Above Foothill in Ventura. The fire originated on the 150 behind Santa Paula, and made its way rather quickly to our neighbourhoods. I think we were the first residential area to be hit.
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What I lost in the Thomas fire
- Thread starter pickles
- Start date
My sister is on Knox, and my wife’s BFF is on Loma Vista. Both houses survived, the neighbors on Loma Vista were not so lucky. The pics are the hills behind my house tonight!
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Wow.
Did you see my reply above about getting live updates?
Last I heard, the fire in Carp was “under control”, but they said that about the other end of the fire too, and that thing is still churning towards Fillmore, so...
Hopefully you have N95 masks. The smoke is very hazardous. There’s instructions on how to make a room air filter using a box fan, a box, and a large panel filter.
Stay safe!
Excuse the "un-educated" me, on this subject. But is it a wind shift that causes one house to catch fire and then the next house beside survive?
Also too, im pretty sure i saw pics two houses that didnt survive but the one in between them did. We just dont see this in the area i live in.
TMB
Also too, im pretty sure i saw pics two houses that didnt survive but the one in between them did. We just dont see this in the area i live in.
TMB
Don’t think “wall of fire” think “hail storm of burning charcoal”. It just depends where a big ember lands and takes hold. In the drone video you can see horizon st in my neighborhood, its basically in the lee of the hill, so it was shielded and few homes burned.
As Pickles noted, this was a storm of sparks. I have footage of my house from a Nest camera from about 3:40 in the morning (on a cloud, in an account I won't use for another year so I can't access it right now). The wind was at about 55 MPH, with reported gusts of 80 MPH. The fire is erratic, and does create its own weather patterns and winds. Embers can simply just be blown over a home, and leave it completely unscathed.
The footage from my nest cam shows quarter-sized embers raining down, with clusters of smaller embers blowing around under the eaves like a swarm of flies. My neighbour had a report from one of his Firefighter brothers @ 4:00 AM that his house was gone. I suspect mine went at the same time.
We were in the direct path of the fire, and embers from Pickles' neighbourhood flew over the barranca (about 100' wide, and 50' deep at my section) and burned a huge swath of my street.
The barranca (dry river-bed) did burn, but my garden was barely singed so I suspect that the fire that destroyed by house didn't come from that source. I lost plant pots (which inexplicably just disappeared leaving moulded earth, and intact plants), and the plastic straps from garden furniture due to heat, but nothing was burning out there.
This fire was moving faster than the people evacuating. We were four miles away in just a few minutes, and the fire had beaten us there (fire in the hills, us on the road below).
Fire in a controlled setting (fireplace, BBQ) is benign but a wildfire seems at times to behave like a living thing. A fire that's fanned by foehn winds (called Santa Ana winds in SoCal) is sometimes compared to the common image of a shark feeding frenzy. It's not a malicious or capricious thing but the end result looks as if it was both. Most SoCal fires I experienced in the 30+ years I lived there were a line of flame proceeding across the landscape but this year's fires look like the whole mountain surface is flaring at once.
We're keeping close contact with friends and family there, two of whom have lost everything to fire in the past. We now live in Oregon and have twice experienced being on the boundary of the evacuation zone. I don't ever want to be closer than that. We do have a very short list (1. spouse 2. dog) of what to grab and throw into the car when the word goes out to "GIT!" and one rule: GIT!
We're keeping close contact with friends and family there, two of whom have lost everything to fire in the past. We now live in Oregon and have twice experienced being on the boundary of the evacuation zone. I don't ever want to be closer than that. We do have a very short list (1. spouse 2. dog) of what to grab and throw into the car when the word goes out to "GIT!" and one rule: GIT!
Question on the embers and eaves - my house was built in the 90’s. It does’t have attic ventilation eaves under the sides of the roof. Is that not common? Or are the eaves just the roof overhang and the embers get caught up there and catch the roof on fire?
Wow... you had some amazing bass guitars and I'm sorry for they're loss. But I'm glad you got away with your lives. I live near the Santa Rosa (Tubbs) fire and while my house made it, I have many friends who lost their homes. These are strange times we live in.
Feel so heartbroken about this. Even if the market is awash with good basses it's sometimes impossible to replace the exact one. This can happen to any of us. Hope you see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Having just been Harvey'd, I can certainly relate. Lost a lot myself. If you need anything, holler. I'm just down the road, south of Houston, TX.
Hi, I'm so sorry to hear about this! it sounds like you might not need it, but I set up a site to connect displaced musicians with other musicians who have spare bedrooms or homes. I set it up initially for AFM local 6 musicians after the fires up here in October, but I'm opening it to everybody now.
Afm6emergencyhousing.yclas.com
If you don't need it yourself, please share the site with others.
Best of luck, will be thinking of you and your family.
Rob
Afm6emergencyhousing.yclas.com
If you don't need it yourself, please share the site with others.
Best of luck, will be thinking of you and your family.
Rob
Anybody who has charred hillsides in this area around a home that survived or even around a lot on which they lost a home but on which they plan to rebuild should think about winter erosion control (laying down erosion netting, etc.) ASAP. A lot of the soil on which homes have been built in SoCal becomes very unstable when it is stripped of vegetation (as by fire) and then submitted to heavy rains. This looks like it will be a dry winter, but you never know. Better safe than sorry.
Good luck to everyone affected.
Good luck to everyone affected.
So sorry to hear about (and other stuff) your Low End Losses.
I work in Oxnard and watched in horror. I have some friends in Ventura & Ojai.
Like yourself, they are devasted but alive.
I’m praying to the Bass Gods for a speedy recovery for you & your family.
oh man, i can't imagine. Here is some good advice from an insurance adjuster that I copied from a popular message board a while back and saved in the cloud in case I ever need to refer to it.....
I used to be the guy who worked for insurance companies, and determined the value of every little thing in your house. The guy who would go head-to-head with those fire-truck-chasing professional loss adjusters. I may be able to help you not get screwed when filing your claim.
Our goal was to use the information you provided, and give the lowest damn value we can possibly justify for your item.
For instance, if all you say was "toaster" -- we would come up with a cheap-as-shag $4.88 toaster from Walmart, meant to toast one side of one piece of bread at a time. And we would do that for every thing you have ever owned. We had private master lists of the most commonly used descriptions, and what the cheapest viable replacements were. We also had wholesale pricing on almost everything out there, so really scored cheap prices to quote. To further that example:
I remember one specific customer... he had some old, piece of poopie projector (from mid-late 90s) that could stream a equally piece of poopie consumer camcorder. Worth like $5 at a scrap yard. It had some oddball shaging resolution it could record at, though -- and the guy strongly insisted that we replace with "Like Kind And Quality" (trigger words). Ended up being a $65k replacement, because the only camera on the market happened to be a high-end professional video camera (as in, for shooting actual movies). $65-goddam-thousand-dollars because he knew that loophole, and researched his poopie.
Remember to list shaging every -- even the most mundane shaging ******** you can think of. For example, if I was writing up the shower in my bathroom:
Most people writing claims for a total loss wouldn't even bother with the shower (it's just some used soap and sponges..) -- and those people would be losing out on $400.
Some things require documentation & ages. If you say "tv - $2,000" -- you're getting a 32" LCD, unless you can provide it was from the last year or two w/ receipts. Hopefully you have a good paper trail from credit/debit card expenditure / product registrations / etc.
If you're missing paper trails for things that were legitimately expensive -- go through every photo you can find that was taken in your house. Any parties you may have thrown, and guests put pics up on Facebook. Maybe an Imgur photo of your cat, hiding under a coffee table you think you purchased from Restoration Hardware. Like... seriously... come up with any evidence you possibly can, for anything that could possibly be deemed expensive.
The fire-truck chasing loss adjusters are evil sons of bitches, but, they actually do provide some value. You will definitely get more money, even if they take a cut. But all they're really doing, is just nitpicking the ever-living-poopie out of everything you possibly owned, and writing them all up "creatively" for the insurance company to process.
Sometimes people would come back to us with "updated* claims. They tried it on their own, and listed stuff like "toaster", "microwave", "tv" .. and weren't happy with what they got back. So they hired a fire-truck chaser, and re-submitted with "more information." I have absolutely seen claims go from under $7k calculated, to over $100k calculated. (It's amazing what can happen when people suddenly "remember" their entire wardrobe came from Nordstrom.)
I used to be the guy who worked for insurance companies, and determined the value of every little thing in your house. The guy who would go head-to-head with those fire-truck-chasing professional loss adjusters. I may be able to help you not get screwed when filing your claim.
Our goal was to use the information you provided, and give the lowest damn value we can possibly justify for your item.
For instance, if all you say was "toaster" -- we would come up with a cheap-as-shag $4.88 toaster from Walmart, meant to toast one side of one piece of bread at a time. And we would do that for every thing you have ever owned. We had private master lists of the most commonly used descriptions, and what the cheapest viable replacements were. We also had wholesale pricing on almost everything out there, so really scored cheap prices to quote. To further that example:
- If you said "toaster - $25" , we would have to be within -20% of that... so, we would find something that's pretty much dead-on $20.01.
- If you said "toaster- $200" , we'd kick it back and say NEED MORE INFO, because that's a ridiculous price for a toaster (with no other information given.)
- If you said "toaster, from Walmart" , you're getting that $4.88 one.
- If you said "toaster, from Macys" , you'd be more likely to get a $25-35 one.
- If you said "toaster", and all your other kitchen appliances were Jenn Air / Kitchenaid / etc., you would probably get a matching one.
- If you said "Proctor Silex 42888 2-Slice Toaster from Wamart, $9", you just got yourself $9.
- If you said "High-end Toaster, Stainless Steel, Blue glowing power button" ... you might get $35-50 instead. We had to match all features that were listed.
I remember one specific customer... he had some old, piece of poopie projector (from mid-late 90s) that could stream a equally piece of poopie consumer camcorder. Worth like $5 at a scrap yard. It had some oddball shaging resolution it could record at, though -- and the guy strongly insisted that we replace with "Like Kind And Quality" (trigger words). Ended up being a $65k replacement, because the only camera on the market happened to be a high-end professional video camera (as in, for shooting actual movies). $65-goddam-thousand-dollars because he knew that loophole, and researched his poopie.
Remember to list shaging every -- even the most mundane shaging ******** you can think of. For example, if I was writing up the shower in my bathroom:
- Designer Shower Curtain - $35
- Matching Shower Curtain Liner for Designer Shower Curtain - $15
- Shower Curtain Rings x20 - $15
- Stainless Steel Soap Dispenser for Shower - $35
- Natural Sponge Loofah - from Whole Foods - $15
- Natural Sponge Loofah for Back - from Whole Foods - $19
- Holder for Loofahs - $20
- Bars of soap - from Lush - $12 each (qty: 4)
- Bath bomb - from Lush - $12
- High end shampoo - from salon - $40
- High end conditioner - from salon - $40
- Refining pore mask - from salon - $55
Most people writing claims for a total loss wouldn't even bother with the shower (it's just some used soap and sponges..) -- and those people would be losing out on $400.
Some things require documentation & ages. If you say "tv - $2,000" -- you're getting a 32" LCD, unless you can provide it was from the last year or two w/ receipts. Hopefully you have a good paper trail from credit/debit card expenditure / product registrations / etc.
If you're missing paper trails for things that were legitimately expensive -- go through every photo you can find that was taken in your house. Any parties you may have thrown, and guests put pics up on Facebook. Maybe an Imgur photo of your cat, hiding under a coffee table you think you purchased from Restoration Hardware. Like... seriously... come up with any evidence you possibly can, for anything that could possibly be deemed expensive.
The fire-truck chasing loss adjusters are evil sons of bitches, but, they actually do provide some value. You will definitely get more money, even if they take a cut. But all they're really doing, is just nitpicking the ever-living-poopie out of everything you possibly owned, and writing them all up "creatively" for the insurance company to process.
Sometimes people would come back to us with "updated* claims. They tried it on their own, and listed stuff like "toaster", "microwave", "tv" .. and weren't happy with what they got back. So they hired a fire-truck chaser, and re-submitted with "more information." I have absolutely seen claims go from under $7k calculated, to over $100k calculated. (It's amazing what can happen when people suddenly "remember" their entire wardrobe came from Nordstrom.)
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