For those curious, I live in the Sierra foothills in California. The Butte fire which started a week ago just ravaged my area. 70,000 acres burned, 360 homes destroyed, 2 fatalities.
The fire stopped about 500 yards from my home. We were EXTREMELY lucky. Seems to be a freak effect of the area we live in that caused the fire to shift and detour around our street. All the houses on our street are fine, no damage, and just across the creek are foundations with no houses. Damn scary.
The roads are still closed due to downed power poles and lines. I understand the need to make things safe, and I am amazed at the herculean effect PG&E is taking to get power back in place, but I am really getting tired of people telling that "the roads are still closed" just to watch the "special" people drive right down them. Those would include anyone with any sort of "official" looking vehicle, regardless of who they may be. And no, that doesn't include us.
Many thanks to the hundreds of fire fighters who focused on saving homes. They did a phenomenal job and many homes were saved, mine among them. Tragically two hold-outs lost their lives when they refused to leave when evacuations were called. I do promise to not complain for the next year about the "special fire tax" being imposed on us due to gross mismanagement at CalFire, or state government, or whoever screwed that up, but after that I reserve the right to complain again.
Here some pics I took to give you an idea. I left them full size so they are pretty big.
These are views from the house we stayed at while evacuated. We got evacuated from there twice as well.
Yesterday I was able to get back home for the first time via some nasty logging roads to get the fridge cleaned out and disinfected. Smelled pretty nasty. The main road is still closed to it will be hit and miss on getting normal access. For now looks like the 1.5 hour trip down the logging road. That road is actually pretty scary. There are some compounds back there miles from anything with high chain link fences with razor wire. Every time I drive there I hear the banjos from Deliverance playing in my head...
I took this one from my porch. You can see how close the fire got through the trees. The hillside is all burned as well as the trees across the creek.
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