San Diego Wildfires 2007

October 23, 2007

San Diego, CA

San Diego is again engulfed in flames and smoke of the wildfires. Actually, it’s the whole of Southern California, but San Diego County is the most affected. It is déjàvu, only with less lively images than the previous fires.

I’m sitting on my veranda in the back of my small house in the middle of San Diego, Qualcomm stadium, a major evacuation site, is a 2 minute drive from my house. The images and sounds pouring over us through TV are too surrealistic to be comprehended, smelling the smoke and feeling the fine burned particles in my nose and my throat are more believable.

The sun came out today and it was a warm day, but the light had a matt glow to it and the air was filled with a dry heath. I hear that more than half a million people are evacuated, and more then a thousand houses are burned to ground. Even though I’m hearing throughout the day the traffic noise, most public places, such as schools and colleges, are closed. I stayed with my children at home, watching TV and waiting.

There are many fires in the county, burning simultaneously. Fire and wind playing with people and landscape their game of seek and hide, once flaring out here, dying down there, blowing west, and then to the east. Santa Ana winds, representing one of the two destructive elements, the other being fire, seem to be the stronger ones then their counterparts in this yen and yang of nature, earth and water.

The fires are fiercer this time, so is the human response to them. It’s remarkably calm and coordinated what people and authorities display and do. There are firefighters from all over California, and from other states, fighting as if it were their fires! Sometimes, they are standing in the middle of a burned landscape of what have been houses, trying to dose water on the one or two houses that are not burned to ground yet. It’s truly heart wrenching. The governor was here yesterday and today, giving comfort. The federal government responded remarkably fast. It sent military tanker airplanes which were operating all day today.

It’s amazing that sometimes tragedies bring the best out in people! Most people who lost their houses in the fire respond with such a dignity and calm that one truly feels their loss as one’s own loss. And anyway, these natural disasters violently put human existence in a perspective that allows us for moments to look at us in more a human way, to see each other as sitting in the same boat. We could and should learn from the nature that violence should not be the work of humans, and that nature doesn’t discriminate when it hits us!