Jet Crash
First of all: Tad, Lane, Paige, and I, and our house and property, are all fine.
Yesterday an F/A-18D Hornet jet plane crashed into our neighborhood of University City (UC), a few blocks from my kids’ daycare center. In the map above, the blue mark is our house, the green mark is daycare, and the red mark is the crash site. The gray area to the right (if you click on the map and move over) is Miramar Marine base. You can see the train tracks just to the north of the crash site — that’s in an unpopulated canyon that the pilot was clearly trying to get to, and just barely didn’t make it. (Sorry, not a great map, but I didn’t want to spend more than 5mins on it!)
The plane hit a little before noon. I was in a lunch meeting, and Tad sent me an instant message that said, “So did daycare call?” They hadn’t called. Tad had figured out that the crash, although close, was far enough away that there was probably nothing to worry about. I tried to call daycare, but, not surprisingly, the line was busy. Tad suggested calling another KinderCare, so I called the one in Poway. They hadn’t heard about the crash yet but promised to call me back. A few minutes later, after speaking to the KinderCare corporate office (she couldn’t get through to our center either), the woman did call me back. Everything was fine, although due to air quality concerns, the kids were to be kept indoors the rest of the day.
I decided to stay at work at that point. If there were air quality issues, they were better off at the air conditioned daycare center than in our house. Also, normalcy is good. I did speak to some friends in the neighborhood, and traffic was surprisingly light. Apparently all the folks who zip through UC on their way to Clairemont stayed away.
That evening, when I picked the kids up, you’d never know that anything had happened. The helicopters overhead and the lighter-than-normal traffic were the only things out of the ordinary. The air quality was fine as far as I could tell. The kids were a bit stir crazy from staying inside all day, but otherwise were never the wiser. They did hear the crash and the sirens, which got them all excited (“firetrucks!”), but otherwise it was a normal day for them.
The news says that three people – a child, its mother and grandmother – were killed in the crash, and another child is missing. I believe they are all from the same family. I can’t stop thinking about them. I don’t know them or anything about them; in fact I haven’t read the latest news this morning. In my head, I am imagining that there is a dad who was at work when the crash happened, and now his home and his family are all gone. It makes me sick just to type that. I caught the tail end of a local radio program about the crash this morning, and the last caller asked if there was anything she could do to help that family, and the radio folks didn’t know.