Tag Archives: wildfires

From the disaster zone…

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Smoke thickened after I took this photo and is worse today.

I live in the area where high winds whipped up 60 different fires in a few hours early Monday (yesterday) morning. My neighborhood was on alert to evacuate, but that never became necessary. In this part of Northern California just north of San Francisco Bay, scores of my friends are among the 20,000 people who have been evacuated, and the homes of at least two families dear to me have burned to the ground.

Many hundreds of structures were destroyed yesterday, but fires are still burning and uncontained and it’s impossible to know at this point what the full extent of the damage will be, or how many lives will have been lost. Though we are all in shock at the speed and extent of this destruction all around us, everyone I know is thankful for the love and support, and continued existence, of their friends and family. I wanted you all to know that I am okay.

smoky sun

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Wildfires are burning all over California. I don’t follow them very closely in the news with my mind…but there is a vague unease in my heart when I am daily reminded of this terror and destruction. Some of those times are in church when we pray that God would deliver us from fire, tribulation, the sword, etc. I know this is also a problem in Canada and in the eastern U.S., but you will forgive me if I am even worse at keeping track of burnings farther away.P1010160 sun smoke 8-7-15

Twice in the last two weeks I was driving back from Pearl’s in Davis just before sundown, and both times I stopped to take pictures of the sun through the smoke. This unedited image from tonight is a strong reminder that the conflagrations continue — but it is also eerily beautiful.

Hoarding sap and hope.

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I’m reading Tuck Everlasting again. Tonight I was grabbed by this paragraph about late summer that could be describing our neighborhood, and much of California and the West:

The pastures, fields, and scrubby groves they crossed were vigorous with bees, and crickets leapt before them as if each step released a spring and flung them up like pebbles. But everything else was motionless, dry as biscuit, on the brink of burning, hoarding final reservoirs of sap, trying to hold out till the rain returned, and Queen Anne’s lace lay dusty on the surface of the meadows like foam on a painted sea.

As you can read and see in the news, in many places we have passed over the brink, with more fires than I can keep track of engulfing towns and forests. We are hoarding hope like sap and holding up our prayers till the rain returns.

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Rim Fire

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A couple of people have asked if the Rim Fire in California is threatening us. We are north of San Francisco Bay, and the city of San Francisco is mentioned frequently in news reports because much of its water comes from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and the fire has burned right up to the reservoir. But all of this is hundreds of miles away.The governor has declared a state of emergency for San Francisco because of its water supply being threatened. Also it is served by hydroelectric plants at Hetch Hetchy, and they have been closed at present.

map of Rim Fire

This map shows yesterday’s updates. I pasted a copy of it here but you really can’t see it unless you click on the link, and if you zoom in on it there you can see the name Hetch Hetchy toward the upper right. I don’t know if it will still be available when more new reports come in today and later, but it was definitely helpful to me to have the visual aid. Dear Lord, protect the firefighters and give them success.