Springtime wildfire
Apparently, springtime is a very dangerous time of the year for wildfires. With the lack of shade from trees that don’t yet have leaves, the sun bakes last fall’s fallen leaves to a crisp. All it takes is a carelessly tossed cigarette, or a campfire that isn’t properly put out… We’ve all seen “Smokey the Bear” announcements. I never paid much attention to such propaganda; until today that is. I was burning cardboard boxes in the burning pit at my father’s house today. I was careful to rake up all the leaves within 10 feet or so of the pit and went at it. There was barely a breeze when I started the fire.
When the cardboard boxes caught, suddenly a stiff breeze picked up and blew flaming chunks of ash onto the hill in the backyard. Within seconds, a wildfire was well established. It genuinely surprised me how quickly the leaves and grass burned up the slope of the hill. My leaf rake wasn’t doing me much good, and the garden house didn’t reach past the fire pit, so I started filling up 5 gallon buckets of water and running up the hill to douse the flames; all the while insisting to my father that the pressure washer would not be a good firefighting apparatus. This wasn’t working quickly enough, so I picked up a rock rake and started removing the dead leaves and grass to create a break at the top of the hill. I was very glad to have watched that smoke jumper documentary on the Discovery channel some time back.
By now, my father had procured additional garden hose from the neighbors house and attached it to ours, lengthening it’s reach by 50 feet or so. Surely, this would put the fire out. A garden hose seems to disperse a lot of water; but in the face of such an inferno, it seems the equivalent of attacking the flames with a child’s squirt gun. Between the fire break and the garden hose, we managed to stop the advance of the flames up the hill and work back down the hill to extinguish the north and south fronts of the blaze. After dousing the hot-spots, we regrouped on the back porch to assess the situation.
It reminded me a lot of California; a 60′ by 60′ charred landscape has replaced the plant life that once thrived there. I figure it’s all good; until heavy spring rains fall and cause a mudslide.