sort of area.

I checked the news and saw that they had closed the I15 one exit north of our exit. So I woke Kristen and said, let’s load the car. I called the grandparents and told them to just drive to the airport to catch their flight. By 6am the minivan was loaded, and our exit was also closed. I drove to the office (which is closer to the fire line than the house) and grabbed some key stuff. Then rather than wait for an evac order that was obviously coming, we headed for the Mira Mesa High School. As it turned out, we only anticipated the order by an hour or so.

Breakfast was McDonalds. When the sun rose, the smoke made for a very red sunrise. There was some ash falling even there in the Mira Mesa area. We mostly hung out in the parking lot of the high school, then registered as evacuees and ate a meal there. Lots of folks were gathered around the sole TV, which was running and endless cycle of the same film clips. Most of the folks there were older folks displaced from Rancho Bernardo, which has a lot of retirement communities, and a lot of them were having trouble breathing. Tons of dogs everywhere, and some folks had set up tents on the grassy areas to camp. Inside, the cots seemed mostly taken, and people were sleeping on the gym floor. You can see what the gym looked like here.

My daughter has type I diabetes, so we needed a cold place to store insulin. And it didn’t look like sleeping there was going to be very comfortable. Several of the other folks at the office have homes that are closer to the coast, plus there were calls from friends up in north LA and in Irvine offering places to stay. We decided to head to Leucadia first, rather than commit to going all the way to LA. By now it is midafternoon on Monday.

The 5 wasn’t too bad, except that driving through Del Mar and Solana Beach had very poor visibility. For those who know the area, you could not see off either side of the highway, nor could you see the highway rising on the other side of the inlet. It was basically pea soup, traffic going 5mph. Once we were north of there, it eased up and started moving more like 30-40mph.

In Leucadia, it wasn’t as threatening. We were on the coast side of the 5, for one thing. A whole bunch of us ended up at this house, and we shared pizza and obsessively tracked things on the news. One guy native to the area told us that the fires have never made it to the coast, and that Rancho Santa Fe has its own firefighters who would likely stop the fires there. We could see the traffic on the 5 from the house, so we could assess how it was going.

As the night wore on, the sky cleared as the winds slowed. But the fall of ash increased quite a lot. I grabbed a brief nap, and when I woke up, you could see a faint glow past Encinitas. The air quality outside was horrible — going out for just a few moments made my chest hurt. When they announced evacuation of parts of Rancho Santa Fe three miles to the east, we had to decide whether to stay and see if they would announce advisory evac for Leucadia, or whether to just head on north. We decided to head north, because otherwise we’d just be checking the news every few hours and not getting any sleep anyway. As it turned out, the fire slowed during the night, and the evacuations didn’t proceed. But I am just as glad not to have been breathing that air.

We thought about heading for our friends in Irvine, but after seeing how close the Irvine fire was to them, declined their hospitality. 🙂 We could see the glow of the Irvine fire as we drove up the 5. We also heard from our friends in north LA, and they were nervously watching the fires north of them (they had a very close shave with the fires in Topanga Canyon a couple of years ago). So they suggested we not go there. It took like an hour to find a hotel that wasn’t booked at 2am. We ended up at a hotel near Disneyland, and made it there by 3:30am.

The hotel lacked Internet and a fridge for Elena’s insulin, so after grabbing a few hours of sleep, we decided to switch hotels, which was easy by light of day. Now we’re by the Anaheim Convention Center, just about exactly 48 hours after we saw the plume of smoke. We’ve had maybe 10 hours of sleep since then. Of course, when we turn on the TV, it’s full of reports of yet more fires closer to LA, so getting news about San Diego has been hard.

Based on reports from folks back in San Diego, both the office and our house are fine. The air quality is apparently OK at the moment, though I suppose that the wind could shift whenever. I hear that there are police barricades one block from the office, which is also right near the bottom of the hill from our house. According to these maps, there were active fires within just a few miles of both places within the last 12 hours. If the wind did shift and kicked up a lot, embers could still float over the neighborhood, and the hill would be one of the more vulnerable spots, I suppose.

Either way, I don’t know when they will let people back into the neighborhood, so we are going to stay here in Anaheim until we have firm assurances that we can sleep in our own beds. 🙂 Thanks for all the many kind thoughts people have posted here and elsewhere.