Red Sunset, Photo

Red Sunset, Natural History Photography Blog

Red Sunset

Filed under: General on 10/23/2007

The Witch Creek fire has now eaten 200,000 acres and at least 500 homes. It is the largest plume visible from space at the moment, dwarfing the fires in other parts of California. Temperatures have dropped noticably today, humidity has risen and the fire seems to have lost some of its strength, but I don’t want to jinx things by feeling too optimistic.

Sarah and I went down to check the surf at Ponto tonight. It was strange. The water was glass, with small shapely waves. It looked at once fun and depressing. I wish I had had time to get in the water. There were a handful of surfers out. The sky was bizarrely red and it was hard to distinguish the horizon due to the haze. A layer of soot and ash lay over the beach and was pooled thickly in some of the depressions in the sand where the breeze could not pick it up. Groups of helicopters were passing by just offshore every few minutes, some going north and some south, busy with their firefighting efforts. A gal that my daughter spoke with had come from Jamul earlier in the day, trying to help a friend of hers save property and horses, but I sensed from her mood that they did not have much success. The sky and sun were so super saturated red/orange/yellow that they practically fried the electronics in our little point and shoot pocket mini micro digicam.

Batiquitos lagoon, Interstate 5 at sunset

Ponto jetties, where Batiquitos lagoon empties into the Pacific

Some links:

The best page for info about the perimeter of the fires, but it is getting very heavy traffic: San Diego Fires - Information.
SD Union-Tribune blog, updated frequently. Traffic was so heavy they had to move this page to Blogspot, the U-T servers couldn’t deal with the demand.
SD Union-Tribune main website (often down due to heavy traffic)
Local TV news coverage: NBC, ABC, CBS.
Area Traffic: SigAlert, Dept of Transportation
An interesting, animated look at the smoke plumes from space: Satellite Animated View.

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Updated: February 10, 2012