“Heirloom Project” for San Diego Fire Victims
Fellow photographer Melissa Schwartz in San Diego has devoted herself to organizing the “Heirloom Project” which in her words is “a collective of photographers offering free family portraits to those families who lost their homes in the san diego wildfires in october, 2007.” Like half a million other San Diegans, we were required to evacuate our home when fires threatened our neighborhood. In the end, the evacuation and days spent away from home only amounted to a major inconvenience. Others, including some that I know, lost everything. Please check out the “Heirloom Project” website and watch it grow along with the project itself.
The phone rang at our house shortly after four a.m. on Monday morning. We had stayed up late the night before, watching the news to keep an eye on the fire. Our house had been enveloped in smoke since around two o’clock Sunday afternoon. After the phone call, I went to my back patio and I was shocked to actually see flames on the hill, across the valley. The fire wasn’t moving in our direction, so we didn’t feel very threatened, but the evacuation was mandatory, so we packed up the camera gear, hard drives, my Mac, and uh..oh yeah!..the cats!
Looking north from our yard around 5:50 am.
The ash was everywhere, as everybody who was here knows - I’m thankful that ash was all we had to contend with