A turn for the worse and time to evacuate

At 2:30 am on Sunday morning we woke to one of the eeriest sounds we've ever heard. Though my cell phone was turned off, Susan's was on and we heard one of those civil alert tones that we used to hear and see on TV when they would say 'This is a test of the emergency broadcast system.' The whole concept of alerting people about these types of emergencies via cell phone is somewhat new and we had never heard this before. But we had an idea why we received it.

We got up and checked Twitter and various other news feeds. The fire was getting much worse in Carpinteria and moving very fast toward Cate and the rest of Carpinteria. From the fire maps we checked, it looked like Cate would be enveloped by the fire any minute. Though it turned out that the alert we had received was, technically, a glitch and was later rescinded, we decided it was the right time to get up and gather up our valuables. Though this might have seemed overly conservative to some, since were still many miles away from the fire, we decided that all of the uncertainty and the terrible smoke and ash were good enough reason to gather our things and head to the Santa Ynez Valley to our family house there.

So we spent 3 hours packing up valuables, woke up Bryce, and took two cars up to our place in Santa Ynez. We arrived at 6:30 am and went straight to bed!

While we were evacuating, here's what things were looking like at Cate School: