(Photo: Terri Abrahamson evacuated from Jamul on Sunday morning, and she's been living alone from an RV in a parking lot ever since. Angela Carone/KPBS )
Even though thousands of San Diegans are returning home, and firefighters have more room for optimism, many communities are still threatened. Some people have lived in shelters for days. One of those threatened communities is Jamul.
I discovered an unofficial evacuation site in a Target parking lot near Jamul, just off the 94. I saw hundreds of RV's. It was a small city. I discovered an accidental community of fire survivors.
While there I met a woman named Terri Abrahamson. She evacuated from Jamul on Sunday morning, and she's been living alone in that parking lot ever since. On Saturday night, before the fires started, she could have sworn she smelled smoke near her house.
Abrahamson: I think because of that I was sort of prepared to face what I saw, which was a wall of fire behind my house. Wind that bent the trees and broke them and uprooted them, and hard to stand up, and gravel flying everywhere, and rocks hitting things and fences coming down.
Started getting calls at about 8 o'clock: "You need to leave!" from my friends. I'm like "Nah!" I'm not leaving till I have to. And then we got the reverse 911 call. I dont know maybe 10 or 11 Sunday night, and we left. Within two hours. But not until the gas and electric went off. When the electricity goes off, the water goes off everything goes off. Everything's off you really don't have any way to fight any fire or reason to stay, and so we got out.
I have new friends here that I intend to keep, and there's a lot more people that I found out I want to know, so I'm going to let things happen kind of naturally when I leave and make sure that I get to know more about the neighbors that I've seen here. 'Cause I think we're a pretty fantastic community. I think Jamul is a pocket of -- it's the heart, you know of San Diego. Maybe it is. It might be. They are so decent to each other and really have big hearts, and they take good care of each other, and it's just been really easy, no probelms whatsoever that I know of. I mean I have only had a little bit of sleep, too, so I think I kinda know.
Reporter: How much sleep have you had?
Abrahamson: Oh, I'm averaging about 3 hours a night since Saturday.
Reporter: Why can't you sleep?
Abrahamson: Not knowing what's going on or where people are, and I had hit my level yesterday of frustration about, "I just wanna go home!" And I was hoping for those red slippers you could click together three times and you're back home!
As soon as we find out when the electricity's coming back on, we'll probably be going home. I don't know if they're gonna have it up in a day or a month or what have you. But I don't know how bad things are. I haven't been out. I'm trying to find a way today to just go look. All I wanna do is look. I don't know yet what to even expect. I just have a feeling it's gonna be pretty different of a landscape than what we left on Sunday.
