Fire!

You probably heard about all the fires in California over the last month or so, maybe even about the one burning in Santa Barbara. Here are a couple fuzzy shots D got from the car as we rolled back in SB at dusk over two weeks ago.

The SB "gap" fire was pretty big but about 12 miles from downtown SB and like 4 miles from UCSB. Because of the direction of the winds and the landscape it only posed a direct threat to some homes in the mountains above SB but it also burned directly under one of the main power lines into SB. We had daily power outages for a week or so, but only for ~1 hour a day. While it wasn't a big deal for us, it wreaked havoc on several big blocks of research machinery at UCSB where people design and build nano devices. A few of the more complex machines take a month to get back online after an outage! They apparently draw too much current for the back-up generators also.

The fire has been 100% contained for a while now and is basically out, though the rough terrain means they're still finishing stamping out hot spots. At its height there were helicopter loads of water being dumped every 5 minutes to try to put it out along with large crews trying to cut fire breaks.

 

 

More pictures from the gap fire.