The family had to drive slowly through the streets because the smoke was so thick, Wolf said. The worst part, she recalled, was that the car was heating up like she was “in an oven”. She also remembers a “panicking sensation” as she worried that something might fall into the street and block their path, trapping them in the approaching inferno.Video of the harrowing drive at the link.
September 19, 2015
"We didn’t see any fire at all and then we rounded one last corner and then it was completely engulfed in flames and there was nothing we could do."
"We live in kind of a dead-end community so there was no way out, we had to go forward. We had to get out."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
9 comments:
Awesome footage from inside the fire zone. Trees literally exploding into flames.
My parents and brothers family live in Murphy's California, which is about 2 miles from the Butte Fire. It's been a scary week or so there. A bad shift in the wind could send the fire through the town in a few hours. There have been a lot of homes and buildings destroyed in the area.
Currently the Butte Fire has burned about 71,000 acres, about 3.5 Manhattan Islands worth. It's reported to be about 65% controlled. There have been three deaths that they know of.
Building a home in the forest is not all it's cracked-up to be...
The sad thing is, none of those trees will ever be lumber.
It's beginning to appear that California authorities did a poor job of notifying everyone. They have to do better in the future. As long as "Moonbeam" remains their governor they won't.
Fritz said...
My parents and brothers family live in Murphy's California, which is about 2 miles from the Butte Fire
Fritz, till you made me look it up, becuz I never heard of Murphy's, I thought the Butte fire was in you know, Butte County where I was born. e.g Chico and Oroville.
No so. apparently there must be other Butte named things in Amador County....
There's a reason back eastward that the people who can afford it choose not to live up in the hollers.
1991 a friend of mine and I sat in McLaren Park (across the 101 from Candlestick) and watched the Oakland Hills Fire. The flames were easily visible and the column of smoke was amazingly compact and blowing ssw-ward down the Bay and across the Peninsula. The streets up in the hills were so narrow that fire trucks either couldn't make the turns heading up or the crews didn't want to risk not being able to turn around and run for it.
Building a home in the forest is not all it's cracked-up to be...
My youthful dream was to have a house back in woods, surrounded by trees...ehh not so much now. Taxpayers spent a lot of money to defend some yuppie trophy homes on a wooded ridge here in 2003. Our place is safely out on the flat and the only trees are the ones I planted myself.
If I were in the woods, I would be a nervous wreck during fire season.
You don't have to be *in* the forest to be at risk of fire.
Los Angeles and the outlying communities are in a basin, surrounding by mountains and with mountain ranges within it. Pull up a map and look at what is called "Griffith Park" -- which is the site of an observatory, the Greek Theater and the LA Zoo -- and it is a mountain that is a wilderness zone.
I've lived in SoCal my whole life and have seen one mountain range or another go up from time to time.
Even the extremely expensive Bel Air area was not immune to fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_Air_Fire
I live in a California Live Oak / Laurel forest area, which is pretty dry* this year. My neighbor, from somewhere in the wet Carolinas, cannot be persuaded to keep her trees under control, especially the volunteer pines now reaching 10-15 feet. Seems she's worried about erosion, which is a word that was removed from the local dictionaries to make room for the necessary expansion of the definition of "erotic".
Every year I feel a great weight lift during the first autumn rain.
*Caution: may be understatement
Post a Comment