The Tea Fire

I cannot believe that it has only been 48 hours.

Thursday evening, Wesmont College and the surrounding Montecito/Santa Barbara area was ravaged by fire. The Tea Fire started about 5:30 pm in the Tea Gardens right above the college. I left campus at 5:20 after I got out of class and had no idea what was to come. I had called my mom when I was walking to catch the shuttle because the wind was unbelievably strong and I wanted her to hear it in my phone. I missed being evacuated with the rest of campus by about 15 minutes.

I sat down in apartment when I got, to relax for a few minutes before cooking dinner and as soon as I sat down, I hear some of my residents in the courtyard yelling about a fire. I opened my door to tell people not to yell "fire" so loudly and could see a huge plume of black smoke from the hill behind us. One of the girls that lives next door, came and told me that Westmont was on fire.

I turned on the news and discovered that a fire had broken out and that the strong winds were spreading the fire extremely quickly. As the evening progressed, we learned that all of the students and staff on campus, including 170 high school students on campus for Preview Days, were evacuated to the gym, the community's wildfire evacuation place, where they stayed for the rest of night and many, into the morning the next day. The picture to the left was taken by a Westmont student, Jessical Conrad, from her dorm (Van Kampen) as she was evacuating. The apartment that I live in is an off campus dorm, so all of our students did a fantastic job of helping us track down every student' s whereabouts. We watched the orange glow against the dark sky grow bigger and closer to our apartment and watched the news closely. Around 8 pm, the fire was moving quickly down the hill and we decided to encourage our students to evacuate. By 9 everyone was out and our neighborhood had been deemed a mandatory evacuation zone. My room mates, some students who had been off campus at the time of the evac, and I drove south and stayed the night Carpenteria. Friday morning, most everyone with family in California went home. I spent the day with some local friends and continued to track the devastation.

At Westmont, we lost our Physics building, old math building, psychology offices-Bouder Hall (housed in the historical carriage house of an estate the school bought), Freshman dorm Clark hall- buildings M, S, and the resident director's apartment were lost and slight damage occured to various other dorm buildings, and 15 homes in faculty housing. Alot of the beautiful landscaping on campus has been wiped out, but miraculoously, alot of it was saved. Fire burned right up on both sides to the Friendship Gardens but the actual gardens were left green and untouched. School has been canceled until at least Wednesday, but conference calls Today (Saturday) and Monday will confirm the college's plans. I am safely back in my apartment this morning and residents have been coming and going quite frequently.

Please pray for the 110 home that were lost in this fire and the families who have been displaced. Many of these families are friends of mine and the college's. Pray for the students who have lost their dorm home, and for the quick return to the academic semester. Pray also, for the fires that have broken out in LA county this morning; many of the students evacuated from Westmont now face the same threats at their homes. Pray that everyone involved remembers that our posessions are not our own, but belong to Him who provided them first.