Black Mountain
Posted on | August 4, 2008 at 10:58 pm | 4 Comments
Some days I wonder if I’m going to have anything to write about. This was going to be one of those days, but then it all changed around 1pm. Some days I wish I didn’t have anything to write about…
Green Mountain, the foothill that my neighborhood is named after, suffered a scary, fast-moving grass fire today. As of this writing, the fire is contained, and it miraculously didn’t damage any structures or hurt anyone. This is mostly due to the efforts of the heroic local firefighters, who went to great lengths to keep the fire from jumping to any homes. The high, ever-shifting winds and the hot, dry weather hindered their efforts greatly, but somehow they managed. The videos and pictures are amazing – you can seen the blackened grass go right up to the yards or fences of homes, leaving the homes themselves untouched. (Check out this slideshow.) Thanks, West Metro Fire!
I don’t think my home was ever in much danger from the fire, as I live south of the mountain and most of the fire was on the east and north sides. But there were some pretty big, expensive houses up there to the north that narrowly escaped. And if the wind had kept up, and suddenly shifted to the south, who knows what could’ve happened? If the fire jumped across Alameda and attacked the homes there, I would’ve really gotten worried. But luckily I didn’t have to start packing up the car with my valuables.
I’ve created a Flickr set with a few photos I snapped of the smoke from the fire as seen from different locales as I was driving home, and from my back deck. I wish I had gotten some decent pix of the blackened mountain or the fire itself, both of which I saw on that drive home. But then again, I’m glad I wasn’t close enough to get pictures of the fire!
Green Mountain does experience fires every once in awhile, but I’m pretty sure this is the largest, fastest-moving one since I’ve lived in the area (some 38 years). It’s been so hot and dry around here this summer that this kind of thing was almost inevitable. It appeared to have been started by a lightning strike. Too bad that lightning wasn’t accompanied by rain! Although it did rain some in the later afternoon, which helped firefighting efforts a bit. The thing is, I know the mountain will recover from this pretty fast and the vegetation will come back (assuming we don’t have a couple of years of drought like earlier this decade). They sometimes do controlled burns of the vegetation around here anyway, so I just have to think of this as getting all those controlled burns out of the way at once! Although it does look like not all of the mountain was scorched – the part of it visible from my neighborhood looks like pretty much unscathed. But I’ll know more tomorrow.
Now I know what it feels like to live in California.
Latre.
Comments
4 Responses to “Black Mountain”
August 5th, 2008 @ 7:30 am
“Now I know what it feels like to live in California.”
You wake up disgusted with a desperate urge to have plastic surgery?
iClaudius xxxx
August 5th, 2008 @ 5:08 pm
I was gonna say something too but I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to spot that wide-open ’straight line’….
August 5th, 2008 @ 5:51 pm
Didn’t take me long to find confirmation – California still has Colorado beat when it comes to hellfire…
August 6th, 2008 @ 2:23 pm
California still has Colorado beat when it comes to hellfire
Interesting link. I think they found Sunnydale (Buffy’s Hellmouth).