Robert Peake

The biggest fire in the recorded history of the area races toward your town. It is within miles of your house, and smoke is everywhere. You call up the official Incident Report web site to see if you can figure out what’s going on. The site takes several minutes — an eternity online, and an eternity in a crisis — to finally load. The result? A sterile update full of numbers: crew, acreage burned, cost in dollars — and a map of the fire that is four days old. As of writing this, the web site is completely down.

Fortunately, a local community blog spotted the need for more timely, comprehensive and always-available information — and has been delivering it ever since the fire started moving our way. It provides a long list of resources, such as sites with great maps including timely thermal satellite overlays that show where the fire is really located, and up-to-the-minute reports from a variety of sources as well as questions and answers from local residents. Spread largely through word of mouth and other blogs, the site now boasts something like three thousand visitors per day in this sleepy town of eight thousand. Clearly, this is blogging at its best — uniting a community in its most compelling time of need.

While the men and women on the ground and in the air battling this blaze have been nothing short of truly heroic, the powers that be attempting to keep local residents informed online could learn a few things from a small community site that knows how to deliver updates to residents craving timely information about their beloved home town. Thanks again to the Ojai Post for seeing and filling an important need.

Are available here. Kudos to the Ojai Post.

Details here

The Geomac Website has some excellent views of the wildfire. Click on “Wildfire Maps” and then select “DAY CA” from the menu. You can overlay satellite and other images to get a sense of what is out there. Here are two images that brought it home to me about the size and proximity of the blaze, and all the “spot” fires created outside the official perimiter:





(thanks to Eric for pointing out this site)

An eerie glow has returned. This morning’s incident update notes that the campgrounds just a couple miles North of us have been advised to get ready to evacuate. And:

Due to wind conditions at higher elevations, ash and smoke can be expected in Fillmore, Santa Paula, Ojai and Ventura throughout today. People in these areas should remain indoors and limit physical activity, keeping doors and windows closed.

Furthermore, The National Weather Service forecasts a possible return of the Santa Ana winds on Thursday — the winds that stoked this blaze up in the first place. That would likely drive the fire further West, right over the top of us. So, we’re still on the alert.

ABC News reports this morning that, “Officials credited a cool, moist ocean breeze Sunday night for slowing down the fire and putting communities out of immediate danger.” So, for now, a waft of sea breeze has put us out of this fire’s path. Unfortunately, “The fire, which has cost about $15 million to fight, also scorched a condor sanctuary in part of the Sespe Wilderness and fish and game officials closely watched a condor fledgling.”

Meanwhile, I set up a very quick-and-dirty command-line PHP script to check the Forest Service’s RSS feed and page me when the title of the most recent item gets updated. I didn’t have time for fancy XML parsing last night, so I just relied on regular expressions to pull out the title and stored an md5 of the title string for purposes of comparison. Works great so far, and helps me rest assured that I will get the latest updates when they happen.

We got home from Los Angeles this evening (noting all the way how ironic it was that we actually went into LA for improved air quality today) to discover that the fire has spread. In fact, according to the latest map from the Forest Service (which I superimposed on a Google map to show the surrounding towns), the fire has basically doubled in the WSW direction.

If it does that again, it will reach Ojai. So, we are packing up some clothes and important documents and getting ready to head South to my parents’ place if necessary. We plan to be able to get out of here with a suitcase and the cat carrier in a matter of minutes if we get that knock on the door. I will also be checking the RSS feed put out by the Forest Service for breaking news and updates.

It certainly brings life into sharp focus to enumerate our most important possessions in this way, to realize that if necessary our life could go on without anything else. Hopefully between the barricades and now over 2,000 fire personnel on the scene, none of that will be necessary. Meanwhile, please pray for rain (for the highest good). We should know a lot more in the morning.

I woke up late this morning to red dawn light pouring in our windows. It has continued all morning, casting an incandescent orange glow over everything. Our porch and driveway are finely dusted with ash. The cat has been on edge — the warning signs of an oncoming fire are deeply primal. We’re heading toward Ventura shortly, possibly down to LA (to catch the last of the West Hollywood Book Fair or maybe visit The Getty) — anywhere to escape the pervasive smell.

Apparently a fire that was lit on Labor Day has been smoldering along and was fanned into action by Santa Ana winds yesterday. 1,600 firefighters have been dispatched. They’re trying to contain a 48-square-mile wilderness blaze in some of our favorite hiking country, the Sespe. Fortunately, the winds have died right down today. Campsites just a few miles North of us have been evacuated. We may be next.

It is strangely beautiful and haunting — the orange cast on everything, the message of ash carried many miles to our doorstep. Hopefully they will get things under control before it reaches the Condor Sanctuary or gets too close to any homes. We’re dropping off a spare key with my parents just before we leave town, so they can gather up the cat and laptops if our neighborhood gets word to evacuate.