Fighting the fire.

Living in the mountains in a rural setting, our house is snuggled in a oak and pine forest. It is quiet and peaceful, with all four seasons. Winter is cold, but I am below the snow line, so winter is doable. Spring is my favorite time, the flowers and trees bud with leaves and new growth. Autumn is also very special with the tree leaves changing colors. Summer was fabulous, but very hot. And then a fifth season encroached, every year getting worse, fire season. It is a scary season and it stresses us every year. Fires popped out all around us, most didn’t effect us, but there were some bad fires that did affect us because it was so bad and destroyed entire towns, or a friends house. So fire season was burned into our pyche so that we dreaded every summer.

The crunch came one year when a fire broke out and the sheriff came pounding on my door, telling me I had an hour to evacuate. My wife was at her Father’s house, 5 hours away, so it was just me, our 2 dogs and our cat. I ran around and caught all of them, putting them in separate crates. Then I filled a backpack with clothes and toiletries, my wife’s jewelry and papers. Loaded everything into the R.V. And locked the house up and drove away. I parked in a friends yard where I lived for 4 days worrying about my house. My wife joined me, and we worried together. The fire was put out, but the sheriff wouldn’t let us back into our house for 3 more days until they deemed it was safe. So now we worried about looters. Finally we were allowed to enter our neighborhood and back into our house. We decided then to never evacuate again. We had to make a plan. Now, as a caveat to that, I must tell you all that our situation is conducive to not evacuating, and for most people facing an encroaching wild Fire evacuation is the right thing to do. Listen to the authorities, they know what to do. Just watching with horror the unfolding news coverage of the L.A. fires showed that evacuation was the right call. But for me, in my circumstances, it is different.

‘First of all, my property is situated in a low population area. Whereas L.A. is a high density urban environment, of 17 million people, my area is approximately the same size with a population of around 300,000 people. Very rural, with a scattering of small towns.

Besides that, my immediate neighborhood is only 27 houses sitting on 5 to 40 acres each, with chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, cows, pigs, horses and llamas, and the occasional ostrich. The houses are all custom built, no trailers or mobile homes, and the yard’s surrounding the homes are groomed and maintained. No overgrown lawns, waist high weeds near the buildings. My property has a large stock pond on it, which can be described as a mini lack. 3 of my immediate neighbors have larger ponds than me. So we all have access to water. I trim the oak and pine trees of low branches 6 feet up the trunk, so creeping fire from the grass won’t go up into the canopy overhead. I also prepare for fire season by cleaning the gutters of leaves and debris so that flying embers won’t start a roof fire. There is still a lot to do, like installing sprinklers on the roof. Some of my neighbors have done that, I still do have to do that. I have positioned 500 gallon bladders all around the property, near the main house and the cottage my son lives in, and all the out buildings. If a fire does break out, all our garden hoses have sprinklers attached to them, and we turn then on so that they are running continuously while the threat is ongoing. I have buckets, shovels and rakes positioned in strategic places to fight spot fires as they occur. I drive all our vehicles into the middle of our driveway away from large trees and buildings, so if a fire does catch a tree on fire the vehicles won’t be damaged. I have a gas generator hooked up to the house, cottage and large metal warehouse so that if we do lose power we can still operate the well. I have a water pump stationed by the pond with the intake hose in the water and the 100 ft output hose unfurled and ready to use. We are ready! The fire department does a yearly inspection of our property and all our neighbors, and I brief them on our plan, so they know what we will do if a fire threatens us. I contact all my immediate neighbors and check up on them to let them know I can come and help them if needed. There are no properties that are overgrown or neglected in our neighborhood. Almost no one will evacuate their house if a fire breaks out, and those that will because of their individual circumstances know that all their neighbors will keep an eye on their house for them. The sheriff knows of our neighborhood plan, and is okay with it. We will survive a wild fire, and the fire season. But of course, we will still stress, and we will still worry about the other people outside of our neighborhood that might not have the same conditions that we have, but we have a fantastic fire department staffed with incredible people, heroes all of them.