Evacuation

Yesterday we were all ready to go to DFW for the weekend, it was about 2:30 pm. We were heading into town to return a RedBox before heading out and as we approached town we’d noticed that the fires were flaring up. It had been a peaceful morning with no smoke and we’d decided that it was probably ok to venture out. However, once we arrived in town, it was chaos with everyone standing at the intersections, in the gas station and grocery store parking lots, some with chairs, many with smart phone or cameras to take videos. Several fire engines from around the state arrived within minutes, probably moving from other areas of the fire to attack the flare up. We stood around for a bit in the gas station parking lot then went across to McDonald’s to see what was being posted on the Fire Marshal’s page. We’d opened the laptops briefly when Chris saw that they’d posted that the main road to our area was being closed. We rushed home to see what was going on only to find out a bit later that they were a bit early on closing our street.

Deciding to cancel our trip to DFW, we went back into town to get back on the internet and find dinner for the night at the store. We’d been home a few minutes and I was talking to my mom on the phone when Chris told me to come outside. We could hear the constables driving down the main road in our area telling everyone to evacuate. Great.

We’d had everything by the door for several days after various possible threats but we still had to scramble for a bit and made several sweeps throughout the house. The cops drove down the road twice telling everyone to get out and then they never came back. We could hear the neighbors gathering their horses, cows and the stubborn donkey to trailer away. Our landlord had been out to his mom’s house and had to convince the cops to let him back into the neighborhood. We ended up staying for about two hours after the evacuation orders because the fire had slowly, at least seemingly, been dying down a bit. This allowed us to gather more of our stuff and let the cats relax a bit before we shoved them in their cages later.

There are at least five smaller planes and several helicopters tackling the fire and a DC-10 flew in from California to help tackle the blaze. At one point they were flying right over our house. That is the video of the DC-10 below.

We made dinner and ended up staying until just about dusk when we decided to walk up the road and peek down our main road to see if the road was blocked. We’d decided if it was blocked we’d leave because we wouldn’t be able to keep a good eye on the fire if we were sleeping and since it was dark outside we couldn’t see anything. So, we loaded the cats up, went to the library for one last check of the update and then drove to my coworker’s house in Spring.

We’re hoping we can get back into our house today, because the cats aren’t happy and I just want to be back in my big king bed! That and fires are much more stressful than dealing with hurricanes.

I intended to do a photo of the plane as it flew by but I’d had my camera set to video so it is a quick and dirty video and a bit dark. I have a video of the fire from the gas station but it is taking awhile to upload so I’ll have to do it later.