Friday, July 18, 2014

Wildfires - and me

I know there are a lot of will fires in the northwest right now due to high temperatures and no rain resulting in extremely dry weather. Small towns in Washington have been evacuated. Leavenworth has a large fire burning fifteen miles away. Here in British Columbia we have the same concerns.
I live in West Kelowna and in the past few days we had two fires about a mile from our house - quickly extinguished, thank heavens.
Yesterday we had a third one which escalated out of control to 200 hectares and not controlled. Today it's 400 hectares and 20% controlled. 2500 people have been evacuated and another 150 are on evacuation alert. We're lucky so far but we're across the street from the evacuation area. We've packed our vehicles with my most precious stuff in case we have to leave quickly.
There are three water bombers fighting the fires and two helicopters. We live on a small lake so the helicopters are filling up their hoses and buckets in the lake and then fly up and over our house. The noise is really loud from all the aircraft - not complaining because I appreciate everything they're doing to keep people and their houses safe. No houses lost yet.

We only have one power line into our area and it's in the middle of the fire zone. If it goes down the whole town and 60,000 people will be without electricity. and apparently the only way to thread them up again is by helicopter..
The unknown and thought of losing everything plays heavy on the mind right now. It's stressful, but we're still in our home, with our two dogs, so that's great. And I love all the firefighters and pilots fighting our fire.
I thought I'd share a few photos from our fire.

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