Watching from Chula Vista...

The photos at right show the view this morning from Lyons Peak this morning. About an hour ago the fire moved right through the peak – at one point we could see flames lapping at the towers and buildings up there. Amazingly, we never lost the camera feed, and it's still working fine!

The top photo (click to enlarge) shows the view east, toward Jamul. The smoke so obscures things that we can't really tell anything about conditions away from the peak.

The bottom photo shows the view north, toward our home. Again, we can't really tell much for sure – except that there is no major fire in that direction.

What is giving us more comfort at the moment is the latest MODIS satellite thermal imagery. This is the bottom image at right (again, click to enlarge). I believe this data is from roughly 4 AM this morning. The red hatched circles show hotspots detected on that pass. The orange ones are hotspots detected not on this pass, but within the past 24 hours, and the black ones are older than that.

I'm blogging from a Mac, and I don't know how to annotate pictures on it, so I haven't marked where we live on this map. The long, skinny reservoir that runs mainly east-west is Loveland Reservoir; we live about halfway between the right end of that and the MODIS splotches just below it. That works out to about 2 miles between our home and the firefront.

From news video we're watching in our friend's home, the Jamul Highlands area has several hotspots burning, but we didn't see any burned homes. The news commentator has mentioned that there were few houses damaged or lost in that area – perhaps none at all. A co-worker sent an email last night saying that all the homes on Millar Ranch Road were saved – which seems miraculous given the flames we saw there last night. The fact that the winds have died way down is greatly helping the firefighters. This gives us much hope...