Noli Irritare Leones

Here’s the email I sent family members (with names and a personal note removed):

Joel’s mother evacuated Saturday night, when the San Bernardino fire was headed straight for her house. [A cousin of mine] also evacuated. On Sunday, Joel and I went to San Bernardino to see whether his mother’s house was still standing. It was; the fire had been stopped about a mile away. Right now there is a burned out zone between her house and the fire, so it probably won’t come her way again. All the same, we stayed until about 3pm, to help her pull together things to take with her if she needs to evacuate again, and so we could help drive things away if she got the evacuation notice while we were there.

There is a TV channel to watch (for those who still have power) which most of the time cycles through screens which show the latest fire status and phone numbers to call; periodically people from the local government appear on the channel to give status reports. Such as, please, if you’re in an evacuated area, don’t go back to check on your house. We’ll be sending inspection teams through and get you information, and we’ll have a system in place by Tuesday to take groups of people back to their property. Or, please, everyone, don’t hose down your roofs. It will only evaporate, and make for less water that the fire fighters can use.

A few people stay behind in the evacuated areas; one person stayed the night in my mother-in-law’s block to watch for looters. Others go to family and friends, or, if they can’t manage that, to large evacuation centers that have been set up. [My cousin's] area, we heard, was evacuated to a high school, but, when we talked to her later Sunday afternoon, we found out that she and her sons all went to her ex-husband’s house.

Joel and I walked around San Bernardino a bit. At Lynwood, not too many blocks from Joel’s mother’s house, is the police block. Our eyes and throats stung from smoke at that point, and we could see little bits of ash, but nothing actually burned. There was, just past the police line, a kind of no man’s land; people in that area weren’t actually evacuated, but if they stepped outside the line, the police wouldn’t let them back in. We met a couple of people who were stuck on the other side of the line from their families; we loaned our cell phone to one guy to let him call someone inside the line.

Later, on our way home, we went to the police line at 40th street. There we had to park outside, but were able to walk in (media people could drive in). We walked down the street and came first to burnt grass, and then to a section where the houses had been burned down. In this area, the burning looked quite random. One house would be intact, while its neighbors were destroyed. We talked with one man who was nearly in tears; his home was perfectly intact, though the bushes around it were burned, but his 92-year-old next door neighbor’s house was destroyed, and so was that of his 80-year-old neighbor across the street.

So far, there isn’t any fire especially near us.

The web site for status updates on the fire is
http://www.incidentreport.com. Click on Old Fire; that’s ours.

Now, here’s my weblog addendum to the family email:

On the slim chance that anyone is actually reading me who might need to vacuate soon, check out this fire evacuation checklist, or Flylady’s 11 Points to Preparedness for Evacuation.

Raven is also near the fire, and may need to evacuate. Those readers who pray, keep her in your prayers.

There’s also a web site for thankyous to fire fighters. Fire fighters have been working very hard here; one of my mother-in-law’s neighbors was on duty for 24 hours before he got to go home to sleep.

Joel has photos up, and will be posting more about the fire, and about where donations can be sent.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2003 at 8:00 am and is filed under California Wildfires, Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.