Glowing in the Night: The Santiago Fire

Posted on October 23, 2007 in Photos Santiago Fire

If you want to start at the beginning, click here.

The fire is like a necklace stretched across the ebon skin of the hills.

A general view of the fire across the canyon from us, north of Portola Hills. Turned quite pretty hasn’t it?

This is the same area that I showed in the photos that I took earlier today. The fire line is about half a mile away. Firemen are swarming Santiago Canyon Road.

This is an accidentally pretty shot of the backfire that the OCFA set along Live Oak Canyon Road. The red and blue squiggles are the firetrucks lined up along the blaze. For those who don’t understand what is happening here, firemen have taken advantage of negligible winds and set a fire in the path of the larger conflagration. They are watching it closely. The idea is to burn out all the vegetation along the road so that when the main fire reaches this spot there’s nothing for it to feed upon. Around the hill and down the corner from here is a particularly lovely stretch of land where many people have homes. There are also two monasteries and a community church on the hill to the right of this photo. Backfires are a desperation measure: what this signals is that help ain’t coming from anywhere right now. We could, perhaps, have used some soldiers and marines but most of them are over in Iraq doing Bush’s bidding….

We learned that the fire came within three blocks of us while we slept….

[tags]Santiago fire, Santiago Canyon fire, southern california fires, california fires, wildfire, wildfires, disasters, fire department, orange county fire, orange county, southern california, Portola Hills, Trabuco Canyon, fire[/tags]