Fire!

Yesterday we spent the morning going to the Y and running errands in town. We came home shortly after lunch and had been discussing something about our neighborhood, so being the nosey neighbors we are, we decided to have a drive through our neighborhood. Our house is the very first one in our neighborhood so we often miss things that go on further back. As we pulled in we noticed a little smoke coming from the back half of our neighborhood. As we got closer, we saw quite a bit of smoke and then behind two of the houses in the back corner we saw fire in the field! Ironically, another neighbor is the fire chief and we saw his vehicle there. No other rescue vehicles were on the scene yet. We finished our nosey look at the neighborhood and by the time we drove back by there were fire trucks on the scene. On the other side of this field is the house where our niece and nephews and their mom, Deb, live. I called Deb to see if she was home but she wasn't, so I told her about the fire. I also asked her if it would be ok to drive over to her house and take some pictures from the driveway. I'm not sure she really believed me about how big the fire was. Here are some pictures from her driveway:

In this first picture you can see how the fire burned in a ring around the field. If you look closely you can see fire on the other side of the burned field, closer to our neighborhood.

The houses you can see in the background are the houses in the back corner of our neighborhood. We don't know yet how the fire started but it seems like it started right behind those back houses in the corner and the wind just took the fire across the field. In this picture you can see the smoke all the way across the picture.
As we watched, the wind pushed the fire very close to Deb's house.

All the black you can see behind the fire is burned field.

There is a lot of muck in our area, and much of this land is muck. When Mike's brother first purchased this land Mike and I weren't married and this pond wasn't there. Mike decided to go driving back there and he got stuck. So, he had to call his girlfriend :) in her Toyota 4x4 and have her pull him and his big Ford out of the muck. I still remind him of this occasionally. ;) As soon as we saw this fireman driving their huge truck back there we knew they were going to get stuck - and they did! We had to get a picture of that. You can also see the water spraying all across the background along with all the smoke. There were fire trucks both back by Deb's house and also in our neighborhood, putting out the fire from both sides. The firemen did an amazing job and got the fire out and as far as we know there were no injuries.