My City is Burning to the Ground Around Me

San Diego is burning, and the largest of its fires is out of control. The sky is glowing red in two directions from my house. From outside the city reports show an impenetrable wall of smoke. When I got up this morning, the sun was blotted out to a red cherry and ash was raining down from the sky - it looked like Pompeii. The air stinks of smoke, even in the house. Sometimes it's hard to breathe without coughing because of all the junk in the air. I have covered the electronics in the house because the ash filters in the cracks and settles on and in everything.

Five fires are burning; the only open highway runs along the coast and large numbers of the outlying areas had to be evacuated. Because of the Sta. Ana winds that blow off the deserts, the humidity had a grand high today of like 13% and gusts of wind drove the flames along as fast as the pumper trucks could drive away from them, about 45 MPH. Some people have been found dead in their cars because they were unable to outrace the flames.

This area is full of eucalyptus trees, which are essentially giant oil tanks and explode like bombs, raining burning liquid all around them. Already the largest fire has burned a sixth of San Diego City, the part enclosed by the city limits proper. Damage to the county is unmeasurable in a literal sense: we cannot guess at the disaster they have caused.

The city is cut off from evacuation to the south, east and north; only northwest on the 5 is still open and it is bumper-to-bumper. Even the Mexican side of the border is impassable: a wall of flame has devoured the road from Ensenada to Tecate and the US parallel highway was already gone this morning. So we are sitting in a ring of fire with our backs to the ocean and thick, oily smoke choking us.

In the chaos today, a Cessna crashed on the 163 highway about a mile West of my house while trying to land only thirty feet from the most densely-populated region of the city. It crashed about a two-minute walk from where my mother and sister stayed when they visited me, in fact.

I live in North Park, which is the middle of the city. Right now, the fires are about three miles from my house along the main highways; they have evacuated a community that is about a five-minute drive from my front door, Tierrasanta. Hopefully the fact that I live here means the fire will not burn here; there are almost a thousand fire fighters fighting the largest fire, which is out of control and directly north of me. They will do anything to keep the heavy areas of the city, the backbone of San Diego, from burning up.

If I'm evacuated I might not be back online for a bit. Don't panic, I'll be around.