Living on the California fire line

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Living on the California fire line

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Making cookies, lemonade and iced tea is the way one resident along the fire line in California passes her day - because she doesn't know what else to do. She tells NowPublic (she wishes to remain anonymous) what it is like to live so close to losing her home and belongings, and the difficulty of finding out what is going on.

"Living on this fire line has been constant low-grade stress since the 28th of June" she says, "and we're not seeing any signs that it's going to let up soon."

By the 29th of June there were over 300,000 acres burned in the area and hundreds of wildfires were already being fought. One of the fires was threatening Big Sur and none of them showed signs of slowing down. It has now gotten so bad that firefighters have to choose which fires they are going to fight first.

"Fire is just about all we can think of," our California resident says, "but my husband and I are very reluctant to leave home."

Her husband has been out helping the firemen to fight the fires; "one crew said he could stay as long as he didn't get in the way," but he is often at a loss of what to do.

By July 1st the fires had already destroyed 17 homes and 52,000 acres of forest.

Our California resident describes finding out what is going on to be the most difficult thing of all. "It's very hard not knowing exactly where the fire is" she says, "I check Sequoia National Park news updates and also Kern County Fire's website and they're OK, but updates are often not current and when you're wanting to know specific information say about what's happening on a particular road."

She also looks at the National Weather Service web cameras up on Mount Breckenridge, but says that if the smoke is blowing towards the web cam then you cannot see anything and it can get very frustrating.

She says that she has been given some walkie talkies so that she can communicate with her neighbours, but that things get really blown out of proportion with the speculations going on.

"And you really have to listen to these darned radios or you might miss important information" she cautions. "We heard spot fires....untrue, we heard evacuation....untrue, this evening we heard that the fire department had lost control of the backfire and that they were evacuating a particular road....untrue." So half the battle is just trying to figure out what is going on and how careful they should be about paying attention to the 'reports'. 

There are also so many different agencies helping out to fight the fires that our resident says that none of them seem to know what the others are doing, so it can become even more confusing.

By the 4th of July, over 64,000 acres had been burned, and one volunteer firefighter had lost his life to the blaze.

"Our house is a basic fixer-upper" she says, "but what gives it its value is the private forest" so they don't want the fire crews to burn along the edge of their property to prevent the fire spreading unless they can absolutely help it. "So for a while there we were more concerned that the fire department was going to do more damage than the fire itself might actually do" she states.

Things did die down for a couple of days, but when they heard the news that some fire crews were going to start back fires in their area, it caused another rush of panic and terror that their property might be lost and damaged by man-made fires.

"My husband hand I have been pretty much keeping to ourselves" she explains. "We don't want to be in their way on our roads as they are single 'lane" and not paved." She describes what a difficult and isolated terrain they live in, and that if the fire was to destroy it all, they wouldn't even know what to do.

She welcomes the fire crews and all they are doing - making the cold drinks and snacks is at least something she can do - but it seems like this fire and the constant threat has no end.

"I'm sure finding it difficult to concentrate on much of anything but fire since it began" she says.

The latest reports are that firefighters have made some progress today in the Sierra Nevada foothills, but crews feel that for the first time since late June they have really turned a corner fight against these wild fires.

And that can be nothing but good news for our California resident.