Scenes from the Fire Line

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The first picture here, which has appeared widely in the media in LA, shows the likely first outbreak of the Eaton Canyon fire, which is now thought to have been sparked by an electrical line owned by one of our corporate socialist “public” utilities.

The relevant thing for Powerline readers to know is that the house in the foreground is owned by one of my best friends (who by the strangest twist of fate was “pre-evacuated,” so to speak, for scheduled surgery in a nearby hospital), and in fact I have recorded both the Ricochet podcast and the Powerline Show several times from this house since I stay with my pal often. And once upon a time I used to run the mountain trails nearby every weekend.

The good news is that the house survived the fire, perhaps from luck, but also from aggressive clearing of brush on the hillside behind the house, which overlooks Eaton Canyon. Neighboring houses were unfortunately not so lucky. The hillside burned, but not the house.

Here’s a look at the “Three Musketeers” (as my best pals from grade school refer to each other) from the backyard in pre-fire times just a couple years ago*):

Here’s what that hillside looks like today:

And the view down the hill into the canyon from the backyard:

I’ll add that I’ve seen the mountainside behind Eaton Canyon burned down to nothing at least four times before in my lifetime, but this is first time the Santa Ana winds blew the fire west to where people live.

As mentioned previously in a brief sentence, my first classes of the semester at Pepperdine next week have been moved online, so students will be deprived of this old look from my Georgetown days almost 20 years ago (I don’t dress this way any more, and certainly not in southern California):