Calblog

I'm over near LAX, which is about as far from fire/smog country as you can get in LA. Air quality poor. with visible smoke/haze and a strong smell of burning brush. I can't imagine what it's like in, say, Claremont which was pretty bad every day when I went to school there.

The skies are blue here but you can smell the smoke. I stepped outside, took a deep breath and had to return indoors.. One of the twins was shooting baskets. She is not asthmatic but I told her to come in if she felt any difficulty breathing. She was in coughing about 5 minutes later.

Be safe Justene.

I expect fires this time of year in the southland, but this is worse than i've ever heard of it being. A single fire stretches from La Verne to Running Springs?

My sister-in-law's family, and my stepfather, live in Crestline. Her family is OK; I don't know about my stepfather. His house is just across the road from the ridge, though, so i've been struggling all night with the possibility that the house my mom died in might be *gone*, along with all that's left of her stuff. I've been obsessively reloading this site which seems to have more detailed news than anything I can get from the official news media.

I hope they catch the guy who set it.

My prayers are with you all.

The fires may give the grocery store workers a face saving means of caving in... they can say they're returning to work because of the disaster situation.

Does anyone think this could be a terrorist attack?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-07-11-alqaeda-fire_x.htm

Granted, the detainee referenced in the article does not mention California as beng a target of their plot. Then again who believes that any of the detainee's will tell the whole truth, or more likely he did not know the whole truth.

It seemed very suspicious here in San Diego that several fires started independently of each other in several different area's extending from the north all the way to the Mexican Border in the south. Early in the morning all of the available firefighting resources were in the Barona area fighting a large fire. Later in the morning several new fires started and each of them was farther south than the last. This has the effect of forcing our limited firefighting resources to deploy farther and farther away from each other with less and less numbers at each place. I have watched the maps of where the fires are on the news all day and it sure looks like there is some sort of co-ordination with respect to the places and times new fires started.

RWV: Interesting theory.... at the very least, it could give Albertsons & Vons "scab" workers an opportunity to head out to disaster relief sites and hand out the food that was just going to waste on the store shelves anyway, thus building up a fair amount of goodwill towards the supermarkets and their replacement workers. And can you IMAGINE the bad press the unions would get if they tried to block THAT convoy?

On a more serious note, I've taken to wearing a SARS mask when walking my dog (my wife thought it looked funny and would wear it, and now she's lying on the bed, short of breath & with a splitting headache).