Fire update (day 3)

I've been out all day, and part of the trip involved slogging through the normally bad LA traffic turned into a much more interesting mess by the fires and road closures. If you haven't seen the terrific pictures put up by Doc yesterday (of a fire north of Hearst Castle), do so. I've been offline for the most part and trying to catch up with normal mailbox deluge the rest of the time.

It started with my trip to Pasadena. Umm, yuck. If it hadn't been the quarterly senior staff meeting, I would have passed... oh well. The most surprising part of the whole trip was winding up down around De Soto and 101 and seeing no smoke. A clear sky. Wow, that's unique! I was in lots of traffic so I had plenty of time to admire it. By the time I got to Burbank, it was haze city again. Pasadena itself wasn't all that bad. It wasn't like home and I didn't see a single errant ash all day.

I caught bits and pieces of the fire news through the day, but was mostly in meetings or talking about the meetings. After finally wrapping things up at 7 (when groups come in from out of town, a meeting blizzard ensues), I wandered over to a party where a bunch of people were celebrating some major new functionality that's been built for a partner. Lots of groups have been involved and lot of people worked hard to make it happen, it was nice to see them all happy for a change.

Anyway, I decided to drive back through Simi on the 118 and although it was dark, I opened the windows just to get a sense of things. The smell coming through Santa Susana Pass was so powerful that I find it impossible to describe. It'll fade quickly, as it did after the Greenmeadow fire in 1993, but I can still smell it now. Overwhelming and inescapable are the only things I can think of, and that's not nearly enough. I'm going to have to get out there and see the destruction close up in the daylight soon just to get a real personal perspective.

Also on the way home, KNX informed me that the Val Verde fire has now come full circle and is back up in the Santa Clarita area. We've got some friends up in Stevenson Ranch, which is just east of I-5 and about three miles south of Magic Mountain. There is a pretty amazing picture from that area in this CBS slide show.

For everyone in the family who keeps asking, we're fine... that was why I started putting up this information. I'll leave you with two sets of reader submitted photos at the Star (they're really terrific).

Reader Photos One

Reader Photos Two