I was working from home this afternoon, because we were going to go camping tonight. So I smelled a little smoke, went outside and saw some over the hill, and decided to be silly and put the birds in their cages. By the time I'd done it, I could see flames from my front door! There'd been an accident on the freeway on the other side of "Hydra's Mountain," and whoosh, up and over the hill it came.
I called Hydra to tell him I was leaving, and then sprinted back and forth to the Tahoe with the birds, a hamper full of files, my laptop, my camera, some bags we already had packed for camping. Hosed down the house a little, turned on the sprinkler system, and decided I needed to go. Took the first shot here as I was leaving our back yard.
I got into the Tahoe and hear the smoke alarm going off...what tha? It's Dodger, doing a dead-on impression of it. Good boy.
Parked the car down on Santiago Road and watched while our local volunteer firemen, the county fire department, the Forest Service fire trucks and even some local water hauling trucks went up into the neighborhood.
It looked very bad for a while. Our house was right in the path of the fast-moving fire. But the fire breaks and the firefighters worked. Also, our neighbor Alex watered down his house, and ours and the one on the other side!
We walked to the house while there were still a lot of trucks in the street. Then walked back down to get our vehicles and Hydra passed out Gatorade and Cokes. We thanked every firefighter we saw.
Our heroes! We've hiked this hill and it's killer even without all that gear!
The after shot. I paced off the distance from the top of our slope to the last burned area...about 25 feet. Gulp. I didn't get all the windows closed in the house...there are ashes on the kitchen counter.
I took a bunch of photos and will post more tomorrow. The adrenaline is beginning to wear off and I think I'm going to go stretch out.
The firefighters are still up there digging out hot spots. I couldn't be more grateful.
That's the corner of our garage roof on the left.
4 comments:
Wow.
Glad your house was unharmed.
What a close call. Glad that it came out ok for you and your neighbors. Was anyone hurt?
Shu-Ju
I don't think anyone was hurt. Not that sort of terrain where firefighters tend to get trapped. It's amazing how fast it came and went. There was a lot of brush up there.
We're looking forward to and mildly dreading our next hike up there, to see what's what. It will be interesting to see it rejuvinate itself. It will.
It's pretty stinky out there today though. We put the house ventilation system on all night last night to filter the air and both woke up feeling like we're having allergy attacks anyway. It'll be good to go camping tonight and get out of the residual smokiness.
Whew, I'm so glad y'all are ok. Given that we had our own fire scare here in our building last month, I can definitley imagine how you must have been feeling...and how grateful you have got to be to those firefighters. And, yes, the smell is awful!
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