Some of the things that we learned from the 2003 fires have been corrected. The main one that came out of the 2003 fires was the need to communicate evacuations. Since the 2003 fires huge strides have been made. The reverse 911 system turned out to be amazingly good and saved lives and made the evacuations a lot more controlled. We did get our Fire 1 helicopter out of the 2003 fires and it was the first helicopter up and really did an amazing job while the political morons tried to figure out how to get the other aircraft in the air. That said, there were a lot of lessons that we learned the hard way to 2003 and we repeated them again this year, sad.

The one that saddens be the most is that the military once again wanted to help us, once again was prepared immediately to help us, and once again was slowed by Cal Fire administrators. The same issues that plagued us in 2003 came up again these last few days and the same sad results occurred.

The good news is that the humidity is up a little and the temperature has come down a bit. The Santa Ana winds have died down, but are being replaced by off shore winds that are hard to predict. It's a necessary evil I guess, the off shore will bring in cool, moist weather, but it's pushing fire back towards us and is much more unpredictable.

I hope everyone remains safe!

Just a small note.. we lost a lot of homes yesterday in non-forest or wild land communities. It just goes to show the unpredictable and destructive nature of wild fires. This fire jumped fire breaks as wide as the 6-8 lanes of the 15 freeway, and most every dirt fire road around. The wind was so intense that no width of paved fire break was going to stop this monster from spreading from forest, to foot hills, to city developments. It's the risk we take, no different than any community on the globe; there will always be fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and other natural disasters; no amount of prevention can stop Mother Nature when her fury is released. Can knowledge and preparation reduce the damages? Yes, but sometimes these disasters even go above any kind of preparation.