San Diego Fires Update #14

Day 5

All of the major fires continue to burn. The most active areas are atop Mount Palomar and along her flanks (the Poomacha Fire) and east of Jamul (the Harris Fire). Containment is being projected towards the end of the month for the fires with control expected in early November.

Assuming no abrupt change in the weather, the next significant news will be the damage assessments. These fires were on a scale with the Cedar-Paradise-Otay fire complex that raged in San Diego County in October 2003. The acreage and deaths appear to be lower than in 2003. The former is just luck; the latter is the result of aggressive evacuations, evacuations that were listened to because the memory of the Cedar blaze has been burned (bad choice of words) in to our memories.

A Little Perspective (and a return to political commentary)
Southern California has about the same population as the nation of Iraq. About 1 million Californians evacuated from the blazes through the seven counties of Southern California (about 4% of the population). There are about 4.5 million Iraqi war refugees (about 15% of that nation's population) The fires of 2007 have lasted about one week. The American occupation of Iraq is in its 238th week. I point out these facts not to diminish the horrors we have felt and the anxiety our loved ones have felt worrying about us but to remind us all that the Iraq War is an exponentially greater horror.

The Cedar Fire in 2003, the Witch Fire in 2007, I wonder what San Diego's quadrennial natural disaster will be in 2011? Perhaps we will have a massive earthquake for a change of pace. I am going to take a break for a day or two - don't worry, I'm perfectly safe - and then resume my snarky political writings.