Outside—grim today. At first, fog. That was good because it helps to cool things down. Now the sun is out and it’s still grim, from remains of smoke in the air.
Soot and ash all over everything. Cars, bushes, driveways, rooftops. I saw a kid skate boarding with little plumes of dust rising up from his rear wheels.
Also are the outages out? Hard to tell. I thought they were over yesterday morning, but we had half dozen outages for briefer and longer stretches from around 1 PM to 6 yesterday afternoon.
The fire in official speak was at first called an event. Since the event started, they would say, or the event seems to be going this way or that. Later the fire was downgraded from an event to an “incident.” The “incident” seems to have started when the Feds moved in and took over the “event” management. That’s what the top Fed dog called it: an “incident.” Personally, I think it’s neither an event nor an incident but a fire.
This afternoon they will have another news briefing about the “incident.”
It’s just like it in the movies. The locals never like it when the Feds move in. The woman who had headed up the locals mispronounced the name of the new Fed boss. Clearly she did not like turning over the reins to the Feds.
Early on, on the second day maybe, I had the TV on without the sound. I began to hate this woman who was talking even though I didn’t know what she was saying. I told Carol, this is an awful person. She is full of bullshit. So I turned on the sound to see if I was right and sure enough I was.
She was a spokesperson for the Chamber of Commerce. Make no mistake, she kept saying, Santa Barbara is still open for business. Meaning of course, open for tourism. Just like in Jaws. The locals want to keep quiet about the shark so the tourists won’t get scared off.
Like come on up, SB is open for business. Bring your asthmatic children and elderly and you can stay in a motel room with no air conditioning because the electricity keeps going off. Amazing.
Really, if I had a BS meter tuned to local TV and radio reports on the “incident,” formerly none as an “event,” the thing would be measuring off scale.
If I hear once again about how “the community is coming together” I will puke.
