San Diego Fires – some video

Check “Utter Disbelief” about our friend’s house below.

http://norberthaupt.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/utter-disbelief-san-diego-fires/

Here is some video done with the firefighters. They are talking about how they saved her house. Had  they not done that, she would have lost her home that morning. The section at her house starts at 2:50 (on the video clock).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khBBWm0NifA

San Diego Fires – The Bad Luck of the Draw

We signed the lease for the new house to move into over a week ago. Then the fires happened. 

This is the house we’re moving into. You can see the house is completely intact, and the one to the right of it is completely gone. You can see the tree is singed on the right side. You can also see some of the rose bushes are brown. About where the people are standing, there was a fence to the right, and to their feet is a koi pond.

This is a picture from the driveway of what is left of the house next door. There is another one completely gone to the right of that one.

Below a picture from the corner of the property looking south to the two burned homes. In the garage of the second one was a car that had pretty much melted down.

One more, stepping further back.

The fence was burned next to the koi pond. The pump to circulate the water in the pond was melted. The fish survived.

Spared – House Still Standing

The message below is an email I received tonight from a good friend in Fallbrook. Hundreds of homes were destroyed in his neighborhood. Here is the message, which speaks for itself:

Would you let the team know that miraculously our home was spared. We just got word from a friend who is an EMT who stood in front of our home, which is intact. Across the street there is nothing! We even have power and a phone as I just called my number and got my voice message. We are still in Lake Elsinore and will try to get into our home tomorrow to assess the smoke smell and such and take care of our fish and the plants. We leave for our kids in MN on Friday for the weekend and this will be extra special. We grieve for our wonderful neighbors who lost their homes, including the priest who brought us all the avocados. Please thank everyone for their messages of concern, their prayers, and their thoughts. I am copying Norbert too as he was checking his sources for us.  We are very emotional right now and extremely exhausted, but many, many are not as blessed as we.

Utter Disbelief – San Diego Fires

Go to www.sandiego.gov and click on the link List of Fire Damaged Homes and you see all the homes destroyed by fire in Rancho Bernardo alone yesterday. Each number under each street is a burned house, full of furniture, clothes, groceries, decorations, toys and all other possessions. I counted 301 houses destroyed. Each one a total loss for a family. And here it is just a number, so people that are evacuated and cannot come close to their neighborhood can see if their house is still standing.

We made the decision to move a couple of weeks ago. The weekend before last we found the perfect place. We hit it off with the owner. He showed us the property. We looked over the fence to the neighbor’s property. The owner told us about the neighbors. We saw their kids playing on their skate boards in the cul-du-sac. A few days later we signed a lease. We were looking forward to moving in a few weeks.

Then the San Diego Witch Creek Fire started on Sunday. By Monday, Rancho Bernardo was an inferno. There was no way in and out of the community. It was evacuated completely.

Today, a day later, I checked the list above and found that the two homes directly next to us on the right burned down completely.

I am stunned. Will we move into a property next door to two piles of smoking rubble? Is the house we’re moving into damaged? Partially destroyed? I don’t know yet. I will find out as soon as the police takes down the roadblocks and barriers, and we can get into the neighborhood.

 

And I cannot fathom what it must be like to read your address on a list on the Internet and realize that your house and everything in it is gone. I cannot fathom how this is happening to more than 300 families in Rancho Bernardo alone. I cannot fathom how this is happening to many hundreds of families all over the rest of San Diego County and across Southern California.

I am not even directly affected, but I am stunned and consumed by utter disbelief. I am very lucky.

The picture below shows a different house, about a half a mile away, on the other side of I-15. On the left you can see the house of our friend Linda. It was spared. In the center you see what is left of the house of her neighbor. One flying ember may have made the difference.