As I alluded to in my last post, on June 23rd, we allowed the Fire Department to burn the old house down. Man, that’s not something you see everyday. Overall, it was a success–by that I mean not only is the house now gone (except for the considerable amount of rubble), but all involved are safe and sound. It was a good day, but not one without events.
The day began at about 9am. Volunteers from 6 different Fire Departments came to participate and learn. Somewhere around 9:30, the first small fire was lit for practice purposes. A team entered the house, extinguished or contained it, then exited. At least, that was the plan. What happened was that first fire spread to the attic quite quickly. Chief stated he figured the attic would catch after about 15 minutes–it took 2. The fire fighters continued as planned–lighting a second small fire for training in the kitchen. It too went well from a training point-of-view, but like the other, spread quickly. Kinda scary, that.
At that point, all fire fighters stayed out of the house. From that point, for the rest of the time, all resources were utilized for the purpose of letting the fire do its thing, but stay contained.
One area of concern preceding the whole event was the old-growth trees that line the corner. The trees themselves were a concern, to a point, but more of a concern was the power lines that spread out under & in those trees. For weeks leading up to the big day, much time and energy was spent over those lines.
Before any fire was started, the Fire Departments sprayed down the trees with water, as well as the foam stuff they use. It looked like it was snowing. Kind of surreal. After a good slathering of foam and water on the tree branches, the actual fire began. As you can see from the gallery, the fire raged through that house. Again, kind of scary. It was built in 1901, and I am certain was a far cry from today’s codes and standards, but when that fire caught, it took the house quickly. All told, I believe the first fire started around 9:40am, and the house was “gone” sometime around 11. B.B.R. probably around 10:15.
All went quite smooth… by the book, as many would say. That is until shortly after 11am when one of the trees by the road snapped about 10′ up the trunk. Apparent now is that its trunk was rotted. This promptly fell across the street, and pulled the power lines with it. We were oblivious to this part happening - the first we knew of anything was the loud pop and crackle of the power lines snapping on the pole about 20′ from us. Safe enough distance, but a bit scary nonetheless. We and the fire fighters in the area quickly moved to safer ground. However, two fire fighters were “caught”. One was in a truck, the other standing a safe distance from the downed line, but neither wanted to walk anywhere for fear of walking in the wet road and stepping in live current.
PGE arrived in about 30-40 minutes and secured the power, allowing the fire fighters to safely move out of the area. PGE then spent the next several hours restoring power–the Barn got power about 6.5 hours later. (Sorry neighbors!)
So, all is back to normal. Well, at least things are a bit more normal–we now have a fair pile of ashy debris to deal with. At least there are no more skunks living under that house, or bees swarming around it…
