A monster fire raging through the Santa Cruz Mountains came closer to UC Santa Cruz on Friday, bringing new levels of fear to a region besieged by days of fire.
Brant Robertson, a UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist, lives 100 feet from the evacuation zone on the university campus.
He said Friday that he had not received a warning, but that he and his family – his wife, 11-year-old triplets and dog – were all packed up and ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice.
He lives in a cul-de-sac on the edge of campus and said about half of his neighbors were already gone.
Robertson stood on a porch outside his house, saying the air was thick with dust and ash, like larger particles – burnt leaves and fibers hung in the blowing air.
“We have all the windows closed,” he said. ‘But you can still taste the smoke. It is unavoidable. ”
He and his wife constantly followed Twitter and kept an eye on NASA’s satellite images.
“I’ve lived all over the place,” Robertson said. ‘I’ve been through tornadoes and earthquakes. But this is different. You just respond to those events. This is unusual in the fact that we do not know when the alarm goes off. But there is a lot of tension. It is constantly stressful to hurry up and wait. ”
Upward of 60,000 people sat Friday in evacuation orders in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties as firefighters hope to spend some time in the extreme heat to make progress against the raging fires. Higher hand ordered the evacuation of the UC Santa Cruz campus late thursday. Scotts Valley, a hub of the Santa Cruz County tech industry, was also ordered to evacuate, with some residents en route to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk for refuge.
It was one of several fires burning in Northern California, many caused by lightning. Together they have fires at least five people killed, destroyed more than 570 structures and burned more than 1,200 square miles,
Robertson said schools will close at least next week as families and teachers evacuate. Even though distance learning lessons were learned, the evacuations made learning and learning impossible.
He said this past week has been exhausting, starting with the heatwave. His phone recorded a height of 108 degrees at his house one day.
Then there were the blackouts, because the electric grid is overwhelmed in the middle of the heat.
“As physicists, we use supercomputers,” which were intermittently on and off, Robertson said. He lost a ton of data.
“Then the storms hit,” he said of the lightning storms that moved across the region Sunday and Monday. “It cooled down, but then the smoke started to build” as a result of the fires.
