Fires

[clearwater]

New fire along Lake Rooseveldt is about 2 miles from several friend's homes. Crawling toward them. Praying the wind keeps blowing away from their places.

 

[Teknys]

I'm up between Kendrick - Bovill ID. This year it's all smoke. Unfortunately I'm having a tough time of it this year. Couple years ago we had fire with in 1 mile of the house. Stayed on property to monitor. I'm setup pretty good with all gravel around all my buildings (metal sides and roof) by minimum 50-60 feet to the nearest tree. As noted in a previous post, we didn't have the snow last winter like usual. Normal season I plow 10-12 times. Last year ZERO. I'm at 2600' elevation.

 

[3 Meter Para Bellum]

Well I said we rarely have big fires where I live, but it has been so hot and dry this year (I haven't noticed any cloud seeding) and we had one 16 miles north of us. I was outside around 6 pm cleaning up after doing some sprinkler repairs when the wind suddenly picked up and I immediately took notice looking around to see if it looked stormy. Then the strong smell of smoke hit. Five minutes later it looked quite smoky all over my street and ash was falling from the sky. It didn't get close enough to bother us, but the people up north of us were evacuating to churches out of the path of it. It wasn't a big fire by west coast standards, but the governor declared a state of emergency which allowed us to call in some extra helicopters to help contain the fire. We're not equipped to deal with that sort of thing in Arkansas because it doesn't happen very often, but if it does it can be a bit dicy because of the sheer volume of trees to fuel the blaze. Things have gotten under control I think, but I am not sure what the damage is yet.