We had our first wild fire of the summer this week. A comparatively small one, only 10 acres or so, which started when a homeowner, with a permit, allowed a small bonfire to get away from him. Crews were on the scene within minutes and even despite the gusting winds, were able to contain the fire and bring it under control over the course of the afternoon. No big problem for the firefighters and if anything, a useful exercise for when the inevitable bigger fires come later in the summer.
However, what was disturbing about the Shawnee Fire, as it has come to be called, is that it was on March 22, almost 2 weeks earlier than 2002 when the beginning of April marked the start of the worst fire season in living memory. That was our first summer here and I got into the habit of keeping one Internet browser permanently open at work so I could keep an eye on the fire reports. There had been a couple of smallish fires even before I moved here in mid-April, but the first to really grab my attention, was the Snaking Road fire, which broke out about 8 miles as the crow flies from the house on which we’d just had an offer accepted the previous day. This seemed like something of a bad omen.
It was the realtor who gave me the news, calling my office to say “You’re gonna hear about this soon enough, but there’s a fire raging out of control up by your house.” I hadn’t lived here long enough to learn the geography of the area, and many of the landmarks mentioned in the reports were unfamiliar to me, however one thing was clear. That fire was disturbingly near and getting closer by the hour. No contracts had been signed and from a legal point of view, this house didn’t belong to us, but even so, I didn’t want to see it go up in flames. More pressing was the fact that my friends Kris and Mario, with whom I was lodging, lived equally close to the fire zone and were both out at work themselves. It wasn’t just their house that was in danger, they have animals that would need to be moved should an evacuation prove necessary. Time was of the essence.
My new employers were very understanding and didn’t bat an eyelid when I explained I needed to take off, but things got more difficult from that point. Highway 285, the only road home was undergoing some major construction at the time. Tailbacks were usual even on normal evenings but today it seemed, the entire state was trying to get up the hill. Not only was the traffic tailed back for miles, it wasn’t moving anywhere and the process of covering the 30 miles to Pine Junction took an age. It was a warm day and my little car overheated at one point so I spent an additional hour standing by the roadside until I was confident enough to ease back into the creeping traffic.
As it turned out, the Snaking Road fire did comparatively little damage. No lives were lost, each home was saved and other than a small storage shed, no property was harmed. The forest took a beating, but in comparison to many natural fires, even that wasn’t too severe. The cause of the fire turned out to be three high school boys who’d started it as a prank to get out of class. These future cancer curers had compounded their stupidity by boasting of it to their classmates. Naturally, because they were “only children”, no charges were ever filed. Hey, boys will be boys. And after all, what’s 2,300 acres of forest?
The starter of the next big fire, the Hayman, didn’t get off quite so light. Maybe because she was a grown woman, or perhaps because this particular conflagration destroyed forest over an area of several miles and required hundreds of people be evacuated from their homes, or perhaps just because she was a Forest Service employee and perhaps should have known better, she didn’t inspire anywhere near the same level of sympathy. Despite their being several dozen wild fires raging out of control around the state at the time; despite the parks and wilderness areas being closed to the public and despite fire bans being enforced to the point that even smoking out of doors on your own property was forbidden, this rocket scientist decided to build a fire in the woods, in order to burn some letters from her ex-husband. Although her case is under appeal, she’s facing some serious jail time.
If we didn’t own our house when the Snaking Road fire started, we did this time and in fact, had been living in it for a whole 10 days. Although the starting point was a good twenty miles away, the Hayman Fire grew at a phenomenal rate. One firefighter likened it to watching a tidal wave as it rolled up the hills and down the valleys. Some homeowners near the danger zone were given a few minutes to grab their most treasured possessions and clear out. I heard one heartbreaking tale of an 80-year old woman, who was given twenty minutes to grab what she could before being evacuated. She took her wedding dress. By the following morning that was the only possession she had in the world. Others weren’t so fortunate. By the time it was finally brought under control; the Hayman Fire had devoured 90,000 acres of forest. Thankfully, no lives were lost but many people lost their homes, countless numbers of livestock perished and who knows how much wildlife died.
We’ve learned a lot about fire mitigation since buying this house. About how the cedar shingles we have on our roof are pure tinder, about how the debris we have lying on the ground will simply fuel the fire at an astonishing rate and how the trees we have growing so close to the house will probably cause the fire department to drive straight past us and concentrate on the homes they might have a chance of saving. We were spoilt last year following a wet winter and the big hundred-year blizzard, which dumped feet of snow on the area. As a result, we didn’t take care of things the way we should. However, we can’t be so lazy this year and I see a lot of weekends work with a chainsaw.
As we’ve seen, you don’t mess around with wildfires and it’s going to be a long, hot summer.
However, what was disturbing about the Shawnee Fire, as it has come to be called, is that it was on March 22, almost 2 weeks earlier than 2002 when the beginning of April marked the start of the worst fire season in living memory. That was our first summer here and I got into the habit of keeping one Internet browser permanently open at work so I could keep an eye on the fire reports. There had been a couple of smallish fires even before I moved here in mid-April, but the first to really grab my attention, was the Snaking Road fire, which broke out about 8 miles as the crow flies from the house on which we’d just had an offer accepted the previous day. This seemed like something of a bad omen.
It was the realtor who gave me the news, calling my office to say “You’re gonna hear about this soon enough, but there’s a fire raging out of control up by your house.” I hadn’t lived here long enough to learn the geography of the area, and many of the landmarks mentioned in the reports were unfamiliar to me, however one thing was clear. That fire was disturbingly near and getting closer by the hour. No contracts had been signed and from a legal point of view, this house didn’t belong to us, but even so, I didn’t want to see it go up in flames. More pressing was the fact that my friends Kris and Mario, with whom I was lodging, lived equally close to the fire zone and were both out at work themselves. It wasn’t just their house that was in danger, they have animals that would need to be moved should an evacuation prove necessary. Time was of the essence.
My new employers were very understanding and didn’t bat an eyelid when I explained I needed to take off, but things got more difficult from that point. Highway 285, the only road home was undergoing some major construction at the time. Tailbacks were usual even on normal evenings but today it seemed, the entire state was trying to get up the hill. Not only was the traffic tailed back for miles, it wasn’t moving anywhere and the process of covering the 30 miles to Pine Junction took an age. It was a warm day and my little car overheated at one point so I spent an additional hour standing by the roadside until I was confident enough to ease back into the creeping traffic.
As it turned out, the Snaking Road fire did comparatively little damage. No lives were lost, each home was saved and other than a small storage shed, no property was harmed. The forest took a beating, but in comparison to many natural fires, even that wasn’t too severe. The cause of the fire turned out to be three high school boys who’d started it as a prank to get out of class. These future cancer curers had compounded their stupidity by boasting of it to their classmates. Naturally, because they were “only children”, no charges were ever filed. Hey, boys will be boys. And after all, what’s 2,300 acres of forest?
The starter of the next big fire, the Hayman, didn’t get off quite so light. Maybe because she was a grown woman, or perhaps because this particular conflagration destroyed forest over an area of several miles and required hundreds of people be evacuated from their homes, or perhaps just because she was a Forest Service employee and perhaps should have known better, she didn’t inspire anywhere near the same level of sympathy. Despite their being several dozen wild fires raging out of control around the state at the time; despite the parks and wilderness areas being closed to the public and despite fire bans being enforced to the point that even smoking out of doors on your own property was forbidden, this rocket scientist decided to build a fire in the woods, in order to burn some letters from her ex-husband. Although her case is under appeal, she’s facing some serious jail time.
If we didn’t own our house when the Snaking Road fire started, we did this time and in fact, had been living in it for a whole 10 days. Although the starting point was a good twenty miles away, the Hayman Fire grew at a phenomenal rate. One firefighter likened it to watching a tidal wave as it rolled up the hills and down the valleys. Some homeowners near the danger zone were given a few minutes to grab their most treasured possessions and clear out. I heard one heartbreaking tale of an 80-year old woman, who was given twenty minutes to grab what she could before being evacuated. She took her wedding dress. By the following morning that was the only possession she had in the world. Others weren’t so fortunate. By the time it was finally brought under control; the Hayman Fire had devoured 90,000 acres of forest. Thankfully, no lives were lost but many people lost their homes, countless numbers of livestock perished and who knows how much wildlife died.
We’ve learned a lot about fire mitigation since buying this house. About how the cedar shingles we have on our roof are pure tinder, about how the debris we have lying on the ground will simply fuel the fire at an astonishing rate and how the trees we have growing so close to the house will probably cause the fire department to drive straight past us and concentrate on the homes they might have a chance of saving. We were spoilt last year following a wet winter and the big hundred-year blizzard, which dumped feet of snow on the area. As a result, we didn’t take care of things the way we should. However, we can’t be so lazy this year and I see a lot of weekends work with a chainsaw.
As we’ve seen, you don’t mess around with wildfires and it’s going to be a long, hot summer.
