Federal State of Emergency

Heh. Eight wildfires loose in San Diego county, most under 0 control and burning wildly under the influence of Santa Ana winds pretty much have the city of San Diego surrounded.

We're in an official State of Emergency at all levels, including Federally. Kinda surprised no one else had noticed this and posted it. Hopefully the fires won't actually require me to evacuate, but it kinda looks iffy.

Hell, it's even international news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7055721.stm

Of course they're more concerned about Malibu and celebrity homes than the 250,000 people in San Diego county evacuated and the several hundred thousand acres destroyed along with thousands of homes and commercial buildings.

Anyway, wish me luck.

Haha! Genius! The map of stars homes at the end of the report is a briallitn touch, wouldn't you say? Good to see the Beeb have their priorities right.

Oh, and to save time - "pikz or it didunt happan".

On a more serious note, good luck, Voll. Hope it turns out alright for you.

The efforts out there are simply amazing. A lot of the Firefighters are still holding out for assistance from nearby states and Northern California, they've been on the job for almost 3 days having grabbed only 3-4 hours of sleep a night literally sleeping on/in the Fire Engines.

The news stations have even had reporters from other friendly stations in other states flying in to give them a break (the station I'm watching has had 2-3 reporters fly in from Chicago).

Current situation is that I've got a fire ~5 or so miles south of me, and I have one that started up a few hours ago about 10 miles east, with another one kinda coming in from the north. Still no news regarding evacuating my area.

Yeah sorry to hear Voll. It's pretty crazy out there from what I can tell on CNN. I'm sure the nation will help out and you guys will get shit under control, I know out here in Florida we get crazy 20,000+ acre fires every year, it'll calm down once they can start making any sort of progression.

If your house burns down you can stay at my place.

When I was up till 5 the other night I saw that as breaking news. CNN said that Malibu was getting torched.

I only realized this last night when they said the Chargers are going to have to practice in Arizona. That's some scary shit, bro, I hope nothing ill happens to your home/you. Evacuate when they tell you to evacuate, don't be stubborn! Good luck.

I'm kind of glad that most of my dad's side moved to Sacramento a few years ago. Good luck man. You know you have the best workers out there, because that's a highly dangerous job, and if you've seen those documentaries and past events you know that firefighters put their heart into it.

Yeah sorry to hear Voll. It's pretty crazy out there from what I can tell on CNN. I'm sure the nation will help out and you guys will get shit under control, I know out here in Florida we get crazy 20,000+ acre fires every year, it'll calm down once they can start making any sort of progression.

Last count, we've lost about 140,000 acres at least to these. The biggest problem D3V is that all of these fires are 0% contained because it's simply not possible because of the Santa Ana winds, the wind is driving them Southwest in gusts up to 50 mph, you cannot fight that because you can't even put Air units up to drop Water/Flame Retardant, nor can you place ground forces in front of them as the fire simply moves too fast, you'd be killing your Fire Fighters.

Until the winds die down, we're pretty much completely at the mercy of Mother Nature.

Now, to mention something kinda cool, and frightening. There are reports of Tornadic activity at the fire line, because it's so hot (200ft high flames in some areas) that it's creating burning tornadoes in some spots.

Fuck yeah, Apocalypse!

Be safe, dude. It sound crazy there.

Raining pretty heavily here today.

Just as an update, we've lost over 300,000 acres (that's like 100,000 acres a day at this rate). There are ~1000 homes somewhat reliably counted as destroyed, but they haven't really even looked at tallying them, that's just from observation.

They've called in roughly 1000 additional Fire Engines nationwide and most air assets in relation to fire fighting are flying over to help, and we still have new fires popping up daily.

I think we've stepped up to 1% containment though, lol.

If anyone wanted to see a rough map of the fires in relation to my house, I added my house to a PBS Google Map of current burn zones and evacuation zones.

Edit: Nevermind, it didn't add the PBS one. Lemme try and fix it.

Still not working, so gonna screenshot and attach a picture.

It just won't let me save the PBS map and combine with mine, and I don't know anything about Google Maps to do this. /shrug

I hope right-wing Christian wackos don't start saying this is retribution for California's liberalism.

That's already been spread among the WoW's Off-Topic forum, and it would be really stupid as San Diego has long been a fairly Conservative area, partially due to the huge military presence here.

We only house the largest Naval fleet in the entire world, heh.

Edit: A picture from Wikipedia:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi....aqua.250m.jpg

This is just going to add to the Katrina thing. Either the Government wont do something right and people will be pissed that they screwed up again, or the Government will do things right this time and people will say that since there's more of a white/rich population there they helped but didn't help in Katrina due to the poor/black population.

How much you wanna bet?

Yeah, once it's over for a short while, I'm sure it'll pop up.

"George Bush doesn't care about black people"

No, the real black Jesus (Kanye) is always right!

Is your home in danger yet?

Not really, but if the wind lets up, the Harris Fire could be sending us running.