“So right after the first notification came in, I fired up the tractor and cleared a 100by 75-foot safety spot away from my house. I cleared everything down to BME (bare mineral earth, then moved my SUV to the its separate safety spot and covered my boat’s 6 gallon gas tank and my two-gallon gas can in a potato mound I excavated this weekend. Then I covered it with a shake and bake fire blanket and soaked my garden, hastily picking up blown down palm fronds that have come off my 70 foot palm tree in the windstorm.”
Stunning post by Jim Forbes in Escondido about the wildfires ravaging Southern California. Very eerie to read one man’s experience as a refugee and long time observer of natural phenomena. I can’t recommend the click to the full post highly enough.
He’s made the front page of Slashdot. Funny that his typepad site can handle the traffic, while most mid-level US Daily newspaper sites would utterly collapse.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/23/1438211
guys thanks for the post. I’m back at home now, the fire is about one mile away. three houses at the eastern end of my street went up yesterday. the smoke is pretty heavy and I expect to see the cherry red glow of the merging Palomar and Witch Creek fires before dusk. I’ve got my eye on my “danger range marker”– a line of four 80 foot Palm trees about one-half mile away. If just one of t hose suckers ignites, I’m outta here fats by the naps of their necks and Perro being tugged at the end of his leash. My atitude is I don’t have a freaking thing I can’t live without. Worse case scenario; I rebuild with the MaForbes wing as part of the original building. I can replace my boat, my garden, my ATV and my tractor very easily using a virgin credit card and a rewardinfg retail therapy session. If it looks really close, I’ll jopin two thousand of my newst best friends at an evacuation center on the beach at Pendleton. Naturally, I have my minimalist tackle, rod and reel and fishing license in my car.
Ten Four over and out.
Jim.
PS, Tell me Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?
hee heee
Jim…hope the winds change direction and your neighborhood survives in tact…
Wow, no wonder they’re all moving up here, in the moist NW…