Out here on this hilltop, November is an unpredictable month. I can remember a stormy November with 17 days of torrential rain which almost made my flat roof unserviceable. This year it is more normal with a hint of evening rain on one or two days , but mostly clear skies, like we have had for the past many months. It’s been very dry overall for a long time…so say my succulents. With daytime high temperatures at a very pleasant 74 degrees for much of the next week or two, the nighttime temperatures are a chilly 44, thirty degrees lower. That’s about a 50% wider spread of daily temperatures than normal. The highs are about right, but the lows are about 10 degrees lower than normal. In fact, that spread is more like what we get in January or February. So I guess we are pushing the season. This whole year, except for our heat wave in early September, the temperatures have generally been cooler at night than normal, tending towards the seasonal extremes. That’s not anything unpleasant since cooler nights are generally everyone’s sleeping preference, and keeping daytime temperatures from getting too high is always a good thing around here. The great thing about our data-driven world is that I don’t have to guess what is or isn’t normal or how this compares to the last few years. All those annual charts are at my fingertips as I write this…and I can play with the data to my heart’s content.
Meanwhile, as I listen to talk of Santa Ana winds and see wind spinners dancing in my front yard, my early warning signals of the drying winds, this condition has gotten serious up in Ventura County. Mike, my California expert who has lived up in the San Fernando Valley a lot of his life and now lives here tells me that is where the Santa Ana’s are at their worst. In fact, he says we get a real mild version down here. But up there is where Kim’s sister Sharon and husband Woo live and Kim got a hurried call yesterday saying they needed to rapidly evacuate in the morning due to a sudden wildfire threat to the northeast. After three minutes of packing up, they just hit the road to Pasadena, where their son Josh lives with his family. They are now there trying to get what information they can about the status of their home and their community. This is suddenly very real and not just a weather.com video any more.
Yesterday, when I heard the news of the evacuation, I looked at my Watch Duty app and could see that what is being called the Mountain Fire started in Balcom Canyon, up in the Santa Susana Mountains, northeast of Camarillo. That fire seemed to being fueled by the Santa Ana winds and getting blown by a northeasterly wind in the direction of Camarillo. It had started at 9am yesterday and VERY quickly spread to the west and southwest, bounded mostly by the Santa Clara River to the north. The fire seemed to mostly focus on the mountains along that relatively uninhabited ridge line, but it had also jumped across Rt. 118 that runs through the plentiful farmlands in that area. South of Rt. 118 is where the residential area of Camarillo sits. This is an area called Camarillo Heights and that is where the embers from the Mountain Fire lighted on what are presumably a number of homes. From there, the fire spread further west and south along the ridge line on which the residential area of Camarillo sits. When I spoke to Woo to check in with him, he told me from Pasadena that it seemed as though the fire was staying on the southern side of that ridge line and that his house, on the top of the northern side of that ridge, seemed safe so far.
When I woke in the middle of the night last night, I happened to see a New York Times summary article on a large California wildfire. That caused me to check the Cal Fire Map to see if there were any wildfire threats near us during this bout of Santa Ana winds. When I opened the map on my iPhone, it opened with most of California showing in rather small scale with the whole of the state showing with small fire icons of various sizes on it. It looked like the midsection of the state, just above Los Angeles was ablaze. If you look at a large scale version of the Cal Fire Map, I immediately wondered what Sharon and Woo were thinking evacuating along the western ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains to Pasadena since it looked like there are several fires all along that area. Of course, that impression was overstated and some of those fires like Bridge Fire and Line Fire in the Angeles Crest area are older fires. I’m sure the folks in Pasadena are quite calm about it even if the Cal Fire Map looks ominous. But then I drilled down into the Mountain Fire, which looked to be the cause of the New York Times article and is certainly the Cal Fire Hot Spot for the moment. The summary of that fire says that it is “Active”, has engaged 14,159 acres and is 0% contained. In other words, this puppy is raging and ravaging a lot of Camarillo.
As I drilled down on the Cal Fire Map, I could see not only the evacuation zones that included the area where Sharon & Woo live, but I could also see what Cal Fire considered the fire zone. That zone was then two streets away from their home, a distance of some 1,000 feet away up on the ridge line, apparently guided by the exact whim of the winds. Now I don’t know Camarillo extremely well (though we have been there dozens of times), but it looks on the map as though the active fire zone may cover about half or more of the residential areas of Camarillo. Fortunately, I haven’t needed to understand what kind of damage is indicated by the Cal Fire Map active fire zone. In other words, I don’t know if that area looks like an active conflagration or that there are just a few embers in the air. But assuming the situation is somewhere in between those extremes, I imagine that Sharon and Woo’s community of many years is going through the trauma that any community suffers under a major natural disaster.
Now imagine that you are Sharon and Woo, in the golden years of your life, living in a lovely hillside community that you have been settled in for decades. This is the place where both of your sons came of age and is, indeed, your family home and community. You are sitting a few hours away, camping out with your son’s family, trying to get information on where things stand. Perhaps Sharon and Woo have better resources than I have through Watch Duty and Cal Fire to know the reality of the situation on the ground, but the pictures in the New York Times article alone would certainly be cause for great concern. That concern would be for their local friends and their safety, their home and belongings (most of which are just sitting where they lay when they were evacuated) and the community that makes where they live presumably special and important to them.
I started this story thinking about the weather of the moment and how it was a bit chillier than I am used to in the evening. Then this Camarillo fire situation unfolded yesterday and seems to be continuing today. Sharon and Woo were scheduled to come down to stay with us this weekend to see Kim’s show. We have invited them to come and stay with us whenever and for however long they need. Who knows right now where this will all go from here, but I am struck by how quickly life can change for any of us. One moment you can be thinking about a breeze and the next it can be about a deadly fire on the wind that will snatch away most of what you know and care about. We are all just feathers on the wind as Robert Zemeckis showed us in Forrest Gump. Whether life runs hot or cold, just enjoy every moment it allows you.