Wildfires

The past three days have been exciting, too exciting for my tastes.

We have had an exceptionally hot, dry summer.  In fact, at our house, we have received a total of .29 inches of rain since June 4.  The total for July was .26 inches and we got another .03 inches night before last.  We have had 24 days of 100° plus temperatures, 5 in June, 15 in July, and 4 so far in August.  The temperatures and lack of rain are very similar to last year.

Last Friday, August 3, there was a pretty good sized grass fire which started somewhere south of State Highway 33 and west of State Highway 48, about 15 miles from our house.  On Saturday morning, I drove down there to see if the fire had burned our land which we use for deer hunting.  It had not; the fire was west of our place about a mile.

Since Saturday was my birthday,  I planned to do nothing but laze around all day.  According to the weather forecast, it was going to be too hot to do anything outside anyway.  We decided to take Rachel and Mike, our daughter and son-in-law, out to eat that evening.

As the day progressed, that fire got bigger and bigger and closer to Mannford.  I was listening to a couple of scanners and it seemed that every few minutes, another fire department was called in to render aid.  About noon, we decided that we might not want to go off to Tulsa for dinner.  We lost both water and electricity around 1:00 p.m. and the house quickly began to heat up.  The high at our house that day was 109°.

About 3:00 p.m., the emergency management people issued a mandatory evacuation of the entire town of Mannford.  This, coupled with the huge amounts of smoke around and our lack of air conditioning, prompted us to decide to spend the night in Sand Springs with Rachel and Mike.  We packed a few things and the dogs and headed their way.

At the kids' house, we spent most of the evening keeping track of the fires on the television news and on Facebook.  I did discover how much misinformation can be found there.  There were several reports of people's houses and businesses being burned that later were proven to be wrong.  Facebook is a great social medium and I do enjoy it but I'm not going to believe much of the news I get from it!

Yesterday morning after breakfast, Louise and I and the dogs headed home.  We still had no electricity but we were going to stay home anyway.  We did get our water service back about noon and about 3:00 p.m., the electricity came back on.  The air conditioning sure does feel good.

We don't know yet how many people lost their homes but we do personally know about half a dozen who did.  Fortunately, there have not been any reports of fatalities or serious injuries.  We had lost a friend in the 2011 wildfires and were worried that that might happen again.

The only fatality at our house was our big old orange koi.  The fish pond pump was not running, of course, and the lack of oxygen and high water temperature was too much for him.  He was about 10 years old and weighed about five pounds.  Its kind of hard to get sentimentally attached to a fish but I hated to lose him after all those years.

We are extremely appreciative of all the emergency services people.  I know that some long, long hours have been put in the past three days to get these fires put down.  Hopefully, today will be the day that they all get to go home and rest.