Thanks to everyone for the lovely emails, and I apologize for not replying more promptly. I was pretty beat on Monday, and rather letdown yesterday. But today is much better - the smoke seems to be finally out of my throat. I'm meeting more refugees here in Santa Fe, and our outstanding  US Post Office j ust opened an office in the Pojaque High School not far from here. I went and picked up my mail, including an over-the-top Irish Crochet collar and an amazing piece of Le Puy guipure. So things are getting a little back to normal. I might even try to find those other two care with the rest of my collection.
The noon press conference just happened at Los Alamos. It might rain today - that's actually bad. Since it is so dry and hot the rain doesn't reach the ground (we call it the Virga), just a lot of dry lightning, which will cause spot fires that are difficult to control. Lightning is always bad in this area - I've sat in my car for up to half an hour at time waiting for the lightning to subside just so I can get from the parking lot to my house. The most worrisome aspect of the fire is the spur heading north toward Santa Clara canyon, which it will continue to do as long as the winds stay headed north. If they switch to the east, then the fire will go directly into the townsite. Something like that happened in 2000, the fire looped around to the north of the town, then the wind switched and drove everything southeast, right into town. So now the firefighters are doing backburning and buldozing along a diagonal line from the southwest to northeast just outside the lab and town boundaries. They are burning both sides of the roads in that area, and then taking off across country where there are not roads. Should be done in about 2 hours. The big fear is that the fire gets into the canyons around town that didn't burn last time, so there's a lot of flamable material around. And so we sit and wait. A fire like this creates its own weather, very unpredictable. In just three days it has burned about twice the size of the 2000 Cerro Grande fire - and that one took about 2 weeks to get that big. Los Alamos is an amazing place for many reasons. It is built on a series of 5 mesas on the slopes of an old volcano - this fire started very close to the volcano caldera, formed by the largest eruption known in this part of America - ash over 500 feet thick formed the Parajito Plateau. Over the years deep spectacular canyons formed in the ash. There are people in Los Alamos who have houses on a mesa and a 300 foot drop into a canyon in their back yards. Laurie http://lacenews.net  - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://community.webshots.com/user/arachne2003
