I made it to work today... had a house full of people who were evacuated from their homes yesterday - everyone on the north side of the major road in Oak Park had to leave their homes.

They managed to extinguish all of the fires in Oak Park, but it's still raging in Bell Canyon and the big fire is in Las Virgenes Canyon. On my way to work, I turn off at Lost Hills road, which is the exit before Las Virgenes (Malibu Canyon) and take Las Virgenes down to the PCH. As thick as you've ever seen pea-soup fog, that's how thick the smoke was on the Ventura Freeway. It smalls of smoke here in Culver City, probably 30 miles away from the closest fire.

Luckily the weather is cooperating today. If we still had the Santa Ana winds that we had on Wednesday, the entire Conejo Valley would be burned to the ground, and the fire would have made it all the way through the Santa Monica mountains to Malibu (which is what has happened in the past with fires like this.)

I want to thank everyone who posted, e-mailed, IM'd, and called me with good wishes. It meant a lot. Wednesday night was pretty terrifying, I gotta say. It was virtually snowing ashes all night (and day) and if just one of them had been a live ember and had landed on any of the hillsides in my neighborhood, it would have been a whole different scenario. We got very lucky. Yesterday I felt kinda like a prisoner in my own home, because it was very hard to breathe outside.

The 3,000 firefighters have done an incredible job. There were firetrucks from all over the Southland and up the coast in Oak Park, from as far away as Ontario, Pomona, Santa Maria, and Orange County. These guys were on duty all night on Wednesday and they're probably still over fighting the Las Virgenes fires now. Yesterday morning I went up to a neighborhood on the north side of Oak Park and took some pictures of the fires. I went back last night to see what the hillsides looked like, and the firemen were all stretched out on the grass on the side of the road sleeping.