Fire

Just a quick post to let you know what's going on with the Station fire, relative to our family.

We can see the fire burning on the mountains, big clouds of smoke during the day and red flames at night. It's very strange going about our daily business knowing there's a natural disaster RIGHT there and 2600 firemen fighting it.
As I left Target yesterday after my weekly grocery shopping I could see the flames, it's just very strange.

There are parts of Altadena (just north of Pasadena) that are under mandatory evacuation, and there was some evacuation in northern Pasadena, but it's not mandatory. The fire is headed East on Mt Wilson towards the Mt Wilson Observatory and the various antennaes there, so we may lose cellphone connectivity.

The worst part of the fire (for us) is the smoke. We're under a cloud of smoke, the air quality in Pasadena is labelled 'hazardous' and we have to keep Edmund and Bronson inside. Matt and I have both been walking to and from work (it's eerie, though, there's no one out on the streets) and we've both got sore throats and ears. I can smell the smoke in my office at work. The mornings are the worst for the smoke, and there are some beautiful and surreal sunrises going on here (yup, I'm up THAT early).

Luckily for us we were not driving up to OVRO when the fire began last wednesday - we were supposed to be going up that day but decided against it the Sunday before because I was worried I was getting sick. When we drive up in the daylight we take the #2 highway right through the Angeles National Forest, right past the Station where the fire started, and for which the fire is named.

When we do go up, we will obviously not be able to take the 2, but we're worried about trying to go around to the West, since the 14 may be unavailable to us as well, so we'll likely need to make a wide detour to the East. At least we'll be headed up to cleaner air and the kids can go outside again.

I read today that they hope to have the fire contained by Sept 8th, which is still quite a ways away!

Pasadenians are advised to think about evacuation and prepare what we'd need to take, so we've done that just in case. Not too much valuable to us, just grab the kids and go mostly.

We will update more frequently as things come up. Matt took some photos off the roof of the parking garage of Caltech the other night, he'll post those soon.