Surfin’ USA

Forest fires

In case you are worried, this is the latest status of the wildfires in Southern California and how they concern us here at UCI:
The biggest fires are currently north of LA and around San Diego, which is a good distance north and south of us, respectively. At the time of writing this, just in the San Diego area over 500.000 people have been evacuated and more than 1100 homes have been lost so far. There is smaller fire, dubbed “Santiago Fire”, some 10 miles northeast of our campus, right at the Irvine city limit. This fire is currently 30% contained, but some evacuations have been taking place there, too.

This year has been one of the driest in a long time and therefore dried out vegetation provides a good ground for the spreading fires. In addition to that firefighters all over Southern California are facing frequently changing strong, hot winds from the desert and high temperatures of 35 degrees (Celsius) and more, which renders all fire control efforts incredibly hard. Conditions are not supposed to improve until Wednesday afternoon, when the winds are expected to get less intense and hopefully the situation will improve.

While we at UCI are not in immediate fire danger at this time, the air around here has been thick with smoke and little ash particles ever since the fires started on Sunday. It has improved somewhat today, but it is still a pain to breath and makes my nose run and my throat hurt. Luckily the computer science building has an air conditioning system that filters the air, so I spend most of the day in the office. Over night I stay at Teiko’s new place, which also has a basic air conditioning.

Update Nov. 4th: So the worst is over, all fires are 95% or more contained and no more homes are threatened. The air around here is back to normal, too. A lot of people have lost their homes, though, and the full recovery from this disaster will surely take a while…