San Diego Fires Force Cross Country Championship To Move
The Mountain West Conference Men's and Women's Cross Country Championships which was supposed to be held in San Diego, California's Mission Bay Park on Saturday, the twenty-seventh of October 2007 has now been officially moved – for the second time in the conference's nine-year history – to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It has been announced that the competitions will now be hosted by the University of New Mexico and held at the establishment's North Golf Course, as San Diego is currently struggling through a particularly bad case of wildfire, which had not only caused much natural and structural damage for the area, but also polluted much of the air. The last time the Mountain West Conference had to move from San Diego (to be held in Morley Fields) to Albuquerque was back in 2003, and it had also been due to wildfires.
The announcement of the move was made on Tuesday, the twenty-third of October 2007, just days before the Mountain West Conference Men's and Women's Cross Country Championships is to be held. It was quite obviously a wise choice considering the devastation that San Diego had to deal with at the time; it was a day later, on the morning of the twenty-fourth of October 2007, that the area was finally issued a formal disaster declaration by the Bush administration.
The wildfires – there were two major initial ones: the Witch Creek fire and the Harris fire – had started their devastating reign on Sunday, the twenty-first of October 2007. Since then, San Diego's locals had lost more than seven-hundred homes. The county itself found itself with almost three hundred thousand acres worth of burned land and property. The damage is further compounded by the occurrence of yet another fire, the Rice Canyon fire, which has already taken down some seven thousand and five hundred acres of land and is said to be inching in on Del Luz and Northern Fallbrook; currently about four hundred structures are being threatened by the Rice Canyon fire.
At the moment, the fires are yet to be contained, made only worse by the area's shifting winds. The air is also still rather noxious in areas, and it will likely take a while before San Diego will have completely clean air.
The Mountain West Conference Men's and Women's Cross Country Championships to be held in Albuquerque's University of New Mexico on Saturday will begin with the men's 8K at ten in the morning (MT), followed by the eleven a.m. (MT) women's 6K.
