Camp Fire

[mellytu74]

I am glad they are safe and have at least something, Marley.

When I read it, I thought of your earlier post about your sister and the cushions. Maybe it DID save the workshop.

[ghostjmf]

I'm so sorry, Marley. They have each other, the pup, & the workshop to camp in.

And you.

[Bob78164]

Residents still aren't allowed back into the evacuation zone, but a firefighter was able to check out my sister and brother-in-law's property and give them a report and some pictures.

The house is gone. From the pictures, I can recognize the burnt-out remains of the washer and drier, the hot water tank, and the stove, but there's obviously not anything left that can be salvaged.

On the bright side, the shop (a prefab metal structure) looks fine. Even the shelf outside the door, holding flower pots and other bric-a-brac, looks undisturbed. If you didn't pay attention to the charred hillside behind the building and the smoke still in the air, you could look at that picture and not realize that it was in the middle of the disaster zone.

Besides my BIL's workshop and a rec room, that building has a full bath and a spare bedroom on the second floor. Once they're allowed back into the area, if they want to move back onto their property before a real rebuilding effort is arranged, it should be possible for them to occupy that space. In a lot more comfort that the folks now living in an unofficial tent city at the Chico Walmart have...

Yeesh. I guess under the circumstances this qualifies as lucky, but I'm sure they don't feel particularly lucky.

I read in the paper the other day that the people dealing with the Paradise evacuation faced an impossible choice. They limited the initial evacuation order to those nearest the fire in the hope that they could avoid clogging the very limited roads permitting egress from the fire area. Unfortunately, the fire moved so fast that even the people who received the initial alert didn't really have sufficient time. It sounds like trying to evacuate the whole town at once wouldn't have been an improvement because it just would have led to people trapped on roads so clogged with traffic as to be impassable.

I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe start encouraging or helping communities with limited egress to build facilities that will let residents shelter in place (the fire equivalent of tornado shelters), but I don't know whether that's feasible either physically or economically. That's a potential issue here in Los Angeles in many of our hillside neighborhoods so I hope someone in authority starts giving this some serious thought. --Bob