Surviving the Workday

This has been a scary week.

On Sunday, after 24 hours of high winds (and no electricity in our home), the so-called Buckweed Fire (What is buckweed, anyway?) burned right up to the edge of our neighborhood of 70 or so homes in Agua Dulce, California. We were protected by the firefighters on the ground as well as the Super Scooper airplanes in the sky that kept flying between the fire and the resevoir.

This is our roofline and trees, the plane above, and smoke below.

The neighborhood filled with smoke. Some people evacuated, especially if they had horses, but wasn’t especially clear what was going on. The fire didn’t have a name at this point, we didn’t know how close it was (and that it was literally directly behind us), there wasn’t any news coverage, and we weren’t told to evacuate.

And, yes, this photo of our street during the fire just looks like a bad day of smog.

Now, here is the disappointing part of this photo essay: I avoided walking right up to the fire to take photos of flames. I know that I’m not a great photographer and risking my life for yet another crappy photo seemed like a weak reason to die. So please assume that the fire burned all the backcountry behind us while we packed things to evacuate.  And waited. And waited. And then the firefighters left and we were alone in the smoke.

After the fire moved south to Canyon Country, and the men in the neighborhood went up to the top street and backcountry with shovels and began covering the embers with dirt so they wouldn’t fly onto homes. This is possibly the weirdest detail to the story because it demonstrates how few firefighters there were around and probably leads to my Malibu Resentment Complex. The firefighters that were here did a great job, but I really didn’t feel that the neighborhood should be smothering embers. And thus began the worst night of sleep of my life.

Today, Wednesday, four days later, I took some photos of the damage along the street that marks the northern boundary of our neighborhood. As of this morning, firefighters were still patrolling the street.

This is basically what the landscape looks like for miles and miles:

I found this partially melted privacy fence at the end of the road particularly sad.

Patches of homes survived, like these homes (though the one on the top left had its attic on fire on Sunday night, so I don’t know if it’s truly all right):

And then there is this home, which you can’t see, because it’s totally gone except for the chimney and surrounding trees. 

Ooof.

I think other homes were lost on this street, but I was beginning to feel like I was gawking so I turned around. As far as I know the Buckweed fire is now contained, although there are fires elsewhere in Santa Clarita, and we remain on high alert with firefighters patrolling the neighborhood and planes overhead.

Our dog, Mia, has placed herself under the kitchen table near our emergency evacuation supplies (a backpack of clothes, a briefcase for laptops, a crate of financial documents, a planner, and, of course, Mia). You have to love the German shepherd. Always on alert. Always prepared. Always ready for action.

This entry was posted by Ms. Theologian on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 9:52 am and is filed under spirituality You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.