When I flew out of California on the 14th, this blog was still working. When I went here to post about the Thomas Fire on 15th, it wasn’t. (Somebody later told me Harvard was moving servers around, so maybe that was it.) But then the fire looked to be under control. It wasn’t.
On the 16th it blew hard down across the mountain flank of Montecito and Santa Barbara, straight toward our house.
So I posted reports, throughout the day, on the #ThomasFire, which is still burning—and will continue burn after it becomes the largest in California history, which will likely happen soon—over at Doc.Blog, which has the old-fashioned blogging virtue of being extremely easy to post on and to edit in real time, and in a WYSIWYG way.
Here are my posts there, in chronological order:
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 9:35am PST
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 9:55am PST
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 10:37am PST
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 11:26am PST
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 11:58am PST
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 1:09pm PST
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 6:02pm PST
#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 8:54pm PST
As you can see in the two screenshots above (taken from this NCWG.gov map), the fire is still active, but the red dots are fewer, and not right next to civilization.
There is a lot of finishing work for the firefighters to do. Considering the size of the fire, and the rocky and wooded locations of so many homes that they saved, we owe them largest possible tip of the largest possible hat. If the fire had its way, the city would certainly have been ruined. And our house would very likely be gone.
There are two more stories that need to be told here.
One is how, exactly, this fire was fought. I gather that there was none other like it in the country’s history, and that there is a great deal ordinary folks don’t know about how fires are fought now, especially in “urban interfaces” (as the pros call them) like the ones we have here.
The other is about the coal in Santa Barbara’s stocking this Christmas. Already the most common sign on storefronts downtown was “For Lease.” State Street, the retail and cultural artery through the city’s heart, seemed half abandoned well before the fire and almost completely abandoned when the fire reached its worst point yesterday. Now, with most of the population evacuated, it seems in places like most of the remaining customers are off-duty fire personnel. It’s hard to imagine how, with both residents and visitors staying away, economic damage will not be very large.
I’m interested in any of the research and writing that may be happening around that right now.
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