A certain measure of calm has returned after the last two days of anxiety and fire.
(It’s a panoramic image – click to enlarge to all of its glory!)
The winds stayed calm last night. That helped a lot, at least in our area. There were still some massive areas burning down toward the ocean, especially around Pepperdine University, but many areas saw the fire’s spread slowing or coming to a halt.
Thursday night, when we first started dealing with the Woolsey Fire it was at 2,000 acres. This morning it was at 37,000 acres with 0% containment. (Thus the anxiety and packing of cars and mandatory evacuations of 250,000 people.)
When we got up it was smoky. We couldn’t see any open flame where we were, but everything that burned yesterday was smoldering. By noon there were a couple of spots down where Victory, Vanowen, and Kittridge all end at the Ventura County line (maybe two miles south of us) that had lit off again, but the water-dropping helicopters were on them pretty quickly.
We’re not out of the woods yet. Late tonight through Sunday we’re supposed to have the winds kick back up, possibly as bad or worse than they were yesterday. Given that most all of the brush in open areas has already burned near here, I’m not too worried about it for us, but we’ll keep the cars loaded overnight just in case. If the winds get chaotic and blowing from different directions through the canyons, smoldering brush lights off again, embers start getting thrown into new open areas (like Chatsworth Reservoir, let’s say), things could get exciting again.
But it’s like wearing your seat belt. You never expect to have an accident (well, at least *I* don’t, YMMV) but unless you’re an idiot you always wear a seat belt. I don’t expect to have to bug out at this point. I consider it far less likely than it was 24 hours ago. But I would hate to hit that one-in-a-whole-bunch circumstance, need to bug out, and do it with just the clothes on our backs just hours after unloading the cars.
We’re fine. We’ll be fine. It was nice to have a calm day. Let’s have another one tomorrow.
You too! We all deserve a little bit of calm.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 