www.arareko.net

A big fire took place on a big piece of land behind many houses in the neighborhood. The wind happened to be strong that day, which made the fire very intense and to move very quickly. Many people, including Firefighters and Police, arrived and were trying to control it. On that piece of land as well there are some high voltage electricity towers. Bad combination…

When the fire moved right under the towers, a huge voltaic arc formed and a lightning strike happened, it went to a metallic fence behind all the houses. This huge amount of electricity moved across the fence, and it went into street wires, fences, houses, etc. Two small constructions went into fire. A total chaos. The electrical shock passed very close to where many people were, including me. I had climbed my backyard wall and was tossing water over the burning land using a water hose.

Thank God nothing happened to anybody. Only some of us were thrown down to the ground and a few others got small injuries. It was a really scary moment, any of us could have easily been killed.

As to material damages… The neighborhood has no electricity, no telephones, water pipes got broken, wires burned, appliances burned, etc. From what I’ve seen (given there is no electricity) my house is leaking water from some walls, it has some wires burned, there is no telephone and several appliances got burned too.

The status right now is that each of us has to fix his/her houses/stuff for the moment. But everybody and authorities are figuring out responsibilities. I guess some kind of legal battle will very likely come in after this.

This morning I had to travel to Sunnyvale. Some very important meetings and work are scheduled for the next 2 weeks and I had to come, impossible to reschedule after 6 months of negotiations… Fortunately, Güero was able to go to Mexico City today to help me out with getting some things fixed while I am out of town.

So this is a brief version of how things were. And I thought it was going to be a relaxed weekend… *sigh*

Note: My ADSL modem/router died too. I’ll continue blogging and saving my posts off-line, hoping that my home server can be back on line in a couple of weeks.