Thomas Fire

Blog readers may remember our trip to Rancho Oso a couple of years ago (that was the campground where the road in/out is really not wide enough for two way traffic and where we met a lady towing a horse trailer just as we got to the last hill down into the campground and had a standoff for a while until someone backed her trailer far enough to the side of the road to let us pass - http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-up-to-west-side.html).

I noticed when I left the Wilderness Lakes campground to go out shopping on Friday that there was a sign up at our gate indicating that the Rancho Oso campground was closed (they are both Thousand Trails campgrounds and a lot of folks travel from one to the next in Southern California during the winter). The large fire that is currently burning in California (Thomas Fire) is near there.

This is the current information on the Thousand Trails website for Rancho Oso:

December 15, 2017: Due to the Thomas fire, we are closing and evacuating Rancho Oso. This was done with the safety of our members, guests, and employees in mind. If you have an upcoming reservation at Rancho Oso, please call our Member Services team at (800) 388-7788 to make alternate arrangements. We appreciate your patience and understanding at this time. We will continue to share updates here as we receive them.

There are some pretty horrific pictures and videos on this twitter feed (you can go there even if you don't have a twitter account):
https://twitter.com/EliasonMike

The CalFire site is here: http://www.calfire.ca.gov/general/firemaps
I was reading the update on this site: http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?incident_id=1922 and as horrible as it is, I found this sentence to be intriguing: "North winds will also exasperate the threat to Fillmore and surrounding agricultural values, with fire being established in the Sespe drainage."  Did they mean "exasperate" (meaning: to infuriate)? Or did they mean to type "exacerbate" (meaning: to make worse)? I can imagine that those fighting the fires might get furious at them at times, but would a fire threat be exasperated?

Again, this is NOT near us - 100+ miles away. But... it is affecting folks in the greater area where we are located - we continue to pray for the emergency personnel and other people who are involved or impacted.

While I was studying the CalFire map, I noticed that there is another fire just off I-210 north of LA - we had been in that area when we drove through the Angeles National Forest and up to the Big Tujunga Dam on "black Friday" (http://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2017/11/a-drive-in-angeles-national-forest.html) last month. When I looked at the details on the incident map (https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5669/) I saw that that fire is very near the road that we took on our return that took us by the dam. When wildfires are burning in areas that I do not know, I tend to think, "Oh, that's too bad." But when it is burning in places I do know, I can feel more empathy for those who are dealing with losses of homes or livelihood.