Friday, May 16, 2014

Wildfires scorch San Diego County: 'Mother Nature was not on our side' --- Carlsbad, California (CNN) -- In her 42 years of living in Southern California, Sophie Payne of Carlsbad has "never, never, never" witnessed so many wildfires at one time. -- Three dozen raged overnight. Eight of them continued to burn Thursday in a patchwork across of San Diego County, ravaging 10,000 acres since Tuesday, and killing at least one person. Payne's hilltop house was an exhibit of their destruction: It was burned to the ground, except for a stone archway and several walls. -- Payne found some family keepsakes in a small safe, and while intact, the papers were charred at the edges. "It's just falling apart," Payne said. -- Another family in Carlsbad similarly lost its house, but everyone -- including the dog -- survived. --- San Marcos, Escondido among hard-hit cities -- Some 10,000 acres had burned in Horn's county in various blazes, the worst being a nearly uncontrollable fire in San Marcos. County officials in that city said that one intense wildfire sucked so much oxygen that it was creating its own weather system, and the city's fire chief, Brett Van Wey, said 5,000 homes remained evacuated Thursday. -- "They are skirting subdivisions, and we are just doing our best to kind of guide it along through the path of least resistance," Van Wey said of the wildfire. -- The city was "fortunate" to have lost only three homes and had one damaged, he said. -- In broad daylight at noon, the fire blackened the skies in one San Marcos neighborhood and sent a "firenado" -- a column resembling a tornado with smoke and flames shooting from it -- rising and twisting into the air. The blaze prompted a state university in that city to cancel this week's commencement and other activities, officials said. --- A new wildfire ignited near the Las Pulgas gate on the Marine Corps' Camp Pendleton, prompting more evacuations, Cal Fire Director Ken Pimlot said. That fire burned 25 acres, a relatively small size compared to the base's other fire on 6,000 acres -- or 9.3 square miles -- the military said. --- By mid-afternoon Thursday, about 15,000 residents were being evacuated in Escondido, a city with a population of 146,000, according to Escondido Community Relations Manager Joyce Masterson. A few hours later, Mayor Sam Abed said he was grateful not just for the cooperation among various agencies, but for the fact Escondido hadn't "lost any structures or any lives and there hasn't been any significant injury." - More, http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/15/us/san-diego-wildfire/index.html

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home