San Diego Burning.

I have to admit that thinking or doing anything related to internet marketing this morning is almost impossible. Here I sit about 15 miles from ANOTHER set of devastating wildfires and I am at a loss for words. Believe it or not, but this is my fourth experience in a major wildfire in my life:

Oakland Firestorm 1991

Black Christmas of 2001 (New South Wales, Australia)

Cedar Fire 2003

In addition, my wife’s family struggled greatly in the Canberra Fire of 2003 and nearly lost their house. So here we are in 2007 and again, another one of these disasters. The red sky. The muted sun. The ash and soot everywhere. The road closures. The school closures. The business closures.

It is days like today that I wonder what the world thinks about places like Australia and California that seem to be on fire on a regular basis. Mind you, I have bounced back between these two major hotspots a lot throughout my life, but I have just happened to be at the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. I know when I watch the news at night, I see things like tornadoes devastate areas of Florida quite often and I wonder if it is the same feeling or not.

Fires are weird because they last so long. Also (now I am really getting stereotypcial here), I have been through two major earthquakes in my life (Loma Prieta Earthquake in Northern California in1989 and the Northridge Earthquake of 1994) but the feeling of these disasters are so different. The event comes and goes. Sure, aftershocks do rock you a little bit but the situation comes all of a sudden and you are left with the effects. With these fires, they start small, they get bigger and you really have no clue when they will end or even slow down.

We are now at the point where there is no end in site. The Santa Ana winds are picking up and there is nothing stopping this fire at this time. Am I in any danger? No. But living to the south-west of this puts me in the middle of the superficial effects (meaning a lot smoke and soot, too much to be outside). The area it is targeting now (Rancho Bernardo) is where my old “day job” resides. It is in an evacuation zone. I remember the two people who lost their homes in the Cedar Fire from my work and I remember how it devastated them.

Today is a day that I go outside and look north-east to my old day job and the homes and lives of my past workmates…I worry and pray. Working from home makes me feel isolated in this whole event. My work day needs to continue but my mind is so far from writing articles or optimizing Adwords or setting up an autoresponder.