Word: santas
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...about 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, another one of Samuels' friends, Chris Gray, 23, got up to check up on the homes of his friends in another part of Rancho Santa Fe, on Las Colinas street. He was planning to videotape what he saw and post it on a new group that had been set up on Facebook. He wandered around Las Colinas and its side streets for about three hours, watching some residents try to save their property, others assessing their destroyed homes. He says he saw 19 homes completely leveled by fire, the cars in front of them...
...Sunday afternoon, the Santa Ana winds whipped up and the waters of the Pacific Ocean off Del Mar were perfect. "The waves were in a once-in-a-year condition," says Garrett Samuels, 23. "Picture-perfect waves." "It was a hard offshore wind," says Alex Gudim, 20. That was a good sign. "It's the opposite of what it's like on land, which is bad. But on the waters, the waves push up, they stand up like a barrel. It was like that all day Sunday and Monday...
...water, looking straight inland and over beyond Del Mar, you saw the smoke rising from the area around Rancho Santa Fe, suffusing the air all around with ash. Says Gudim, "You couldn't look inland, you couldn't look at the shore because you'd see mounds of ash. You'd be inhaling ash." But that didn't stop the surfer. He still wanted to catch those perfect waves. And, on Monday, with a bandanna tied around his face to filter...
...back on land later on Monday, it was all seriousness. Gudim and several of his friends had been evacuated from their homes in Rancho Santa Fe. They moved to Del Mar, where they "chilled" at the apartment of Samuels and his roommates Jeff Stumm and Gordon Cunliffe, both 23. But the friends wanted to check up on the homes of their friends and neighbors. So they decided to head back...
Things might have been different if the harsh, hot Santa Ana had kept blowing at gale force, because the inferno came close to pushing Schwarzenegger's system to the breaking point. Last May, a Los Angeles Times investigation found a number of unfilled gaps in the state's firefighting capacity, despite the recommendations of a blue-ribbon commission set up in the wake of disastrous fires in 2003. Big-ticket items, like more manpower and trucks, new communications systems and a modern fleet of water-dumping helicopters and planes, went unfunded by the legislature and the Schwarzenegger administration...