Sorry for the lack of posts. I’ve been on vacation for the last two weeks and before that I was overwhelmed at work. I wish I had better things to post about.
For anyone that doesn’t know, much of San Diego and surrounding areas are on fire. This is worse than the fire from four years ago. If you remember that one then you have some idea just how bad it is.
I live in Fallbrook, an area in northern San Diego county. When I went to bed on Sunday night the fires had already started, but they were a good distance from me. By the time I got up around 9am Monday (the last day of my vacation) that had changed.
Turning on the news I saw that there were now 8 fires that were blanketing the entire area. One of them, the Rice Fire, was close enough to make me worry. I spent the next four hours running around trying to find information on the fire and getting ready to evacuate.
It’s been a long day, but as far as I can remember sometime around 1pm half of Fallbrook was ordered to evacuate. This wasn’t my half, but it was only a couple of miles away. I finished packing and managed to convince my roommate that this was serious and he needed to get ready.
We left sometime around 1:30pm?, about a half hour or so after the partial evacuation. Apparently we left at a good time.
The road out of Fallbrook is a narrow two lane that winds around and ends up at 76. We ran into a little traffic, but not too much that was out of the ordinary. We got on the 76 and headed to the 5. We stopped briefly to get gas and overpaid for it.
The 5 North was good for a few miles, then it went to a crawl. It took over two hours to get to Irvine, a drive that normally takes an hour at worst.
Harvey, my roommate, has relatives in Irvine and we were heading there. As we got closer I started to worry as there was a lot of smoke. Fortunately we rode out of it and their place seems to be safe. Once we got there, we found out that we left at the right time.
Shortly after we left the partial evacuation of Fallbrook was elevated to a total evacuation. The 76 became a parking lot. They opened the road that goes through Pendleton (a military base) to help people evacuate and that was a parking lot as well. I’m glad we didn’t wait any longer.
As of right now my answering machine still picks up (12:50am) so my house seems to be standing. I’ve also heard that the santa anna winds that are driving these fires have died down a bit, at least from reports from people that are still in the fallbrook area. They are predicted to pick up again in the morning though and they are saying that they’ll be blowing until Thursday.
We’re not out of this yet.
I’ll try to update this as I can.
