Saturday, May 17, 2014

California Wildfires Spread Across Hills, Leveling Homes --- ESCONDIDO, Calif. — With fire rolling swiftly down the hill toward their houses on Thursday, Jeff Brown, his brother and his grandmother were forced by sheriff’s deputies to flee the two homes here that the family has occupied since the 1960s. -- Mr. Brown, 38, was back just an hour later. His house was untouched, but his grandmother’s home was gone — only the chimney still stood. “Damn, you can’t even tell there was a three-bedroom house here,” Mr. Brown said, as he walked across the property on Friday. “The trailer in the back is gone. The shed was over there, where that gray pile is. Everything is gone.” -- At the end of a week in which 11 wildfires consumed nearly 20,000 acres across San Diego County, residents and officials here were just beginning to assess the damage and determine the causes, even as fire crews continued struggling to get five of the blazes under control. At least seven homes across the county were damaged, along with two commercial buildings and an apartment complex, county officials said. One body was found in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. And three people have been arrested in connection with setting small fires, the district attorney said. --- For Mr. Brown, there was not even any rubble worth picking through. His grandmother, Doris Brown, 83, had been a book collector. But her book collection, her jewelry and generations of family photographs were lost amid a gray pile of twisting metal, shattered glass and ash, which was still smoldering on Friday. -- “It’s terrible — I grew up here,” said Mr. Brown, who installs flooring for a living. “The family pictures of all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren is what we’ll miss the most, and her books. If you go sifting through that, you’ll probably find some melted gold. She had a lot of jewelry.” --- The week felt hard to fathom for many people around San Diego County, with triple-digit temperatures and unseasonably high winds — plus three years of drought, which had left the landscape almost eager to burn and contributed to a succession of fires that shook residents’ sense of safety. --- On Friday, many people still could not return to their homes around San Marcos, north of San Diego, where firefighters were still working to control the Cocos fire, which had destroyed the homes in Escondido on Thursday. - More, IAN LOVETT, NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/california-wildfires-spread-across-hills-leveling-homes.html?hp

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