Fire!

I don't know if this has made it onto South African news (although it is on the News 24 website), there are huge fires burning in California. More specifically there are several large fires burning around San Diego.

I copied this off one of the news websites to give you an idea of just how huge these fires are. The red area is the burn zone, The little fire symbols are where the fires currently are and the crosses are evac points. Even though we're quite safe (SDSU is somewhere under the 'La Mesa' label on the map), it's still scary.

The news stations have been covering this all day. At this stage 250000 people have been evacuated for the areas surrounding San Diego and it doesn't appear that the fires are going to be stopping anytime soon. A State of Emergency has been declared and good old Arnie is doing his bit and is going around visiting the evacuees.

As far as I can make out the fires are as a result of an incredibly dry summer with virtually no rains and are being driven by strong winds. I heard a report today that a fire had jumped one of the main highways, the I15. When you realise that American highways are concrete monstrosities with at least 6 lanes in each direction, you understand how impressive that is.

I just wanted to reassure everyone that I am fine (just in case you were worried). There's a permanent smell of smoke around and things are quite hazy but aside from that all is good. In fact they're probably better than good because the University was closed at 1pm today and is going to be closed tomorrow too. Something to do with levels of smoke in the air and getting people off the roads so that the evacuees can get to where they need to go. I'm not complaining.

How's this for impressive? The University has these movable electronic signs which they've put up at all the major intersections around the University so that people know what's going on.

It seems we have gone from one extreme to the other here, last week it was cold and it rained! This was a really big thing... I've been told that it hardly every rains in San Diego. Seeing as it is tecnically a desert I suppose that's hardly surprising. Apparently it's rained once or twice since I've been here but I was always asleep at the time and there was no trace of it by the time I woke up.