Jamul Fire Help

Update:

Several people, including Daniel Tyack, wrote to say that the Jamul Fire Help site can now take donations by PayPal. We just made a donation; it was easy and fast. If you're not familiar with PayPal, it's the largest electronic payment service in the world, owned by eBay – it is very safe and reliable. I have used it personally for thousands of transactions.

Original Post:

I just heard from Daniel Tyack that he's helping the Jamul Community Church put up a web site to act as a hub for the effort to help our community rebuild. A worthy effort to be sure. You can find their new web site at www.jamulfirehelp.org. If you need help, or if you can help those who need it, pay them a visit...please.

Puzzler...

Last week's puzzler:

It seems like forever since I posted the last puzzler, about a strange early form of main memory for digital computers.

The correct answer was “mercury”, which got 41% of the 98 votes on this puzzler. To the best of my knowledge, none of the other elements figured in any early computer memory system, though silicon of course is the main constituent of current memory systems.

As one commenter noted, mercury was used in an early memory system that was essentially an acoustic delay line. The system that I worked on used long glass tubes of mercury, bent into a spiral much like a fully compressed spring. Each tube was about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, bent into a spiral that was about six inches in diameter and about four feet long. That means that the tubes, if fully extended, would have been about 100 feet long. The glass was coated with a soft plastic coating that was intended, I think, to provide some high-frequency acoustic isolation. The system had something like 40 of these tubes, providing a 30 bit word with error correction (the extra 10 or so bits). I can't remember some of the interesting details, such as the acoustic frequency or the number of bits held in each delay line. I do remember the main maintenance issue: thermal control. The operation of the system depended on (for those days) very tightly controlled, steady and even, temperatures across the entire array of tubes – not an easy thing to do.

This week's puzzler:

For this week's puzzler, I'm going back to history – this time, a little piece of American history that I happened to witness while I was serving in the U.S. Navy. As always, no fair Googling until you answer!

A Beautiful Chaparral Morning...

This is the view just now from the west-looking camera on Lyons Peak. Aside from the char in the foreground, you'd never know San Diego County was on fire just a few days ago. The white layer you see in the distance is just fog; our normal “marine layer” that we see on many mornings. I love this sight, especially as I drive down the last stretch of Skyline Truck Trail into the town of Jamul – the mountain tops look like islands rising out of an ethereal sea…

I received several emails from worried readers this morning, wondering why I wasn't posting. I suspect these are all new readers (and very welcome!) who have the impression from last week that I normally post a couple hundred times a day. This, I'm afraid, is simply not true. I actually have a job, where for some reason they expect me to do things for them <smile>. Normally I write a couple of posts a day, on average; some days more, some days none at all. It doesn't mean I've disappeared!

In response to another reader email, here's an offer: if you'd like your fire story to be up on the web (with photos, if you'd like), I'd be more than happy to let you do so on my blog. Just send me an email with what you want to say, and any photos you want to put up, and I'll take care of getting it up there. Make sure you let me know what personal details you do and don't want published (your real name, your address, etc.).

And one more excellent idea a reader had: if you have a story related to the firefighters and the wonderful job they did protecting our properties, or if you just want to say THANK YOU, I'd be happy to publish that as well. Again, just write up what you'd like to say in an email, and send it to me.

My email address is slightlyloony-at-jamulblog.com (replace the -at- with @). I have to write it in this odd way to keep the spambots from finding it an inundating me with disgusting email advertisements…

Reverse 911

Many of us who live in the remoter regions of San Diego County spend quite a bit of time many miles from home, at work, shopping, having fun, or whatever. A reverse 911 call to our homes when we're away is of little use.

I heard on the radio this morning that San Diego County very recently installed a second-generation reverse 911 system that is much more capable than the old one. It can make hundreds of thousands of calls per hour (a huge improvement), and it can handle cell phones and email addresses. But – a big but – it can only do this if you tell it what numbers or email addresses to call when your address is threatened.

Fortunately they've made it very easy. I just did it for our home, and it took less than a minute to register my cell phone, my wife's cell phone, and both our email addresses. All you need to do is to go to the County's sign-up web site, and fill in one simple form.

Take a few moments and do it now, while you're thinking of it…

Harris Fire Movies...

Hans-Werner Braun is one of the folks who run the HPWREN cameras on Lyons Peaks. These are the cameras that provide the images I use on my camera web site.

This morning, Hans-Werner sent me a link for some movies he has made from the images captured from all four cameras on Lyons Peak. They make for very interesting – and sobering – viewing…

All Those Thank-You Notes...

One last thing before I go back to unpacking…

When I picked up my email this morning, after getting the computers back up, I found notes from quite a few of my readers. In many different ways, they all said basically the same thing: thank you for the blogging and the cameras during the fire. When I get some time, I'll answer every one of them – but for now, a collective response:

You are all very welcome – it was indeed my pleasure to be able to do something useful and helpful for my friends and neighbors during the fire. Your notes are very much appreciated, as they tell me that I did some good. Thank you so very much for taking the time to let me know…

Home Sweet Home...

We are home at last. Like most people in our area, we are busy unpacking the vehicles we evacuated in (we stuffed a one-butt RV and a full size pickup as full as they could get, and left a stuffed SUV in the middle of our yard). Blogging will be light-to-nonexistant today after this post. I'm expecting to be rather tired tonight.

We drove back in at dusk last night. Once we got the official word that Lawson Valley was open, we packed as fast as we could (the cats were the main challenge!) and headed back. On the drive back, in the poor evening light, we didn't see very much of the damage. Driving through Spring Valley on Jamacha Avenue, we could see that San Miguel was burned over, and the places where the firefighters stopped the fire looked ominously close to town. As we turned right on state 94 in Rancho San Diego, we could see burns almost down to 94 as they came down San Miguel on our right. Then as we drove up Skyline Truck Trail out of the town of Jamul, the light was starting to fail, and we could just make out some burned spots off to our right, in the hills. Lyons Peak was too dim for me to actually see anything.

The best moment of the return trip came as we turned left from Skyline Truck Trail onto Lawson Valley Road. A fire truck, loaded with a tired-looking crew, was sitting at the stop sign waiting to come out of our valley. We opened our windows and yelled “THANK YOU!!!” at the top of our lungs – and were rewarded with big smiles and waves back. It felt so very good to be able to do that…

As we rolled into our driveway, of course we did a quick visual survey. There was not a thing out of place, not a single bit of damage. After all that drama and anxiety, everything looked so very normal, with the singular exception of our SUV and tractor parked in the middle of our yard, as far as possible from anything combustible. The house wasn't quite so normal, as we'd stripped a great deal out of the house when we evacuated – but of course we knew this, and expected the house to look odd. The main thing is that it was there, standing, and not a pile of ashes. We were very, very lucky here in Lawson Valley. It could have been much worse for us…

Last night we just unloaded the animals (who were very happy to be in their home again!), took a long, hot shower, and went to bed early. This morning we slept in until after daybreak, and then went to work. As I write this, around noon, we have most of the art back on the walls (which goes a long way to making the house look more normal), my slide rule collection is back indoors, and the computers are back in and running (allowing me to make this post). We're probably halfway through the unloading process. We're expecting to be quite tired tonight…

Restrictions Lifted?

Rusty Beatty emailed me a few minutes ago, saying that the word was out at Steele Canyon that all restrictions were lifted and everybody could go home. I didn't want to publish that without corroboration, but I just found it on SignonSanDiego's wildfire blog:

As of 3 p.m., all evacuation orders in the Harris fire area have been lifted for the following communities/areas:

Carveacre
Lawson Valley
Jamul
Potrero
Tecate
Dulzura
Barrett Junction
Engineer Springs
Deerhorn Valley
Indian Springs

There areas are open to RESIDENTS ONLY.

The following road closures REMAIN IN EFFECT due to road work:
State Route 94 at Barrett Smith East
State Route 188 and SR-94

Woo hoo! I think it's time to go home!

Harris Fire Update...

I captured this photo off the east-looking Lyons Peak camera about 45 minutes ago, but I had trouble posting it – Google appears to be having some kind of difficulty. If you expand this photo and look closely, toward the right side of the base of the dark gray smoke, you can see flames. They're the first I've seen all day. Hopefully this is still part of the backfiring operation we heard about earlier, and not something to be worried about. It appears to be very close to where Barber Mountain road comes around the north side of Elena Mountain.

And we finally got another MODIS satellite thermal imagery pass. This time the only hotspot on the Harris Fire is the one pictured above. Three miles southeast of my house – it figures. For this shot, I cleared everything except the last 24 hours of MODIS data, so that (if you blow it up) you can see exactly where the hotspot is.

News and reports from readers have slowed way down – which means that most of the folks that have been helping make this blog a great source of information for the Jamulian community are now themselves busied with things far more important that this silly blog: they're getting back home. It feels very nice – and normal – to know this is happening. With any luck at all, we'll soon be joining them. It's not looking too good for tonight (for us to return home, I mean), but perhaps tomorrow morning.

I've been thinking a lot today of all the people who have lost their home. I sure hope the rebuilding process is easier for them than it was for the people who lost their homes in the Cedar Fire – some of whom, we've read, are still trying to get their building permits…

Reader Report...

Rusty Beatty passes this along:

Here is a great link. I watched the road closure starting on Sunday until my computer was evacuated on Tuesday. We had a good idea of how fast the fire was coming down 94. The CHP site is updated every 20 seconds. http://cad.chp.ca.gov/ click on San Diego and then click on Harrs Fire.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to make this work. First you click on "San Diego", in the box on the upper left hand side of the page. Then you look through the list of incidents that pops up, to find the one that includes "HARRIS FIRE" in the description. Then you click on the link in the same row (line), but in the "Type" column. When you do that, the bottom of the page will fill in with a sort of event log, with all kinds of useful information, especially about road closures.

Thanks, Randy!

Reader Question...

From Lauren:

Your updates and maps have been invaluable - thanks for the great, continuous and responsible information.

We are awaiting the fate of Wisecarver Truck Trail. We saw the Modis fire map on your site last night showing the fire moving nearly to our back door.

Does anyone have any information on this area? Was the fire that crossed Lyons Valley Road south of Lawson Peak extinguished?

Thanks for the kind words, Lauren. To the best of my knowledge, the fire never got to Wisecarver Truck Trail – but the remote part of that road, closest to Lawson Peak, was very close to where I believe it did burn, and might have burned over. I'm pretty darned sure that the end of Wisecarver Truck Trail near Skyline Truck Trail is undamaged. From all the information I have, the fire in that area is out. Does anyone out there have any more information about these areas?

Reader Report...

Trey M. writes with this report:

FYI, at 11:30 Skyline TT was closed at Babel about a quarter mile up the hill from the scool. CHP said they had not heard anything other than is was to remain closed until they heard otherwise.

Thanks for the update, Trey!

Reader Query...

Alexandra asks:

We heard that Deerhorn Valley was open, but camera shows active fire around what is maybe Barbour Mt. Rd.? that runs into DHV Rd. I'll bet that end of DHV is still closed. Authorities don't know. Do you know?

If I've got my roads straight, I think that is the area where there is a fire – a backfire, I believe (and hope!)...but does anyone out there know for sure?

Harris Fire Update...

San Diego Online's wildfire blog is reporting this:

If you live in the vicinity of Wilson Creek and you see smoke coming up, you may be seeing backfires being set by firefighters to deprive the Harris fire of the fuels it needs to keep burning.

According to Cal Fire, backfiring began in that area yesterday and worked out well, so they're continuing with that this morning.

Elsewhere on the Harris fire, firefighters are putting in containment lines in Hauser Canyon near Barrett Lake.

It seems likely that's the smoke we see in that area; it's in the right place.

Reader Report...

Rusty Beatty files this report from the Steele Canyon briefing, via Blackberry:

I am at steele canyon h s for the 10 am update meeting. Looks likes 6 pm to move back in. Depends on fire burn today.

Thanks, Rusty!

Reader Plea...

From Carlene:

Can someone please call me as to when I might reach my home @ Lawson Valley & Rudnick. Thank you all so much. 760-801-6877.

Carlene, that's the same area where Debbie and I live, so we're watching it closely – keep checking back here for news. And we'll give you a call when we actually make it back home.

Help From Iraq...

I just read this post over at OPFOR:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RELEASE No. 20071026-01
October 26, 2007

Iraqi Army at Besmaya Installation Support San Diego Fire Victims
By U.S. Army Sgt 1st Class Charlene Sipperly
Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq Public Affairs

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Members of the Iraqi Army in Besmaya collected a donation for the San Diego, Calif., fire victims Thursday night at the Besmaya Range Complex in a moving ceremony to support Besmaya's San Diego residents.

Iraqi Army Col. Abbass, the commander of the complex, presented a gift of $1,000 to U.S. Army Col. Darel Maxfield, Besmaya Range Complex officer in charge, Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, to send to the fire victims in California.

The money was collected from Iraqi officers and enlisted soldiers in Besmaya. In a speech given during the presentation, Col. Abbass stated that he and the Iraqi soldiers were connected with the American people in many ways, and they will not forget the help that the American government has given the Iraqi people. Abbass was honored to participate by sending a simple fund of $1,000 to the American people in San Diego, to lower the suffering felt by the tragedy.

Foreign soldiers that have lived through over 3 years of hell, thinking of us and taking up a collection. Amazing.

Reader Report...

Sawdave reports:

Hi as of 1000 the caltrans sign at 94 and vista diego still says LVR closed at STT.

I did NOT drive to ck point to verify.

Thanks for the report, sawdave...

Harris Fire Update...

No new news, really. The photo is the east-looking scene from Lyons Peak cameras. There's a little bit of smoke visible; something is burning out toward where the Barrett Lake access road first approaches the shore of the lake – considerably further from Lawson Valley than the scary flareup we saw yesterday afternoon. This is a fairly remote and inaccessible location, making the job much tougher for the ground crews…

Reader Report...

Tom S. reports:

We are back in our house in Skyline Ranch. However, when I drove down at 9am to the LVR/STT intersection, the CHP told me it was a hard closure there. They tried to make me leave and I had to tell them my family was back at my house and insist on turning around. It was touch and go for a moment. They have set up another roadblock at STT and Babel Dr., up the hill a ways. It doesn't make much sense because why put a block there is the STT/LV block is a hard closure? I suspect there is a lot of confusion going on. They clearly have let some people back because there are many more cars in our neighborhood now.

They said there would be a meeting at Steele Canyon HS at 10am to clarify things, though how much clarity there will be I don't know.

Thanks for the report, Tom. You be careful near those checkpoints – I'd sure hate to hear you were dragged away, kicking and screaming!