K-Squared Ramblings

Under Construction Indefinitely

We went to Wayzgoose at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.

Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.

Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.

What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.

The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.

Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.

I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.

Golden to Green

Back in October, shortly before the Santiago Fire, I went sightseeing in the Tustin Foothills and snapped a picture of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. A month later, I took a picture of the same view after the fire and posted the two as a before and after comparison.

Well, we’ve had several months of normal (for SoCal) rain, and the hills have turned green. Mostly. It’s clear that the scars from the fire are going to take at least another season to heal. The last couple of days have been very clear, so I went back to the same spot to take a “four months later” photo.

March 10, 2008. Click for a larger version

Now compare it to the November (post-fire) and October (pre-fire) photos: Read the rest of this entry »

Con-Fusion

A press release from The Hero Initiative arrived today, describing their plans for MegaCon. The dateline said Los Angeles, which I found funny, because I knew MegaCon was somewhere on the east coast, but I couldn’t remember exactly where (and the press release didn’t say).

So I looked up the convention website. The first location I saw was Orange County, which was a bit confusing because I live in Orange County, California, which is right next to LA. Then I remembered there was an Orange County in Florida as well. Scrolling further down the page I confirmed that the con was in Orlando.

The cognitive dissonance lasted all of a second or two, but it makes me want to go back and look at anything I’ve posted about WonderCon in the past week and make sure I mentioned it was in San Francisco.

(The post title is not to be *ahem* confused with ConFusion, a convention in Michigan for which I’ve occasionally seen flyers.)

San Gabriel Snow Panorama

We went to The District on Saturday afternoon to catch Cloverfield and check out the Auld Dubliner. I took the Warner exit to go in the back way, and noticed someone standing out on the shoulder of the ramp, taking photos. I looked out past the wide expanse of empty fields and was astonished to see the entire San Gabriel mountain range covered with snow!

Not just the tops of the mountains on the eastern half of the range, but everything, even the lower parts you can just barely see by the Cajon pass, and this huge expanse north of Los Angeles that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen covered.

I pulled over as soon as I found a spot I considered safe, then walked back up to the top of the ramp. I talked briefly with the man I’d seen taking photos, and he said he’d lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen the mountains like this. He also mentioned he had a friend who had served at the base*, and he was going to send him the pictures.

I ended up taking a 12-photo panorama (zoomed) spanning at least 120° from the blimp hangar on the left, across the San Gabriels, past the hills above Orange and Tustin, the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, on to Saddleback, which had a few bits of snow clinging to the mountainside.

Click to view panorama (424 KB 6648×500 JPEG)

*This is the location of the former MCAS Tustin. The Marine base was closed in the mid-1990s, and the land is only just starting to be developed—notably The District in one corner, which is what brought us to the area yesterday.

Green and Brown

While driving to work this morning, I looked off to the left and saw this beautiful view of fluffy white clouds hugging the mountains, and bright sunlight on the patchy green hills.* When I got into work, I went straight for the corner conference room that has a view in that direction… but the clouds had rolled in and turned everything gray. I kept checking back every so often, but the closest I got was this:

It’s been great to have a more normal amount of rain this year. The coastal hills all turned green after the second rainstorm, early in December. The hills up by the mountains took longer, since most of the area had burned off in the Santiago fire. Faint patches of green started to appear around Christmas, and now, the lower hills at least are more green than brown.

The scenery still looks odd, though. There’s a third peak (Flores?) near Saddleback, about 1,000 feet lower, that normally blends in with the mountain behind it. Well, the entire north face of the hillside burned. Then high winds blew the ashes away. People coated it with a green-gray material that I suspect was intended to prevent mudslides (it looked like the stuff they spray on dirt embankments in construction projects before the landscaping kicks in). It rained, repeatedly. Then we had high winds again, clearing all the gunk out of the air…and now it’s got the light brown color normally seen on the lower, closer hills during the dry season, instead of the darker brown of the mountains. It doesn’t blend at all, even from as far away as Tustin.

This was taken from in front of the Ralphs on Jamboree on January 13. You can see the line of hills in front is still a green/brown mix, and then there’s this light brown lump rising up behind them. On the left side you can see some remnants of the anti-erosion substance.

The following day, on my way to lunch at the Irvine Spectrum (7 miles away, and perhaps a 30-degree difference in angle), I went over a bridge and saw Saddleback next to the Ferris wheel. I knew I had to get that shot.

I parked in the west parking structure, then went running around the top floor looking for a spot where I could frame the wheel and the mountains together, and avoid too many light poles, and get above the few cars, and not have to worry that losing my balance would cause me to fall 3 stories to my death. I finally climbed onto one of the support pillars for the light poles in the middle of the deck, where if I fell I’d only fall a few feet.

Here, you can really see the difference between the areas that burned and those that didn’t. Compare this to the third picture in Saddleback Snow, or the second in Ashen Mountains.

Sadly, the best places to take photos from seem to be the middles of freeway bridges and tops of private buildings — in other words, inaccessible.

Saddleback Snow: Don’t Blink

There was a little snow on Mt. Saddleback on Sunday, but not much worth mentioning. Sometime early Tuesday morning, though, a freak storm seems to have hit the mountain… and only the mountain. We certainly didn’t get any rain down here in the flatlands.

At 8:20, the mountains were still shrouded in clouds:

By 9:00, the clouds were starting to burn off, leaving behind a coat of snow, not just on Santiago and Modjeska peaks (still behind clouds), but on the lower peaks to the northwest.

By noon, most of the snow had melted. There’s still some in the shadowed crevices.

Before and After

On a clear day in early October, I went driving up into the Tustin Foothills to see what I could see. I took a bunch of photos at a turnout, and also stopped at an intersection that gave me a nice view of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. I used this photo a few weeks later for my drought post.

After the Santiago Fire, I waited for another clear day (which took several weeks), and set out to do it again and see just how far north the fire had reached. I managed to get a great pair of before and after photos from the intersection of Foothill and Lemon Heights.

October 6, 2007. Click for a larger version

November 24, 2007. Click for a larger version

While the orchards seem to have been spared, you can see the field in the foreground looks scorched, and most of the trees making up firebreaks seem to have died. More dramatic are the hillsides. Before the fire, you can see expansive dark patches of scrub, wide expanses of lighter dried grass, and occasional dark green bushes. Now it’s all dirt, except for the blackened remnants of the bushes. There are several gullies whose sides were hidden and softened by the ground cover, but are now starkly visible. And after this week’s rain, they’re probably eroded even more.

A few notes: The air was somewhat clearer for the “after” photo, and it was earlier in the afternoon, so the angle of the sunlight helped pick out terrain features a bit better.

Ashen Mountains

Things are starting to get back to normal, at least for those of us not directly affected by the Santiago Fire. There was a layer of haze coating the mountains Monday morning, but the air smelled normal, and the sky, when the clouds broke up, was blue.

My co-worker who stayed behind in Silverado came back to work today, and had all kinds of stories about everything from rescuing kittens from burning houses and repairing a radio repeater to holding off advancing flames with a length of PVC pipe (using it to break apart the brush ahead of it).

The air was clearer even than usual, affording a detailed view of the hills and Santa Ana Mountains. The clouds made patterns of light and dark on the landscape. The hills looked better in sunlight than in shadow, with the light brown (dirt?) dominating over the charred stubble. In the shade, the hillsides simply looked blackened.

The mountains, on the other hand, looked better in shadow. As silhouettes, they looked no different than on any hazy day (except for the one plume of smoke still rising). In sunlight, however, they looked gray (normally from this distance they look brown) from all the ashes. From what I read, there are places where every bit of vegetation for acres has burned. My co-worker said areas of the mountains looked like a moonscape.

I actually saw, from a long distance, a helicopter (presumably) dropping red flame retardant on the mountains to create a fire line.

Late in the afternoon I actually spotted some faint Anti-crepuscular rays (think Thomas Kinkade, but in the direction opposite the sun) looking out the window. They were too faint to get a decent photo, though.

Sometime, maybe this weekend, I plan on driving out to see the landscape more closely.

Clouds Replace Smoke

The change in the weather has brought in clouds today (Saturday), and even the occasional sprinkle of rain. It apparently helped slow the Santiago Fire considerably.

I went into work this morning to deal with some network problems (you may have noticed that this site was down for a while), then went over to the Spectrum to grab lunch and take a look at Leopard. (Incidentally, my plan seems to have failed: Amazon shipped the box yesterday, so I’ll have it in just a few days. And I’ll really want to put it on the PowerBook.) I went up to the top of the parking structure to take a look at what was visible.

There’s considerably less smoke than yesterday, and you can see the beginnings of a layer of haze below the hills. The cloud of smoke peeking out from behind the lower peak just in front of Saddleback stayed there, without getting visibly larger or smaller.

The air’s been relatively clear, except for the fertilizer smell when I walked out of the office. People were out shopping and sitting at outdoor tables. I saw one woman walk by with a face mask, but everyone else seemed to be taking things as normally as possible.

The apartment complex cleaned out the pool, which a few days ago had intricate patterns of ash lining the bottom.

They also finally cleared away the remnants of the tree that collapsed on Sunday. They chopped it up into smaller pieces, and moved it off the sidewalk, but left the stacks of logs, branches, the stump and piles of sawdust sitting on the lawn for the rest of the week. After a day or so, the sawdust turned almost bright orange. My best guess is that they ran the sprinklers.

Of the two co-workers who live out in Silverado, one cleared out on Tuesday, while the other stayed to help out with, well whatever he could. Putting out spot fires, rescuing animals, scouting. His wife has been sending out email updates whenever he manages to contact her. I ran into the one who evacuated at the office today (he frequently comes in on weekends). At the time, the prognosis didn’t look good, but now it sounds like the canyon homes were spared for another day.

It still wasn’t encouraging when, walking to the Corner Bakery at the Tustin Marketplace tonight, Katie and I were again able to see a red glow in the mountains. We went looking for a spot where I could both steady the camera and see the glow, and finally set it up on one of those waist-height light poles lining the entryways to the parking lot.

The glow brightened and dimmed several times while we paused.

This is a 10-second exposure taken around 8:50 PM. You can see how well-lit the parking lot is by looking at the trees. I suspect the Marketplace is the primary reason we can’t see as many stars from home as I’d like.

Shift

Winds have shifted northward. The good news: my workplace is no longer drenched in smoke from the Santiago Fire. I can see blue sky and wispy clouds, terrain back to the nearby hills, and the twin peaks of Saddleback rising above the smoke. Reportedly the northern peak (the one without all the radio transmission towers) has burned, though it’s hard to tell at this distance. The bad news: it’s sending the flames straight at Silverado Canyon, which was spared earlier this week when the fire raced past it eastward. Once again, worried about the co-worker who stayed behind and spent the last few days rescuing animals and relaying information.

A Breath of Fresh Air. Please.

The Santiago Fire has moved up into the mountains, raging through the Cleveland National Forest. The canyons are still under evacuation, but out here in the Saddleback Valley, it just looks like a really smoggy day. With yellower-than normal sunlight. It was actually cold this morning, for the first time in well over a week.

Things were just clear enough at home last night that we opened the windows for about an hour to air the place out. Then the smell of smoke started drifting in again.

Because there hasn’t been much to see since Thursday, I haven’t been taking as many photos. So instead I’ll point you to a couple of nighttime photos I found on Wikipedia’s article on all the fires. The one on the left is a view from Aliso Viejo across the valley (the Washington Mutual building at the lower left is half a block from the comic store I frequent) by Wikipedia user Bighead. The one on the right is a view from Mission Viejo by Kevin Labianco. His other photos on Flickr are worth looking at as well.

The OCFA has posted a nice map showing the progression of the fire. Since they replace their maps every day or so, the thumbnail links to a local copy of the map. (via AerynCrichton)

I’ve noticed people starting to speculate on terrorism as a possible cause of the fires, because it’s awfully suspicious that they’d all break out at once. Well, no, actually: it isn’t suspicious at all. Southern California is a very dry region. It rains in the winter (well, usually), then dries out in the summer. By the end of summer, the grasslands and brush are basically tinder. Then the Santa Ana winds blow in, usually in October: high speed, high temperature, low humidity. They dry things out even further, spark power lines, and once a fire has started (by arson, accident, etc.), make it spread rapidly. To make matters worse, there’s that drought I mentioned last week.

So if conditions are ideal (so to speak) for fire in one place, they’re usually ideal all over the region. We get wildfires every year, often two or three at once. They don’t get the headlines when they’re out in the wilderness, only when they encroach on cities and homes. And sometimes, when conditions are really bad, we get massive fires across the region. It’s happening now, it happened in 2003 (with the Cedar Fire being the largest), it happened in 1993 (the nearby Laguna Beach fire being only one of several).

In short, California burns regularly. People can help that process along, but it happens. Could terrorists have started some of the fires? (So far, only the Santiago Fire has been identified as arson.) Possibly. But it’s hardly the most likely explanation.

Fire by Night

With the winds dying down, the smoke from the Santiago Fire clung loosely to the mountains most of the day. Unfortunately, smoke from the new fires down on Camp Pendleton drifted up the coast to take its place, bringing back the yellowish sunlight. Also, without the wind to clear them away, ashes left a thorough coating on anything outside. Work was somewhat calmer, with everyone (and their houses) finally accounted for. Power kept flickering throughout the afternoon, though. Between 4:30 and 5:00, something massive flared up, sending a new plume of smoke into the sky.

I ended up leaving the office after dark, giving me a chance to take some pictures of the orange moon (it was actually a bit past first quarter on Sunday, and it’s not quite full today*).

I also went looking for spots to take pictures of the red glow coming from the mountains. There’s a bridge near the office where I frequently take pictures of the hills, and I managed to find a spot where I could set up my mini-tripod and still have a view of the glow. There was one brighter patch which seemed to be changing shape, which I figured might actually be flames.

Afterward, I drove up to a cul-de-sac on Quail Hill which I’d discovered at lunch. I just parked my car at the end of the road, put the camera on top of it, and started trying shutter speeds.

The vantage point gave me a better sense of geography. The Irvine Spectrum area lies in the foreground, with the 4 tall office buildings (the two in the middle are under construction) and the bright neon proclaiming the movie theater. The shopping center stretches off to the right. The empty area behind them consists of undeveloped land from the former El Toro Marine Base and the hills that burned earlier this week. The clusters of lights about 1/3 of the way up are, I think, Foothill Ranch. That places the glowing area in Santiago Canyon.

Even though some of the houses up on Quail Hill seemed to still be under construction, they had an efficient neighborhood watch going. I must have been there only 3 minutes before a van pulled up into a nearby space. A guy stepped out. No labels, no uniform. I said something along the lines of, “Hello, I’m taking pictures of the glow from Saddleback.” He said, “It’s still going, huh?” “Yeah.” I muttered something about exposure times, and he got back into his van and drove off.

*Strangely, I just discovered that my Nightmare Before Christmas calendar has the phases of the moon shifted… well, out of phase. It lists a new moon for Friday instead of a full moon. Everything else is consistent with this placement. Except reality.

Smoky Sky

Had a chance to run through all my Santiago Fire photos from the last few days with Katie and my parents, and they picked out a few favorites that I hadn’t already posted.

This first one was Monday morning around 10:30, as I drove into the region covered by the smoke plume.

Just a few minutes later, I had parked at work, deep within that plume. he sky was a hazy orange-brown, and the sun was bright orange, as you can see looking up at this tree.

This next picture is yet another view of Monday’s sunset, seen from the 405 near Sand Canyon. This shows more variation in color, with a distinct cone of bright yellow surrounded by red, bounded by gray on the sides and fading to blue above.

Finally, here’s a view from the Quail Hill area on Tuesday just before sunset. This was taken from Knollcrest Park, roughly the same view as last month’s lenticular cloud photos. This is looking across the Saddleback Valley toward the Santa Ana Mountains. The smoke has cleared enough to see silhouettes, though the light has faded too much to see any more detail. The large plume is rising from Mt. Saddleback, the highest peak(s) in the range. The sun is very close to setting: the houses nearest the ridge are already in shadow, with the next row still in light.

Watching the Santiago Fire

Now that the wind and smoke have shifted, watching the progress of the fire has become a nervous office pastime. It’s far enough not to threaten us here, but from the windows along one side of the building, we can see the blackened hills through the haze. And we’ve got people who live in the areas being threatened. Every so often, a group will collect either looking out a conference room window, or checking current fire status online.

Sunlight is almost normal, if a tad yellowish. I went over to the Spectrum for lunch (yesterday I just ate in the cafe downstairs), and everything looked like business as usual…with one key difference. People weren’t sitting outside if they could help it. Normally, on a day this hot, the tables outside the food court would be full, and small children would be running through the fountain. Today those tables were empty.

I went up to the top floor of the parking structure to see what I could see, and to be honest, it wasn’t much. Even though the air was (relatively) clear where I was, it was still hazy off in the direction of the hills.

The wind mostly swept the pavement and sidewalks free of ash, but it’s collected on anything rougher—like a lawn. Whenever I cross a strip of grass, little puffs of dust rise around my feet. I had to clean my shoes when we got home.

Around 4:30 or so, the smoke lifted enough that the mountains were visible. After a few minutes, a thin column of smoke rose from behind the hills, with occasional bright flashes visible as flames flared up past the ridge.

It was getting dark by the time I picked Katie up from her office. On the way home, we could see the top of the ridge of hills silhouetted by a faint orange glow to the southeast.

More Fire

The wind shifted during the day, and by mid-afternoon the sky near where I work was considerably clearer—even though the fire seemed to be getting closer.

Some geography: The Santa Ana Mountains run parallel to the coast, and form the northeast border between Orange County and Riverside County. Here are a couple of photos from older blog posts showing the hills and the mountains in the background (though from very different angles).

The fire “broke out”* in the foothills on the western side of the mountains. One side went straight over the line of hills and down toward the flatlands, threatening homes in northeastern Irvine last night. That was stopped, but it continued along the canyons to the end of this set of hills, and last I heard had reached the edges of neighboring Lake Forest.

I think the front may have gotten within 4–5 miles of where I work, though we couldn’t see anything but smoke in that direction until late in the afternoon. Every so often I’d wander over to a conference room that normally has a clear view. Off to the northeast, everything faded to brownish gray. It faded to the southwest as well, but at least I could see silhouettes of the hills in the opposite direction.

I did, however, watch ashes floating by horizontally, 4 stories up.

Toward mid-afternoon, the wind (and fire) shifted, moving the worst of the smoke plume away, and outlines became visible. I took this one around 5:30, and you can just see the (likely) charred and smoking hills. (Notice also the orange balloon off toward the left.)

With all the smoke in the air, the sunset colors were intense. As the sun sank, it was a brilliant orange.

As it neared the horizon, dipping deeper into the layer of smoke, it turned almost purple, and was dim enough to look at directly. (Not that I stared—I’ve seen Pi after all!)

We got a break from the wind for several hours, which just ended minutes ago.

*Reports are that it was arson. What the hell is wrong with people who do this sort of thing? It’s not enough to set a bonfire, or even just burn down one structure—you have to burn down 15,000 acres of wilderness and possibly people’s homes?