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More Fires

This morning a small fire started in Sepulveda Pass. It was out by the afternoon, but it caused I-405, the San Diego Freeway, to be closed in the early morning. Ashleigh and I detoured around the closure. On the radio, the officials were talking about the possibility it could burn like the Mandeville fire of 30 years ago -- the previous post I made here. We drove along Sunset Blvd and saw a half dozen fire trucks parked near Kenter Canyon, another place they feared the fire would spread.

1978 Mandeville Canyon Fire

This was taken from the Beeson Agency office in Century City looking west to the setting sun in the smoke. I'm pretty sure it's the 1978 Mandeville Canyon Fire. LAFD archive. The LDS Temple on Santa Monica is visible to the left.

Wild Fires

There are two fires burning around the San Fernando Valley now. This seems to happen when we have Santa Ana winds. The radio news said there were gusts up to 83 miles per hour (130 KPH). We forgot to put the umbrella down in our patio and the wind pushed it hard enough that it cracked the glass table top. The temperatures are around 80F today. Yesterday morning it seemed pretty chilly at 9 AM when we started Becca's softball game.
The fires are not menacing us much as I write this, although they have snarled traffic quite a bit. The 118 freeway is closed so people who need to go that way are forced onto the 101 freeway. The 101 was moving, but they are threatening to close it -- why I don't know as the commute would turn into a total nightmare.
Here is the Daily News' map of the fire. I don't know if it will stay updated or not.

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Here is my version showing the fire areas with the blue line indicating a path through the brush toward where we live.

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We've seen numerous wildfires from our property, but they're just far enough away that they don't threaten us directly. In 2001 there was a very local fire on Castle Peak. It was visible from our house:

But much more visible from a few blocks away:
The fire on Castle Peak was extinguished in a few hours.
In September of 2005, a major fire burned through the open area to the west of us. I took this photo (and others that I can't locate) from the driveway.
The 2005 fire burned from the north all the way to Malibu. In 1993 we had a major fire that came the other way and was visible to the south, but didn't come so close to us. The 1993 fire was sandwiched between the 1992 riots and the 1994 earthquake. There were floods in that span as well.

Softball Team

Here's another coed softball team from the dawn of time. That is me with the Prince Valiant hairstyle.