Friday, July 04, 2008

Fire in the Hole

Well, not exactly in the hole, but relatively nearby. So far, the biggest problem we've seen in our part of Santa Barbara from the Gap Fire is intermittent power issues. While that makes it particularly difficult to blog, it is otherwise just a nuissance in our current power-crazed lives. You like power, I like power. It's normal American stuff.

Last night, power went out about 7:15 and was out at our house until 11:30, according to the clocks that kicked in somewhere in the night. The problem was all linked to a big power line that was brought down by the fire. To restore power to all of us crazy light-loving fools, they switched us to a smaller power line. They are describing the current situation to be similar to having 12 strings of Christmas lights plugged into the same outlet. AKA, we're in for more electricity fun....sans electricity. Tonight, power was only out for about 2 hours, so here I am posting.

In case any of you are worried about me, don't be -- we're fine. We're not in the path of the Big Sur fire that you've seen in the news -- that's quite a ways north from us. We're looking out our backdoor at a fire that just started Tuesday night, and has grown quickly, but no structures have been damaged as a result yet, and there are no casualties so far. GB got back from a work conference in France last night...during the power outage...and is currently sleeping off his jet lag. We're still probably 7-10 miles from the fire, so while we can see it, with little-to-no wind, that's a long way away.

This is a picture of the smoke line as seen from our house near sunset this evening. The smoke is so thick that it makes the whole sky look gray. The sun was been bright red during sunset the last two nights. It's stunningly beautiful, until you remember why the colors are so fierce.

We'll definitely continue to watch this one. I'll keep you posted on what we see from here.

2 comments:

Stephanie said...

WOW, I was wondering how you all were doing in the most recent fires. Keep cool -- I guess it's good that you are not as AC dependent, as we are. Sadly, we're complete power hogs in our house.

Heather said...

So far, so good. Don't want to jinx anything, but the latest reports sound like things are going well in fire-fighting land.