Wild Fires & Miracles

Several fires swept down on us last Friday. We were surrounded by them, and they were devastating. 

My brother's house was threatened, so he took refuge at our house with his family and animals. He had been out shopping with his wife, about 20 miles away from home, when they came out of a store and saw the smoke.  My husband had been working in the barn, and he called me to look outside. The smoke was dark and massive.  My brother's daughter, my niece, was at their home, and she texted them that a Level 2 evacuation had been ordered. 

We had 35 mph winds that day and extremely low humidity, so the fire swept quickly into the town of Medical Lake (about ten miles from us), which houses a very large state hospital (it's the hospital my husband worked at when we first moved to Spokane) My brother's community is on the outskirts of Medical Lake, (about 7 miles East) next to Silver Lake. Because of the wind direction, the fire made its way quickly through the town, and to the area of my brother's house, wiping out almost everything in its path. As he evacuated with his dog, cats, wife and daughter, they saw lines of cars backed up trying to get to safety on other roads. It reminded us all of the Maui fire because it had moved so swiftly, with so little time to react.

The last I heard, 200 homes and structures were destroyed and one person died. Some animals were trapped in the homes and also died, but I haven't seen how many. My daughter's friend lost her home, and she had two dogs that perished. They lost everything, even the cars parked outside.

My brother's house was saved by two miraculous events. The first was his neighbor, a Mennonite man. We had seen video of him out plowing a fire line around his farm with a wall of fire and smoke heading directly for him. Well, he also plowed a fire line around my brother's neighborhood, and the flames came right up to that line, but went no further.

The second thing that saved his house, which continued to be threatened from flying hot embers as big as your hand, was that USAA sent their own fire truck to his neighborhood. It is a military retirement community, and many of the homeowners had USAA insurance. That fire truck and crew battled the embers all night and saved the homes there. They remained on duty until the threat lifted, many days later. 

I guess there is a third thing, an unexpected heavy rain in August, which is very rare for our area. The rain came through yesterday, which allowed all the evacuations to be lifted and my brother and family to return home.

That was called the Gray Fire, but there were two others burning at the same time. One of them was North of us, the Oregon Rd Fire in Elk, WA. I have a good friend with a breeding operation in Elk. She has two stallions and a number of brood mares and foals--20 in all. She and her husband had built a thriving farm and her daughter, husband, and grandchildren lived there, too. They were able to evacuate all the humans and animals with the help of their community, but lost their home and barns.

Their escape was harrowing. Two of the horses wouldn't load and my friend had to walk one out, and to safety at 11:45 pm, in the dark, with a fire behind her. Her daughter and son-in-law followed her and the horse, Dash, to make sure they weren't hit by a car. The cameras at their house went dead at 12:30 am, just 45 minutes after they left. My friend walked that horse 7 miles to safety. A couple days later they found the other horse they'd left safe in a pasture that by miracle had remained unburned.

While the rest of the country has experienced extreme heat this year, we have had a mild summer, but we were in a patch of days that were hovering around 100 degrees. I will be interested to know what started these fires and if any of them were a result of an arsonist.

On another note, I worked with Tweed on the new breezeway today. He was cautious walking onto it, but then walked nicely to his stall and went in. I don't have to take him down the breezeway to access his stall, but I do want him to get used to it.

I've been keeping the brick clean with my new handy-dandy leaf blower. My husband bought me a little one, but I replaced it with a bigger one that gets the job done much faster. 

The weather has turned mild--highs in the 70's--and it's as if we never even had raging fires surrounding us. We had been completely smoked in, the worst air quality in the US and low visibility, but now the skies are clear. 

To say this has been a crazy summer would be an understatement.