Another big wildfire yesterday during the heavy winds we were warned about in the weather report. That's two in a week. It was down on one of the lakes used for hydropower, so there was equipment and fuel and facilities endangered. We were pretty worn out by the end of it.
I'll try to get some rest and be back to normal next week.
" hyrdopower" your typo sort of sounds like Old Norse!
ReplyDeleteGood work on getting the fires under control. Can't think of a harder peacetime job than that.
Thank you, I fixed the typo.
ReplyDeleteThe winds made the fire much harder to control. It kept drying things out and then stirring new fires up out of the embers. Ordinarily the lake/river (it's an artificial lake made by flooding the east fork of the Tuckasegee, which right now is low enough that it's more like the river than the lake) would have served as a barrier. The winds were stiff enough we ended up with fire on both sides.
The fire on Thursday was uncontained by any such natural barrier, but the winds were lower. Also, the guy who started that fire had his excavator (locally called a "trackhoe") and was able to help us cut a fire break around parts of it.
We;re bracing for another bad fire day tomorrow. Lots of fuel, and winds over 60 MPH, dew points below 0 F. We've had some firefighters injured (brush-truck rolled, both were able to get out of the truck.) Everyone is praying for rain and bracing for trouble.
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
A few summers ago, after the Paradise fires, I went sort of semi-berserk around our place with chainsaw cutting brush and understory and hauling away deadwood- filled about four 12 yard dump trucks packed down with an excavator. Just trying to cut the fuel load close to the house and make a defensible space.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, we have not had a bad fire in the coastal Puget Sound area for a long time. So everyone thinks it can't happen. The summers are drier than usual, and the deadwood is thick. A customer from California came by the shop, and the first words out of his mouth were "do you get fires around here?" He had lived in Paradise and got out by minutes- his house burnt to the concrete.
I once watched a hundred foot ponderosa pine detonate from fire-it was at the top of a steep slope with the fire burning up, and the entire tree went to combustion temperature at the same time.