When you live in a place with as much wilderness as I do, wildfires are just part of the scenery. They happen. But this one’s happening a little too close to home.
It’s been four days now, and they have it 5% contained. It’s burned almost 6,000 acres. We have a national fire response team (57 people) and eight 20-man crews on it in addition to our locals. It’s in totally unmanageable terrain, so they can only really hit it from the air (we have air tankers and helicopters on it). It’s only a few miles from town one way, and from my house a different direction. One shift in the wind (and 60 mph winds are common here) and a bunch of my friends are homeless. My wife’s working the volunteer information phone lines and we’re both on call for evacuation assistance.
Everything smells like smoke, my yard is covered in ash, and I can sit on my back deck and watch air tankers dumping fire retardant.
I’m generally calm and cool about emergencies, but this one is getting me just a bit freaked.
On the bright side (heh), just be glad you’re not posting a “need help, fast” thread!
We too live in the middle of the woods, but don’t really think of this as fire country (Catskills area of NY). Did you know/have an inkling of the area before you moved? How does one find out (it’s not likely something to be advertised in the real estate ad, is it)?
Hope things go well, hope you get some great shots of the tankers (or do some large shots to calm your nerves). You’ll keep us posted, no?
I didn’t actually call around and ask people about fires before we moved here. I considered it kind of common sense that when I’m adjacent to almost a million acres of wilderness area and national forest–much of it heavily wooded–with warm summers and low humidity (the temperature is currently in the 80s and the humidity in the low teens), there will be wildfires. Oh, yeah, and we just came out of an 8-year drought, so everything’s dry.
Where I live we had one last year. Look up the Castle Rock Fire on Inciweb. (ETA: their site seems to be down at the moment. I keep timing out.) I know all too well now what it’s like. It got within a couple of miles of me, and talk about impossible terrain – mountains and valleys! There hadn’t been a fire like that around here for upwards of twenty years, if not longer, but a few days after I moved here, there was a lightning strike to the west.
The firefighters were excellent. Beyond excellent. I am forever amazed and grateful for everything they did.
I’m not trying to one-up you, but I really have been where you are, and it’s no fun at all. Hang in there.
It’s pushing 10,000 acres now, and some hotspots have jumped out of the canyon to our side of the ridge. They have 700 people on the fire now, but most of them can’t even get to it. I’ve been watching the planes and helicopters fighting it. They’re cutting firebreaks with bulldozers.
I think we’re in good shape, but it’s still rather nerve-wracking.
The fire’s up to over 10,000 acres now, but it’s about 1/3 contained, and there’s a solid handline between the fire and my house. I’d be breathing easier, except the air here is still filled with soot.
My wife and I decided we’d had enough of breathing smoke for a week and went hiking up at 10,000 feet altitude among a bunch of alpine lakes today. Then we came back to town and spent the last three hours at our local microbrewery.
You know, InvisibleWombat, Ohio is boring as hell, but boredom is the price I happily pay for no wildfires, no mudslides, no hurricanes, and only teeny little earthquakes. Yes, Ohio gets the occasional tornado, but NE Ohio not so much.
UPDATE: It looks like things are well in hand. The firefighters say that they won’t call this fire “out” until there’s a good layer of snow on it, but it’s mostly contained and there’s no longer smoke and ash in the air. They’ve pulled most of the hotshot crews out, shut down the fire retardant operation, and taken the heavy air tankers elsewhere. We’re all breathing heavy (smoke-free) sighs of relief.
