God, it's terrifying isn't it? Down here we get Shelter In Place! warnings. Which means everything is dire.Welp, that dragon got a lot scarier real quick... We evacuated yesterday - packed two of the cars full as they could be (had to leave one car behind because the pup can’t drive ) and escaped to a friend’s house that isn’t currently in such dire straits. We’ll probably be bouncing around houses and camping for a while now. Trying to look at it as the vacation we haven’t been able to take all summer, really nothing else we can do.
I still can’t believe any of this. Totally insane. I don’t know much about fires or fighting them, but it sure seems to us like somebody screwed up royally here. It should never have been able to get this close. We’ve been tracking the fire on maps and listening to CalFire’s daily updates for the last week, saying Well there’s no way they’ll let it get all the way here, they can’t let Tahoe burn. But I guess it turns out they can... This has literally never happened before, evacuating the entire town. The other fire people talk about, back in 2007, really only effected a few neighborhoods on on side of town. This is just... everywhere.
We got the call at noon on Monday to GET OUT IMMEDIATELY and upped the already frenzied pace of packing, dodging and brushing away ash going back and forth to the car. I think the scariest part was the cops coming through neighborhood by neighborhood with a loudspeaker telling people FINAL WARNING TIME TO GO. Not at all apocalyptic...
Once we actually left the house, though, I weirdly started feeling much more calm. Something about just being finally on the road, even in bumper to bumper traffic, it was like, Well, that’s all we can do, is what it is. I very much did not like the pressure of deciding the fates of all my possessions, so once that insanity was behind me, I actually relaxed a little.
What an odd experience. Zero stars, would not recommend.
Are you okay now? Are you safe? We've been seeing footage of it all the way down here. It's - very scarey...