Fire Update: Tue night

We're heading to bed now - it's Tuesday night and all in our neighborhood is quiet except an occasional helicopter fly-over or fire engine in the distance. We can see some glowing smoke in the distance but the skyscape tonight is nothing like this time last evening. Tonight we drove through the neighborhoods in our area and how strange to see everything perfectly still and "normal" compared with last night where the same streets were filled with flying embers, fire trucks, news crews, etc.

Unfortunately, the scope of "our" fire has worsened and took several homes today a couple of miles away. For non-Californians, we live just next to the canyons, a much more rural type of land where fires spread much more quickly and there is more vegetation and greenery to go up quickly. So several homes in a nearby canyon got taken today but overall the firefighters have been extremely successful in keeping the fire away from the more developed land areas. Here's a map of the scope that we're talking about - I don't want to pinpoint our house exactly but you get the idea. Currently our fire is pushing 20,000 acres of coverage.

Luckily the damage isn't nearly as bad as some of the other locations like San Diego, Lake Arrowhead, etc. This is the only OC fire that I know of currently but that also makes it feel a little like we're getting swept under the rug without much outside support. I think we finally got some planes in today which is supposed to make a big difference.

Have I mentioned that the cause of ours is arson? Someone intentionally set it off in 3 locations. I could go on about this but it's incredibly frustrating - all the manpower that could be used at other fires, all of the wildlife, property, land damaged. I can't even imagine what would motivate someone to do this.

Again, we feel extremely safe at this point despite the magnitude of the fire. Our stuff is still packed just in case but we don't expect to see any more of the action that we saw last night. It's been an exhausting last 24 hours or so with the preparing, watching, waiting, etc. - we are quite tired despite the fact that we never even were evacuated. Off to get some much-needed rest - sweet dreams!