September 21, 2010: Fire Part 2

When we got out of church on Sunday, we smelled smoke and saw that there was a fire up on the mountain. No one knew anything about it, but it was on the backside of the mountain, so we guessed that it was coming from Camp Williams. A little while after we got home, I went out on my back deck and this is what it looked like.
I went out to the front yard and took this picture:
We were supposed to go down to Orem for Sunday dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, but decided to wait to see what was going to happen. Around 7:45pm we put the kids down to bed and I went over to my mom's house to see what it looked like from there.


Once I saw flames on top of the mountain, I called Dave and said, "Let's pack it up." If we did end up being evacuated, we didn't want it to be at 4:00am. We took about an hour and a half to go through our house and loaded up both of our cars with pictures, computers, etc. When we were about to leave, it was dark, but we could smell the smoke pretty badly at that point and knew that it was getting a lot worse. The following pictures were taken by friends.


When I pulled out onto the highway and saw the entire mountain on fire I burst into tears. It really looked like entire developments were being burned (I learned later that they were ok) and because it was so dark and there was so much smoke, it was hard to tell where the fire really was. We went down to my aunt and uncle's house and stayed the night there, but I didn't go to sleep until they had lifted the mandatory evacuation for the area around Josh's school. The pictures below were taken yesterday by a friend of mine.


This is from a park down the street.

You can see how close it got to houses. The firefighters did an incredible job of keeping the fire from burning houses. When our governor went home Sunday at 1:30am, he estimated that 25 to 100 hours would be burned. Three were completely burned to the ground. There is damage to other houses, but they should be ok. A few of my friends live in areas that are still evacuated and they can't go back to their houses yet.

Today the fire is 25% contained, but there is a high wind warning at noon. Anyone who has been to my area of the valley knows that the winds we get here can get 40-50mph winds pretty quickly. School was in session today, but I may be picking Josh up early just in case. I'm still processing all of the emotions that went into the past 48 hours.