They are still encouraging us to not use cell phones, so I’m trying to keep the office updated via voip. I can usually be reached via the office number or Tara can most likely at least give you a status update. I’m hoping to make a run for Murrieta in the morning if conditions allow.
whew! that was WAY too close for comfort. (:-)
as far as i know, no homes burned in the winterwarm and san luis rey heights area. my son and i traveled pretty extensively throughout that area this morning, and we saw no home burned, or any fire damage, anyplace. we even got to gird road, getting there through via del robles, and no fire damage was visible there, including on the other side of gird road.
here’s a map that seems to be the final map for the part of the fallbrook fire closest to our neighborhood:
http://tchester.org/temp/fire_map_071023_label.jpg
Our fire is called the rice fire, for the rice canyon origin of the fire.
in my map, the base red map is pretty similar to a more accurate map i just saw on channel 7; the hatched red area is the additional fire area from my recollection of the channel 7 map. the fire apparently just touched gird road somewhere south of via del robles. channel 7 doesn’t have this map online yet.
there seems to be no actual fire, other than perhaps smoldering small patches, anywhere near our neighborhood. since we saw no evidence of fire on our travels, i can’t vouch that the map above is accurate for the burned area; the burn area might be _smaller_ than indicated. but we know the burn area is not _larger to the west_.
it almost completely puzzles me why they keep saying the fallbrook fire is zero percent contained. the only explanation i can think of is that they can’t get the normal “containment” in an urban area, since they can’t bulldoze a fire line and set backfires along it.
however, there is still a ton of smoke here, coming from the active part of the fallbrook fire in rainbow, and from the new palomar mountain fire that started at the la jolla indian reservation, which is now up to perhaps the 4000 foot level.
if the weather prediction about the winds is correct, that smoke plume will be blown away from fallbrook starting tomorrow sometime, but it may be days before the smoke currently over the ocean travels back past fallbrook.
fallbrook is still under a mandatory evacuation order, and they are still turning residents away from the major roads into town. there are manned roadblocks at via monserate / sr76, s. mission road / sr76, olive hill / sr76, old highway 395 / sr76, and e. mission / i-15.
i suspect they will lift the mandatory evacuation order tomorrow, on wednesday, but that is just a guess. winds are still howling just 5 miles to our east, pointing our direction, so it clearly isn’t prudent to declare fallbrook is safe until those winds turn around.
after i sent the evacuation notice yesterday (monday) at 1:32 p.m (gee, that seems like so long ago now…), i packed up my computer so was not on email again until now. that is why i couldn’t respond to any questions via email sent yesterday.
most people along acacia lane apparently got the reverse 911 call; however, several people, including me, did not. however, we packed everything we wanted to save in our cars, including my computer, and were ready to leave literally on a moment’s notice. i also knew from the location of the fire that we had a safe exit drive from our car.
my guess is that somewhere between 70 and 90% of fallbrook residents evacuated. camp pendleton reported that over 20,000 cars passed through their gates yesterday, with most cars having multiple people in them. that is a good 30,000-40,000 people, out of the total fallbrook population of 40,000-50,000 people, and it doesn’t include those who went out sr76, sandia creek drive, or n. river road.
at least 10% of the residents in our neighborhood remained, including me.
my family could remain in relative safety since we have very good visibility from our house of the surrounding area, and i knew we had a safe exit drive from this fire that was approaching from the northeast.
it was clear that we were not in much immediate danger at the time the evacuation order was given, and we diligently monitored conditions both from our house and from driving to other vantage points to pin down the fire locations near us. we continued regular monitoring throughout the night. also, ham radio reports kept up roughly abreast of fire conditions; they gave the only accurate reports of actual fire locations. it helped immensely that the wind here calmed at 1 a.m. last night (1 a.m. tuesday morning), with wind gusts below 10 mph and then becoming dead calm at 6 a.m.
we did have a scary moment this morning. the fire fighters tried to hold the fire at three ridges east of our neighborhood last night / this morning, but it jumped two of those ridges and made it to gird road, according to reports. we thought we were going to have to evacuate until our drive this morning found that the fire was only to our south on gird road, if at all, and we saw fire trucks patrolling along gird road.
the authorities made a good call on the evacuation, since if the winds were right, a fire could burn from i-15 to the COAST in only 15 minutes or so. since it took THREE HOURS for most people to evacuate to a distance of 30 miles away, clearly it was smart to issue an evacuation call early. better safe than sorry!
