I've got cousins in Sylmar.
Unless they're in the hills up above, they're fine. Sylmar is a big place, and most of it is dead flat.
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Overnight the north end of San Diego County, right below Camp Pendleton, blew up. Many structures gone, more horses dead, and generally a very scary scene. I can't get any hard information because it's out of market for L.A. Nooz, therefore it doesn't exist. Pretty much anything of substance comes from twitter, and you know what that means. Everything has to be checked out. Slow process.
They can't even cover the in-market fires. (Did you ever think ratings would determine which rapidly unfolding disaster gets covered? Oh, you did. Never mind.)
They ran out of money for continuous, largely ad-free, live coverage. Even the blowout in Ventura County is ceasing to exist except in 8-minute segments where they breathlessly spout superlatives regarding how huge it is, with little hard data. "It's big. It's a big fire. The fire is large. Gee whiz, it's such a large fire. Back after this short break, with the Middle East blowing up."
A few facts make it through the jamming, trolling, and botting. Latest idea on the fire near us is that it started too far from the freeway to be caused by someone throwing something out of a car. The area is known for homeless encampments, and they've been known to have campfires on chilly mornings. So the cause is still to be determined, but arson seems less certain.
Another problem is that when the wind gusts to 80 MPH, it can bring down power lines, which spark. If the major grid path to Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, which has three lines of huge high-voltage towers, failed BEFORE the fire started, we might have a cause. This is really, really conjecture on my part though.
Maybe the girls at St. Thomas Aquinas Academy saw something. (This has to be the first fire ever named for St. Thomas Aquinas. Who's next, St. Francis of Assisi?)
In any event, the Thomas Fire is now 135,000 acres, which is an area larger than Detroit, and expected to burn for weeks, if not months. It goes from the mountains to the sea. Hundreds of structures destroyed.
This morning there was a small fire just off PCH, near the Santa Monica incline. There's really nothing around there to burn, and they got it out before I even woke up. But they had closed the w/b 10 freeway before the tunnel, if Glen ever drove that way, and dumped all traffic into an already gridlocked part of Santa Monica. Oof.
I'd heard it before that a lot of families rely on the public schools, in other words our taxes, to feed the kids. They can't afford to feed them. (Yes, tell me again how drumpf has caused an economic boom. For whom?) But a lot of schools have been closed since Tuesday or Wednesday. So now three schools in the area have set up what are essentially 21st century soup kitchens where the kids can come and get their lunch anyway. You can't make this stuff up.
I have a headache.