Hi all.

You may have noticed that I've been offline for a few days. As I was saying at Friday's scrum, I got a call from "CodeRed" at 2:00am Friday morning saying that we had to evacuate our neighborhood due to the Woolsey fire. By the time we were ready to leave, we got another call at 2:30am that downgraded our neighborhood to voluntary so we went back to bed.

The LAFD had put the northern boundary of the fire at Bell Canyon Road which is a long walk southwest from my house, and since the wind was blowing hard from east to west, I figured the fire was going to blow away from me, so not to worry. Uh-oh...

So two fire trucks and a bunch of LAPD parked in front of my house, which is the last house on a dead end street. Over the next couple of hours, about 100 other looky-lous showed-up, but the fire was playing nice and kept to the south side of the ridge so still no evacuation and one of the fire trucks left. And then...

A hot spot directly to the north of my house. Still the wind was blowing from east to west (looking north so that would be from right to left in the photo) so we all just watched it burn. As the afternoon wore on, more of these hot spots would flare-up all over the hill, one at a time, and each one would burn itself out before another one would start. I talked to the fire chief and he said they wanted to let all the dry brush burn, as long as it didn't get too crazy. And every once in a while, a helicopter would drop a ton of water on one of the hotter flare-ups (remember that to the south, the Woolsey fire was raging out of control and burning down houses so most of the resources were down there). And then...

Now the LAPD went into action big time and we all had to leave. FAST. We had already packed-up the cars, so we drove them down the hill a few blocks and parked, then walked back up to see if we were going to be homeless or not. The LAPD knew who we were and gave us some slack until...

The entire hill behind my house literally exploded into a huge firestorm. There were these weird ribbons of fire that shot 30 feet into the air. It felt like we were standing in a furnace and the fire was roaring. My neighbor Dan recorded this video right after the blast...

Even after it seemed that everything had burned, it would flare-up again and again as it spread to the east and west behind our houses...

Now we had to leave. Most of my neighbors had evacuated a long time ago and had already setup a really helpful text feed that saved everyone's sanity over the longest night of our lives. But because we left so late, all of the rooms in the West Valley were booked so we holed-up at a Starbucks in Platt Street mall, where we stayed until they closed. My neighbor Jim works for a company that supplies helicopters to news organizations, like ABC7 News, and he posted this picture to our text group. Our houses are in the yellow circle.

So the fire burned down the north ridge and around my house to the ridge on the east where it was threatening the Ingomar neighborhood. The map above is for the helicopter pilots to navigate the fire zone. This is what was broadcast on channel 7 a few minutes later...

So everything has completely burned to glowing embers to the north and the fire continues to burn through the mountain to the east. My neighbor Dave managed to elude the LAPD and was live-feeding news reports to our text group the whole night while dodging a rain of red-hot embers, which ignited palm trees and other shrubs throughout the neigborhood. They needed extra fire trucks just to drive around and put out these flare-ups (see south of Wiscasset and south of Pennobscot).

At 7:00pm, Dave posted the good news. All of our houses survived. The LAFD had put two hose teams in our backyards and kept the fire from jumping the iron fences into our yards. They also kept everything good and wet, especially the decks and overhangs and roofs. They faced hell at 10 feet and didn't back down.

Here is the view to the east as the fire continued to burn towards Box Canyon, but around our houses there were just a few small hot spots to water down (my house is on the left in the picture)...

So my wife and I and our two cats spent Friday night in the Platt parking lot glued to our phones. The next morning we drove back to the house but all the streets were blocked-off by the LAPD per mandatory evac orders. But we forgot to take my wife's meds so they let us in and here are the heroes chilling in front of our house after an unbelievable night...

The hillside has been completely denuded (compare to the first photo). Some of the trees in our backyard got singed but Dave was right, everything was OK, only really, really dirty.

The mandatory evac order is still in effect and we had to leave. We finally managed to find a room at Motel 6 and I'm still here waiting for the evac to be lifted. Unfortunately, the winds came back with a vengence Sunday morning and the fire flared-up again in the east and rained a ton of embers on our neighborhood, which started a few more hot spots in people's yards. Please note that palm trees are particularly susceptible to catching on fire in these conditions.

And that's when the LAPD finally nabbled Dave and kicked him out so our insider news source got cancelled.

Looks like it won't be until Tuesday or maybe even Wednesday before we can go home, but I should be online now, for the most part.

Thanks, Steve