Petrichor & Pumpkins: Real-life scares

- and not the fun kind.

Here in WA state, we are on high alert for fires. This is a pretty regular thing in late summer, especially in the eastern part of the state. Summers are usually pretty dry here, and when there has been weeks with no rainfall, everything becomes pretty flammable. Some years are worse than others; last summer, our area didn't even get much smoke from faraway fires, while the year before, we endured almost a month of hazy, smoky skies and hazardous air quality.

This year, it got crazy really fast in our area.

Yesterday I took a brief nap at 6:30 pm, and at the time the skies were blue and clear, but it had been very windy all day. When I woke up about 40 mins later, it looked and smelled like the apocalypse. The wild winds had apparently blown in a lot of smoke from eastern WA wildfires, and descended upon on quite suddenly. Then, a couple of hours later, a brush fire started right near our place, which started a fire on someone's property just a couple of houses down from us. The apartment complex near us was evacuated. Because of the winds, it was beginning to look like we were going to have to evacuate as well. Fortunately it was contained and the only deaths were a few chickens on someone's property (RIP).

We lost power about an hour after everything from that incident calmed down, which came on in the middle of the night, went back out again, and was restored by about 9:30 AM. For the time being, the smoke has cleared in our immediate area, but it's only a matter of time til things get hazardous and hazy again.

The winds are still blowing like it's the end of the world out there, and high winds are likely to last all week with high temperatures in the forecast, making the fire weather more of a threat. And brush fires are started to burn out of control in the surrounding towns, closing whole highways and forcing certain areas to evacuate. This is common enough out in eastern WA, which has a totally different (hotter & drier) climate than we we live, but it's not really a thing here. We get brush fires, but not whole neighborhoods burning down. That is happening, now.

I'm definitely trying to prepare, in case something happens where we live. A single spark could burn down a whole neighborhood, and fire departments are beginning to get overwhelmed. Winds are bringing down trees and power lines. This pattern might not calm down til Friday at the earliest.