Fire!

A lot of family members have been calling me in the last few days to make sure that Kevin and I were alright (due to the fires). I suppose not posting here hasn’t helped the mystery at all so I thought I’d give you all a little update before my regular entry.

Kevin and I heard about the fire up in Malibu Sunday morning. We didn’t think too much about it as 1) Malibu is 65 miles away from us to the north and 2) with the extreme lack of rain we’ve had this year, fires are unfortunately inevitable.



Sunday night I was at home nursing my cold\sinus infection watching a bad movie I bought for $1.99 on Pay-Per-View (it was called ‘the Gold Diggers’…a PG rated movie with Cristina Ricci about two 13-year olds searching for gold in a mountain) (no matter how I phrase that it sounds bad, doesn’t it?) when Kevin called me up. He was out at our friends’ house having dinner and noticed some smoke on the horizon. He wanted to know if the news had anything about it.



Truthfully, I was so engrossed in my bad movie that I didn’t even notice the smoke. I walked outside and saw it immediately. The sky was black and orange and it smelled like a campfire. I went on the internet and saw that Santiago Canyon was on fire. Santiago Canyon is about 15 miles from our house in Costa Mesa, and a mere mile or two from where Kevin and I work in Irvine. Because of the Santa Ana winds, which are strong hot dry winds that blow west from the desert to the ocean, all the smoke and ash were coming our way. The winds were so strong it sounds like a ghostly freight train was blowing through the area. The moon appeared Halloween orange glowing though the smoke.




I closed all the windows in the house as I didn’t want the smoke to get inside. However, the Santa Ana winds make the temperature incredibly warm so it wasn’t long until inside got stuffy. Turning on the fans did little to help.



Kevin made it to work the next morning but I was still at home with my cold\sinus infection. With Kevin’s asthma and my cold\sinus infection just trying to breathe normally was hard. At work, they let any non-essential personnel leave and work from home.

As bad as it is, I feel very fortunate. We aren’t in any immediate danger. As I told my mom last night, we may be 15 miles from the fire, but there’s a lot of concrete from there to here. The worst we have to deal with is cleaning the layer of soot that has covered the backyard.



It’s Wednesday now, and the Santiago fire is 30% contained. The winds have died down some so the smoke isn’t so bad. There’s white ash everywhere and it kind of looks like snow. A co-worker just said to me, “I’ve heard of a white Christmas before, but not a white Halloween!”

*Photos are from the OC Register