The full extent of the horror won’t be known probably for years. Embedded in it are these little stories of absolute desperation. Of course she did. Anyone who has ever loved a pet knows why.

Via Sue Echelmeyer over at That Other Place…

Actress Samantha Rose Baldwin was trying to get home in the Palisades fire to save her 10-year old cat. Traffic was at a standstill so she abandoned her car and ran for 15 minutes straight to get home.

She found her cat who was hiding, put her in a blanket, put her in a cat backpack and fled the house. At this point the route where she had left her car was on fire. So she ran for her life down to the ocean carrying her cat on her back and a roller bag.

She made it. She saved her cat.

From the photographer Ted Soqui: “Samantha Rose Baldwin escaped the Palisades Fire with only a roller bag full of belongings and wearing her pet cat in a backpack. She is standing with the sea to her back in the Gladstone’s Parking lot, and facing the acrid smoke from the fire. Shot this image with my Leica M6 film camera using Kodak Portra 400 film

This post from farmer Edward Westerfield shows us why we need to pay attention to what farmers tell us about the changing weather patterns (paragraph separations are mine). 

Fire about one mile from my home in Baja in the last hour. My home on the beach will be fine but it makes me think about what more than a half century of farming has taught me.

Two weather events marked vegetable production in California like clockwork. One was that rains would start in the fall almost exactly on November 1 after a long summer of no rain – meaning time to make sure all tomatoes and other non rain-tolerant crops were out of the field and on their way to market. The other was the Santa Ana winds. Every fall they would come within a few days of September 21, the fall equinox. It defined our plantings in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border where the salad and brassica crops feed the country every winter. I was trained to start planting the day the Santa Ana winds ended so that the soil temperatures would have dropped enough.

This year no rains have come to southern California or northern Baja in 8 months. ZERO! And the Santa Ana winds came this week – almost 4 months late, and fiercer than any on record. Some people with political agendas are trying desperately to point fingers but us farmers know the problem. The clock is broken.

Global Warming…or Climate Change if you like…is a real thing. Ask the weather forecasters whose models are all mucked up now. Ask the ski slope operators who need to use their snow machines more often now. Ask the farmers. Especially ask the farmers. Their clock is the ticking of the seasons. And the clock is broken.