Fire Update

The fires around San Diego are getting worse. At this stage about 500000 people have been evacuated and 1250 homes have been destroyed. There are several fires around the San Diego area and so far they've burnt about 300000 acres. The really scary thing is that the two biggest fires are hardly contained at all. At this stage they expect one of them to be contained on 31 October at the earliest and who knows about the other one.

The news stations are covering the fires 24 hours a day it seems. I suppose it's a good thing because you can see the vast scale of the fires. There have been pictures of helicopters water bombing the fires and apparently some large cargo planes are expected and will also be able to help with that. Which is a very good thing considering that the one fire was 20 miles long! A national emergency has been declared and apparently Bush himself is coming down to visit on Thursday.

You realise how tragic this fire is when it affects people you know. A while back (maybe a month and a half ago) I was invited to the house of a Rotarian. This was the day after the District's Rotary Foundation Seminar so there were a number of important people in town. He and his wife were hosted a very nice lunch at their beautiful home in Fallbrook for everyone. Fallbrook is directly North of San Diego and slightly inland. It's a very pretty, slightly rural area in that it's a bit out the way. The houses are large and stand on very big properties filled with avocado trees. Everything was very green and lush. Apparently they were evacuated from their house yesterday and don't expect it to be standing when they return.

On my side I haven't been affected much at all. You can smell smoke outside and the horizon is just grey but that's all thankfully. The University is closed for the rest of the week so on Thursday Sarah and I are going to drive up to Bakersfield to visit her parents. Bakersfield is north-west of LA and about 3 and a half hours from San Diego. We're then going to carry on to visit a friend of hers in San Luis Obispo for the weekend. She mentioned something about a Halloween party too so we're going to get costumes tomorrow I think. It should be fun! At least I'm getting to see a bit of California.