I have family (in-laws) and lots of old friends in SoCal, so I checked in on the fires on-line this morning - looks bad.
But, really, it is a local disaster, right?
At lunch the e-mail came in - the San Diego Supercomputer Center is erratic and heading for going down later today. Don't expect it will be up to much this week.
Staff were ordered to stay home, power is "erratic"...
dammit.
We have 100,000 hours to burn on that big iron, this semester, it can't burn down.
SDSC just e-mailed. All systems down at noon local time...
Somewhere, there's a climate scientist, with thousands of hours to burn on that big iron, studying the contribution of global warming to fires ...
Still, at least SDSC didn't just fire up the honking great smoking diesel generators so they could run their climate model...now that would have been amusing.
I'm in Santa Barbara for a workshop, and the skies are all red and dusty from the fire they had here over the summer. It's not a good time to be in SoCal. (Or, evidently, MidCal.)
Apparently this morning a fire was reported on Palomar Mountain. The local reservation is being evacuated and being people are setting up at the observatory.
A link here