UPDATED: Yikes. SignonSanDiego reports:

The Harris Fire is 70, 000 acres and 5% contained.  Firefighters are looking for full control of this fire on November 4th.

November 4th?

Still home, still safe, still worried about the city. The Harris fire to the south is making inroads; it engulfed Mt. San Miguel last night. My kids know Mt. San Miguel as "the mountain with all the transmitters on top like spiky hair." All year, we’ve been wanting to find out its name; now we know. (Sort of. On the news they just call it Mt. Miguel.)

Here is a picture taken during the night.

This is a good site for updates. SignonSanDiego moved its firewatch blog to Blogger to accomodate higher traffic.

The Witch Creek fire also continues to rage. It has burned more than 164,000 acres so far. Some 5,600 hundred people have evacuated to Qualcomm Stadium, and many more have gone elsewhere.

Here’s a blog that is updating frequently with fire news for all of Southern California, not just the San Diego area.

UPDATED MONDAY EVENING:

Our area is still safe and likely to remain so, although we had a brief scare this afternoon when we heard reports of a brush fire at an intersection about a mile from our house. It was quickly contained and poses no further threat. Authorities believe it was started by flaming material blown from a wildfire almost 20 miles away from us!

Some 250,000 people have now been evacuated from their homes in the north and east parts of San Diego County. Thousands more are without power. A staggering number of homes have been lost. Keep those prayers coming.

Here’s a post from my friend Laurie, whose mother has been evacuated from her North County home and is now staying with Laurie’s family. Laurie has experience with evacuations—her family had to leave for 3 days during the fires of 2003. I sure hope that won’t be necessary this time. Laurie writes:

There is the worst corridor of fire North of us.

And as of tonight there is a growing corridor of fire south of us with the new evacuations of Chula Vista.

We live near the Qualcomm stadium, where they are sending evacuees, so hopefully that is a good sign that we may remain safe.

I
have clothes loaded into laundry baskets and photo albums in a box. The
file of important papers on the counter ready to go. Won’t forget the
laptop and cameras.

(The kids all packed their backpacks full of
legos and toys first thing this morning as they woke up and I let them
know of the danger.)

My kids packed their treasures this morning too, even though I assured them it is highly unlikely we will need to leave. People are evacuating to our area, I told them. Rose didn’t care. She was all for hightailing it out of here, the sooner the better. That’s about when I decided it would be a wise idea to turn off the TV news. The footage is horrific.

MONDAY MORNING:

From SignOnSanDiego (no link because I don’t want to jam their server):

7:25 a.m.
The San Diego County Office of Emergency Services reports there are
some 18,000 acres of San Diego County burning right now. That includes
the areas burning in the city of San Diego, officials said.

The fires are zero percent contained.

Our area is not likely to be in any danger, but parts of San Diego County to the east and north are seeing severe damage right now. As I type, I’m listening to a news reporter describe how the fire jumped over Interstate 15 at one point—a huge multilane freeway. It’s hard to imagine fire leaping across that expanse of blacktop, but burning embers can travel quite a way on the wind.

Please keep the evacuees (thousands of them) and firefighters in your prayers today.

Alicia and Kristen have blogged about this too. Boy, Kristen, I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t shoot for this week to visit the Wild Animal Park after all, eh?