This morning, at approximately 0720 PST, we were given notice by the fire department to immediately evacuate our home. We had to leave within 15 minutes, grab whatever we could, and get out of the Lake Arrowhead / Running Springs area and down the mountain as quickly as possible.

At last report, the fires have already destroyed over 130 homes in our immediate area, 1/4 mile away, with a 0% containment at the present time. More about this fire >

We do not yet know the status of our homes, our area, or anything else---as all inbound traffic into the area has been blocked. Power lines are down everywhere and the high winds are making it next to impossible for the fire crews to get a level of control over the flames in our forested area.

Until further notice, there will be no updates to this web site. The contact form is closed and email will be unavailable. Please direct your unimatic questions elsewhere. In short, we can spend no further time maintaining JSN until this situation is resolved.  The remainer of my web development equipment was left up on the mountain---and I have far more serious issues to deal with now.

Most ironically, I don't know how much longer this web site will still be online. Unbelievably, we had a blackout two hours before the fire began to come through and I accidentally left our natural gas-powered generator turned on. What this means, dear JSN readers, is that the jumpseatnews web server that hosts the data on this web page is still turned on and running up there on the mountain inside my closet.

That's right. Although this site's static pages are hosted by normal web host, the data that makes the pages display is hosted by a small computer I own that is located up in the red fire area in the photo you see above.  The jumpseatnews data web server is all alone, running by itself in the dark, inside a smoky inferno in Lake Arrowhead, and still dishing up UAL news to United Airlines Flight Attendants around the world. There just seems so much irony in that.  Go figure...

I hope it does well tonight and into tomorrow as long as the power generator holds out----and of course that the house doesn't burn to the ground.

I'm ok, Bailey's ok, and we're just standing by watching the world burn.

It's going to be a long night.

Christopher