Fires

It's November and we are experiencing more aberrant weather - another of those climate times when people tell us "this never happens!" In this case, it never gets this warm on the central coast in November. It has been wonderfully summery the last few days with temps in the 70s and very low humidity. The reason for the warm weather are the winds blowing in from the northeast. Here they call them offshore winds. In Santa Barbara they become sundowner winds as the sun goes down and the winds blow through the canyons. The winds this week whipped up to over 70 mph when the "Tea" fire started in Montecieto, the Riviera of the central coast. They have been warning that the area was "due" for a big fire as it hasn't burned in a long time. Many mansions burned (over 100 so far).

Then yesterday afternoon a fire started in San Luis Obispo. One woman in SLO said that she was watching the fires in Santa Barbara on TV and looked up out her back window and saw the hills on fire right behind her house. They managed to get that one under control very quickly. These winds moved down to Orange and LA counties overnight. They call them Santa Ana winds there. Fires have started in both counties and the winds are whipping up the flames. So far since this morning over 500 mobile homes have burned down.

We are pretty far away from the fires in any of these area. There were a number of houses spared because the owners did a good job of keeping the vegetation around their houses cut way back. Every year the residents on the central coast are asked to trim back the vegetation to within 100 feet around the house. We are fortunate in that the 100 foot boundary of our house is open space maintained by the golf course as part of the Audubon Signature Preserve.