Fire!

There are a lot of wildfires making national news right now, it's hot, it's dry.  We don't have bunches of buildings burning, or the threat of nuclear waste burning, but we had a fire in our vicinity yesterday. 

I was home with Austin since with my new schedule I stay home with him on Mondays.  We went swimming in the town north of us and on the way home, off to the west I could see a huge smoke plume rising.  There is only one two-lane highway between the towns and there just so happened to be a construction crew re-paving the highway so they were limiting traffic to one lane at a snails pace.  I saw the smoke, and of course not too long later heard the sirens coming from behind me.  This is a small community and any time there is a fire all the local departments get called in, as well in this case as the Forest Service, BLM and BIA.  The fire trucks came racing down the closed construction lane and sent the gravel flying.  I watched the back window of the van in front of me shatter into a million pieces and fall to the ground.  I got a couple new stars in my window, but none got completely destroyed.  When we got to the end of the construction zone the van pulled over and joined 3 other cars sitting there with completely busted out windows to complain. 


I get home and Austin fell asleep in the car so I moved him to his crib and logged on to Facebook to see if anyone knew what was going on.  I could also see that they had airplanes and helicopters dropping water on it. I watched from my front door and this is what I saw:

And then this:

The winds were very strong and blowing the fire towards town.  There wasn't a whole lot of information about it since it was small and we kind of live in the middle of no where.  After a couple of hours they had the smoke knocked down. 

Today at work I found out the fire was mostly within the reservation of the tribe that I work for.  The fire started on the highway and burned east where it hit a dry wash and exploded because the wash was full of tamarisk.  It then burned further east until it just got just outside the reservation.  It was still probably a good two miles from the western edge of my town.  It was still smoldering in places this morning so the fire fighters from various agencies are out there keeping an eye on it.  The winds are really picking up, so keep your fingers crossed that it does not get re-started. 

Now comes the fun part of figuring out how to secure the soil in the wash as we are one to two weeks away from our monsoon season starting and this wash will have all kinds of erosion problems without any plants holding it in place.