(no subject)
[ Photo by Paul Wellman / The Santa Barbara Independent ]
There's a huge fire in my hometown (again, fairly regular occurrence in California, but this one's the biggest in quite a while). Apparently it started shortly after I rung off the phone with my mum last night. My family's well away from the evacuation areas, but it's still a rather frighteningly large and fast fire. About 3,000 acres in 24 hours and counting, and they're guessing about 100 homes lost so far. But no serious injuries, thankfully. (I was reading an update from the local hospital and one fire-related injury was a "dog bite", which ... what? All the others were normal fire-related things like asthma attack, smoke inhalation, burns, etc. And then "dog bite".)
Just the still photos are alarming (see above, for instance), and my mum said the tv footage is scary. There's a small private college up in the fire area and it came up so fast they had to shelter-in-place in their (fire-proof) gym. I can't even imagine how terrifying that must have been. They lost nine buildings on the campus and fifteen faculty houses nearby, but everyone made it through unscathed.
While trying to find information on the fire this morning, I first tried the KEYT (local tv news station) and the SB NewsPress (local newspaper) websites. KEYT was only helpful if you were already in the know, since they provided evacuation info and such, but not the details. The NewsPress website, though, was spectacularly bad. I clicked on the front page story and was immediately greeted by "This current article requires registration and login to view. You may also purchase the article without a general registration." It's not even free registration; you have to subscribe to the paper to get the online stuff. Which, okay, they're a small-city paper so I get they need to make money, but don't you think a HUGE SCARY FIRE emergency is the type of thing where you shouldn't have to freaking log in to get information???
Helpful news sources included the SB Independent, which has a [ whole page ] full of articles being continuously updated (and no log in required!). (Also, they have better journalism skillz in general; there is much dissent regarding the editorship of the NewsPress.)
The LA Times is also helpful for free and accurate information. Even though it is a HUGE SCARY FIRE, I was amused by this snippet from an LA Times [ article ]: "In the hills of Montecito, residents could be seen packing up cars. Horse trailers and Porsches snaked their way down narrow, winding mountain roads." Because, yes, that is a very neat summary of the kind of people who live up in the fire area. On that note, celebrity homes that are nearby but so far unaffected include Michael Douglas, John Cleese, Oprah Winfrey, and many others. We've apparently even made international news because of the celebrity quotient who live there: "'Tea Fire' wreaks havoc as it storms into California celebrity haven" [ Times Online UK ].
Oh, and if you are curious like me and want to know why it's called the "Tea Fire", it's because the point of origin was near a place called the Tea House. It took me about an hour to figure that out because all the articles just referred to it as the Tea Fire and never mentioned how it started or anything. Then I found a [ Google Map ] of the fire area, which had the Tea House marked as the point of origin. I know nothing about this Tea House, so I looked it up and it's actually Tea Gardens on a huge ginormous estate called Mar Y Cel that's full of gorgeous ruins and is now burnt to a crisp.