Cedar Fire photo

The Cedar Fire of October/November 2003 was by far the closest call we've ever had to having our home and property burn. For those of you who aren't familiar with the chapparal ecological system we live in, I can say it like this: basically we live in an area where we are completely surrounded by large piles of very dry, highly inflammable fuel. Without human intervention, we're told that lightning-started fires would burn chapparal areas typically every 15 to 30 years. The area immediately surrounding our home hasn't burned for over 30 years, which means that we have a huge and extremely dangerous "fuel load" in our area. The vastness of the chapparal area means that cleaning it up and disposing of the fuel really isn't practical. Not to mention that you'd destroy all the native plants and animals in the process. So...we're left in this ever-more-precarious situation, exacerbated by the seven years of drought (but thankfully the drought is over due to the above-normal rain this year).

But we do it anyway, because we love the chapparal...

The blue dot on the map is the approximate location of our home; the green smudge is where the city of San Diego is located (about 25 miles from our house). The red rectangles are the locations of the burning areas at the moment this picture was taken (an infrared sensor on the satellite provided the data for this). You can see a burning area due south of our home; that's the Otay Fire. The large oblong group of red rectangles north of our home is the Cedar Fire, burning in all directions from its center. Further north is the Escondido Fire. We didn't have this information at the time of the fire, but we did know that our home was directly in between the Cedar Fire (burning south toward us) and the Otay fire (burning north toward us). It was not a pleasant situation. I wrote a contemporaneous account and photos on my personal web site. On that web site's home page you can find links followup accounts and photos as well.

Click on the photo for a bigger version.