Tuesday, September 29, 2009

fire in the hills

looking west towards the Caldecott

Fire crews are close to containing a fire in the hills between Oakland and Orinda. As you can see in this frame from KPIX, it's on the hillside immediately south of highway 24 on the Orinda side of the tunnel. According to KPIX, the fire is mostly contained, and no homes or other structures have been threatened.

I was riding past Lake Temescal on way home from the Red Cross, and heard lots of fire engines, then saw several aircraft over the hills. There was a larger plane dropping retardant, and a smaller plane that I'm guessing was a spotter. And there was a helicopter that came and filled its bucket in Lake Temescal. I saw it just after it had gotten a load and was heading back for another water drop.

firefighting helicopter
over Lake Temescal

2 comments:

ArtSparker said...

It's such a tinderbox, we have been very lucky overall this season.

Unknown said...

Indeed. Yesterday was a bit windy, but not too bad, and it was relatively cool, so we were fortunate.