As many of you may know, we live in Goleta California. Over the past 5 days a wild fire has been raging in the foothills of Goleta.

The fire has burned over 8,000 acres and 20 structures as of this writing. The fire is ~5-6 miles North by North West from our apartment at the moment, though there is no evacuation warning nor order for our neighborhood. In fact, there is a Red Cross shelter setup on just the other side of the freeway from us at San Marcos High School. There is an evacuation warning for the neighborhood just ½ mile north of our apartment.

We choose to grab some important things, and leave our apartment last night due to the air quality and power outages we were experiencing. Power has been going off during the night for several hours at a time for the past 5 days since the fire started. That combined with a requirement to keep all our doors and windows closed in order to keep the smoke and ash out caused out apartment to become unbearably hot. We spent the night at my mother-in-laws place last night, and we’ll likely be going back home this afternoon to see how the air quality etc. is.

At the moment, we’re not particularly concerned that our home is at risk, but the ash/smoke and power outages is making it uncomfortable and at times impossible to stay home. Our kingdom hall is only a few feet south of the road that is used as the demarcation line for the evacuation warnings, so our meetings and field service have been canceled for the holiday weekend.

Exciting times to be sure, but we’re doing fine. I’ll try to keep everyone up to date by means of this blog. You can also find regular updates about the fire stats on our local news website.