East Bay Home and Gardens

When Building, Think Ahead To When Repairs Are Needed

By Jane Powell
Thursday July 03, 2008
Recently I have been doing a few repairs to my back porch, which has required taking it apart in places to replace various structural members which are rotting. -more-

About the House: California is Burning

By Matt Cantor
Thursday July 03, 2008
California is burning down. This is the real Shock and Awe. As of this writing, there are over 1,300 fires burning in the state and nearly a third of a million acres have burned. Since I’m not good with acres, I decided to convert this to square miles. At 640 acres to a square mile, this means that close to 500 square miles have burned. Again, I’m not that good with areas so I like to find something to compare this with. The city of Los Angeles is about 500 square miles. San Francisco is less than half that size. Imagine, two San Franciscos have completely burned down in this recent spate of fires. We’ve currently got over 17,000 fire personnel working on fighting these fires, over a thousand engines in the field, three hundred bull dozers cutting fire breaks and 85 helicopters (mostly dropping water on these many blazes). -more-