Horses threatened by the California wild fires in the Malibu area are finding refuge at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, CA. As of yesterday afternoon 120 horses had been sheltered. The facilities at Pierce College can accomadate 200 horses and additional shelters are being set up in Los Angeles County. Read a press release from Pierce College here.

Update: signonsandiego.com has a news story on the evacuation of horses from fire threatened areas: “By 9:30 a.m., the fairgrounds’ 2,400 stalls were full. Horse owners who didn’t make it had to look elsewhere: to friends and family with barns or land, to an evacuation site in Lakeside or stables in San Juan Capistrano, Thermal and Indio.” Read more…

You can find a video on the horses evacuated to the Del Mar Fairgrounds here (a commercial plays first and then the real video).

KPBS the NPR station in San Diego has put together a great map of fire affected areas. It includes a wealth of information on the fires including info on evacuation centers, animal evacuation centers, evacuation orders, and more.

I received this email from a MD friend living in San Diego:

“It was hard to concentrate on anything yesterday. 300,000 evacuees, many camped in our neighborhood I guess with family. Hundreds of homes burnt north, south and east of us. Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Santa Fe, Poway, Santee, Alpine, the wild animal park, horse farms (relocated to Del Mar, which was then evacuated along with Solana Beach). It’s expected to get worse for a few days. The burn unit here is at capacity and our backup hospitalist was called in to see patients evacuated from Pomerado Hospital. The sky is gray; there’s ash on our cars and my throat hurts. Since 1900, however, nothing as central as where we are has ever burned. Signonsandiego.com has maps that are useful and lots of places have satellite photos of the smoke.”

Update: NPR.org has a large number of news stories on the California fires. One story (link, click the listen button) talks about a woman who was able to evacuate all but one of her horses to the Del Mar Fairgrounds. She had to leave one horse behind in a fire ravaged area. Sadly, I can only imagine that such stories are not rare.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 8:40 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.