Unsettling

A couple of weeks ago I was getting ready to start dinner when Pierce asked if I had heard the ambulance go by.  I hadn't.  Five minutes after that I saw a rescue vehicle pass by.  There are only a handful of people who live that direction, so I was wondering what was wrong.  I started dinner when my phone rang - my parents.  They saw on the news that there was a brush fire out of control on our road.  From that point, things quickly escalated.  Here is my first view of the fire, taken from my driveway, with my cell phone.  The sun had already set, so this wasn't an effect of the sunset.  Rescue vehicles and trucks were passing by our house at a rapid pace.

Next thing I knew, a helicopter was hovering in the front yard.  It seemed to want to land in our horse pasture until Francie pitched a huge fit in the pasture.  Turns out she doesn't care for giant sky monsters. Instead, it landed in the pasture next to the horses.  This picture was taken from the house.  The helicopter is on the top left.  It tried to take off with a bucket of water a number of times, but the high winds had it rocking in the sky, and it kept having to land.

 We watched the news and the smoke and the rescue vehicles rushing by anxiously that evening before going to bed.  One neighbor lost a very nice barn/cabin building to the fire.  Thankfully the winds died down that night.

The next day things were quieter, aside from all the vehicles and news crews rushing up and down the road.  Our road saw more traffic that day than it had in the past year combined.  I went out to hang some laundry and noticed the wind was picking up again and becoming gusty.  It wasn't long after that before rushing fire trucks and sirens were flying past our house again.  I walked outside to take this shot of the smoke returning.

 I took these pictures standing in my driveway, monitoring which way the wind was blowing.  Thankfully for me and my close neighbors, it was primarily blowing the opposite direction.  But the smoke was unsettling. 

Then the helicopter returned.  You can see it in the top right corner above.  This time the bucket (which is below the tree line) was working, and they found a better location for water retrieval from a neighbor's pond.

You can see the smoke starting to infiltrate the woods on our side of this mountain ridge. 

We were all so relieved when things finally got back under control.  In all, over 150 acres burned, but no one lost their home and no one was hurt.  I hope that brush fire never comes that close to my house again!