WILDFIRE!

[oldandslow]

While everyone is discussing the state of the nation and the world I've been worrying about something a little closer to home. It's fire season again and we have one going just a few miles north of me. The wind is blowing 50-55 miles an hour and it will probably burn into Texas. If it were 30 miles south it would just hit farmland and quit but there is some ranchland in it's path after it crosses the state line. If the firefighters can't stop it, it will eventually hit plowed fields. The area isn't densely setteled but there are some homes across there.

I was out of town most of last Tuesday and came home to find one had burned into the west edge of the little town I live close to and burned five homes and eleven other buildings before they got it stopped.

Being in a grass fire is about the most scary thing that has every happened to me. About 10 years ago we had 75 mile an hour winds and a fire burned over my place. I was in the middle of it with a water hose but I was lucky. It split and burned right around each side of my home. My eyes looked like raw liver that night and I couldn't see very well for about three days but other than that I didn't get hurt. I did pretty well ruin a pair of high dollar athletic shoes I really did like. They were pretty scorched after it was all over.

I have developed a really sensitive nose for smoke  and when I smell it I get out and start looking because if I can smell it the wind is bring it toward me.  I also keep a good look out all across the west on days like this. If another fire threatens me the wife and I are going to pile in a vehicle each and leave. I'm not hanging around for another fire.

[powderman]

We will be in an open burn ban til up in April. We just now got a shower and a couple of inches 2 days ago, but my pond is still just over a ft low from the drought last year. Stay vigilant, good luck friend. POWDERMAN. 

[Siskiyou]

http://www.nifc.gov/nicc/sitreprt.pdf

[oldandslow]

I watched it burn by and head on east. There is a house two miles north of me and it was a little way behind it. Then it flared up back where it started and the wind is shifting to the north. I can smell smoke. The main smoke column is still going slightly north of me but I'm going to go watch and be ready to bail out if necessary. The way the wind is blowing I'll know pretty soon.

[Slowhanddd]

I wish you luck tonight and will say a little prayer for you and your neighbors.

[Sourdough]

Hope no one gets hurt or losses their home.  Stay alert. 

We have hundreds to thousands of acres burn every summer.  They only fight them if they endanger a village or homes.

Several years ago got caught out when a big fire got started.  We were rafting up in the Brooks Range, got woke up by buddy at 3:30AM.  We could see fire glowing all around us, in all directions.  We deflated our rafts and sunk them in a quite slough, weighting them down with rocks.  Same thing with our gear, or as much of it as we could get underwater.  The  food we could not get wet we put in a metal box, and left it on the gravel beach.  When the falling embers and smoke got so bad we had to do something we slid under the water in the slough ourselves.  Luckily the slough was not as cold as the river, still we liked to froze.  I got hyprothermia myself.  We crawled under a cut bank, and used a piece of wet canvas to keep our heads under so we could breath.  We kept having to splash water up on the canvas to keep it from igniting.  We were in the water for about 15 minutes.  After that the winds died down and the embers stopped coming in under our bank so we could climb up out of the water.  My feet got so cold they hurt for two weeks after we got home.  We breathed smoke for two more days while we were trying to dry out our gear.  And more days as we floated on down the river.  Sure put a damper on that hunt.

[Pat/Rick]

Prayers and hopes for your continued safety.

[oldandslow]

It's a lot calmer around here this morning and I didn't get burned up. It came awfully close again though. It was coming straight at me for awhile but the wind kept shifting to the northwest and it hit the road about 150 yards south of me. We were in pretty good shape by then if it hadn't veered off. My son-in-law runs an oilfieldtrucking company, my daughter works for another, and the neighbor just east of me works for one and each brought two 18 wheeler transport trucks loaded with water. They watered the right of way on both side of the highway from north of of my northern neighbor to about a half mile south and each truck made two runs. All of us had sprinklers running in the yards between the road and our houses. By the time the fire got to the road there were two of the little pumper firetrucks used to fight these fast moving fires set up and waiting and they made quick work of it when it hit the road. Roads and firebreaks do nothing to slow down a high wind driven fire like this so I was glad they were there.

The fire departments never learn about these things. This one started up from where it originally started and they had to fight it all over again. Their strategy is to chase the fires and this works but ever one starts up again where it originally started because they leave no trucks behind to watch and put out the hot spots as they reignite. It happens damn near every fire when the wind is high. All it would take is a couple of trucks wiping up hot spots but they just don't do it. The fire was was already done and gone past me when everything started over again.

I don't know for sure but I heard kind of fourth hand that a niece lost her home yesterday afternoon. She doesn't have anything to do with us so I guess someone will tell us---or not. I'm going to go prowling in a little while and see how bad it was. A lady we know that lives 2 miles north and a little east of us told us it burned all around but split on both sides of her home and didn't damage it. There is a house 2 miles north that I can see and the first fire was just behind it. It disappeared in the smoke in the second wave though. It's getting light so I'll check and see if it's still there when I finish this.

This picture was taken as the fire approached and certainly doesn't show what it really looks like. The camera just can't show enough light to get a real prospective. It shows less than half of what the flames were. You can see the water puddles in my driveway in the fore ground from the trucks.



This one was taken in front of my house and the house shown in the picture is my daughter's home about a hundred yards south. You can get a little better idea of what the fire was like but it still doesn't really show how truly big the flames were.

[Slowhanddd]

Wild fire are scary stuff.My second worst fear of dying.Fire and drowning.

[Sourdough]

Those grass fires move so fast when the wind blows.  Saw some in Northern New Mexico, gave me the idea to stay away from that area.  I se you are in Southern NM.  My wife grew up in Alamogordo, and we lived there for four years.  Not a lof of grass in the Toularosa Basin.  Always thought I would like to live near Artesia, or Carlsbad.  Now I'm having second thoughts.  Thought about building a subterraniun house?  At least it would be fire proof, and you could sleep good at night.

[no guns here]

Best thing you can do out there is keep the grass in your yard area cut darned short.  Plow it under some if you get the chance before the fire hits.  Use metal or other fire resistant roofing and brick siding.  Some of our family lives out that way, they have a small (maybe 1/4 acre) pond next to their place.  They could pump that and spray down the place if they had to do so.  I don't think they have any kind of pump for it though.  I sure would...  I'd get me a gas powered pump and enough hose to reach.  I've seen folks lean old tin sheets up against the side of their barns and stuff too.  I guess that would work for your house if you had time to put them up.  Best wishes on all of it.  Might be a good idea to burn off your yard on a calm day to knock the fuel down.


NGH

[oldandslow]

I can't remember the last time I was in Alamo, Sourdough. My wife's older sister lived up the hill at Cloudcroft for a long time. We would go up to visit and go snowmobiling in the winter a few times and the same in the summer just to cool off. We would sometimes make a run down the hill to get groceries and we went down to the hospital in '92 when my wife broke her ankle after we had been snowmobiling all day. The relatives moved after they retired and I don't have a reason to be there anymore.

Carlsbad is a nice place even if it is the hottest place in the state. Artesia ain't so great in my opinion. Funny thing is they don't seem to have many grass fires over there. We make up for it up on top of the Cap though.

I keep my yard mowed down and have even cut down a really pretty spruce tree and a big cedar in the front yard just because they were too close to the house. If either had ever caught fire they would have taken the house too.

I thought this might have cured my fire problem for this spring but after looking around in the daylight today there's a lot of grass still just west of me. Guess I'll have to keep my fingers crossed.

[blind ear]

How much of a dead zone barrier between your house and fuel/grass/trees do you have to have to be safe from a running fire? I have lived in the southern hardwoods all my life and it is hard to get even a ground burn there unless conditions are just right. I have no idea what all the ash and sparks and burning debree might be capable of. I imagine something biblical raining from the sky. ear

[williamlayton]

The cap rock did get a bad burn---looks like a number of folks got hurt pretty bad, from the news.
We have very few here in S/E Texas but if one kicks up there is just no stopping it.
I have seen those things jump a hundred acres when the wind is right. At 50+ MPH that is just about as right as it gets.
Glad you dodged this bullet.
Blessings

[oldandslow]

blind ear, Since the county will only mow the bar ditches once a year and it really isn't a very good job I mow the ditches just like my front yard so the grass is really short. Now I also have a fire break in the pasture in front of me. The fire department ran a motor grader down thru there after the fire was out.  At least it will be there next time.

William, you hear about it on the news way down there and I still haven't heard anything on our news.    Albuquerque is where all the TV news comes from and I probably just missed it because it would have been a five second thing. Last time I remember them giving any coverage to a fire was a few years ago when 118,000 acres, a post office, 5 homes, and 42 barns and outbuildings burned up on a Sunday afternoon. It was a two sentence thing taking about 5 seconds. 

Quite a few years ago on a windy Saturday afternoon there was a fire several miles north of me and the fire boys had it out in a couple of hours. Later on the 6 o'clock news the news gal reported that "There IS a wildfire raging in Lea County that has already destroyed 11 home and several barns". The fire was already out and it didn't burn anything but grass and mesquite bushes. So much for accurate, up to date, news.

[Sourdough]

There was an article in Tuesday's Fairbanks Daily News Miner about a big fire in the Texas Panhandle.  Several houses were lost.  I'm thinking that was your fire, and they just missed the fact it started in NM.

[ironglow]

  I am glad you and yours are safe..my heart goes out of course, to those adversly affected .
   Where I live, we rarely get dry enough to be seriously affected bt grass/forest fires althouigh they do occasionally happen. Usually if a grass fire starts, time it hits a woods line, it either burns out, or is comparatively easy to put out.  Still, in a very dry year, there are some difficult ones..
     

[oldandslow]

There was an article in Tuesday's Fairbanks Daily News Miner about a big fire in the Texas Panhandle.  Several houses were lost.  I'm thinking that was your fire, and they just missed the fact it started in NM.

Not mine although it might have started in NM. I'm quite a ways below the panhandle and on the west side of the lower south plains. The plains extend into NM about 45 miles along here and the cap ends about 30 mile south.

The little town a few miles north of me has a live weather site on the internet and just before things began to get exciting Sunday it was showing 8% humidity and winds gusting to 58 miles an hour.

[Old Fart]

We've had a pretty good sized grassfire here in central OK for a couple days.
It's just that time of year. UInfortunately some people forget easily it is.
It started right by the interstate. They are pretty sure it was started by a cigarette butt being tossed.