This post is an old one. I'm going back in time almost 2 1/2 years ago. There have been several fires recently, and this was content off the old site that is now gone. So just bear with me as I recount the events of that day and what happened afterwards.
It was Wednesday, November 30th. The week after Thanksgiving. I had just had another baby boy, Drew, 11 days before. My mother and family had been here for the birth and Thanksgiving and had left on Monday morning. We were getting back into a normal routine (well, as normal as life can be with a newborn). The girls were off to school, and I was sitting at home with the boys. Jeff was in town hauling hay from one of our fields to a dairy in Clovis.
Jeff called and asked me where that smoke was coming from. Smoke? What smoke? So, I went to all the windows in the house til I found a puff of smoke in the distance.
I'm a horrible judge of distances, so he asked me to load up the boys in the pickup and check it out. So, I travel down some dirt roads a bit and go as far west as I could go. The signs that say "Air Force Property: KEEP OUT" stopped me from going any further. I had reached the east border of the Melrose Bombing Range, the fire was on the range. But no big deal, they had their own fire crews and the wind was blowing to the North-East, away from us.
On my way back to the house, Jeff asked me if I could check on the cattle's water. We had recently moved the cattle to a different field a mile from the house. He told me I should be able to see the water float in the tank from road. Well, I couldn't see it. I didn't want to go in the pasture, it was a really hard gate for me to close (just a barb wire gate, but you have to put alot of pressure on it to get the wire loop over it). I had just had a baby and knew I didn't have the strength to get it shut. So, I called my father-in-law, Don, to see if he could check it for me. And I went back to the house.
Apparently the water tank wasn't working, because he called a pump guy to come out and work on it with him.
By that time, the wind had shifted. It was now blowing to the South-East, the smoke was coming towards the house. The wind not only shifted, but had picked up to about 40MPH. The sky and ground was a really eerie shade of brown and orange. Of course, I took pictures. LOL! But I felt safe because the fire was way out on the bombing range.
Then Don came to a screaching halt to the house and switched to Jeff's feed pickup. I thought he must be having problems with his truck. I fixed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a glass of milk, and sat down to check email. Then the pump guy came up and said, "Let's get y'all out of here!". By the time I got the baby into the carrier car seat, he already had Chance in his carseat in the truck. I left my lunch at my desk, and was wearing my oldest, holiest, most worn out pair of sweatpants I owned (because I did just have a baby and nothing fit me. I was going for comfort, not style. I may have brushed my hair that day, but I know I had no makeup on). Great, I'm getting evacuated and I look HORRIBLE and can't go back to get something better.
I didn't know where to go. Jeff told me to head to his parents house. But how could I go there when I don't know what's happening at MY house!
The fire was west of my place. So I went to the Mesa road, 2 miles south of the house. I drove up and down it (pacing in a pickup). All I see is a wall of smoke. Dang it, I wish I had thought, as I was being evacuated, to grab the video camera. And my digital camera battery was nearly dead, too. I have crappy clothes, few diapers, and no batteries! I always thought that if I were evacuated I would grab my scrapbooks, important papers, my computer, and as many clothes as I could throw into the camper, hook up and take off. My evacuation plans had gone out the window.
I looked north to where I should see my house and this is what I see. Smoke and flames! I have no idea if I still have a house now, everything could be gone, all my clothes, furniture, stuff for the baby. At one point I saw a huge burst of flames in the air, and I knew I had lost my home.
Well, I didn't. It was the abandoned house up the road 1/3 a mile. The old Feland place.
I shamelessly steal pictures, too. This is from news footage from when the TV station in Albuquerque got here. I think this is the road west of the school. The video actually showed tornadoes of fire jumping across the road.
The smoke was getting closer to the Mesa road, and suddenly my phone rang. Somebody told somebody who told my mother-in-law that the school was being evacuated. I raced that way, and just in time got my girls off the bus. They were fixing to take the whole school on an emergency "field trip". They actually did go to a local dairy, then when the fire got closer to that, took them all to a church in town to wait for parents to get them. And here I have to pause and say that we have some of the best kids at our school. The high school kids came down to the elementary and preschool and helped the teachers out with those little ones.
I finally went to my inlaws house and waited. There was nothing else to do. Of course, my mother-in-law took pictures (since my camera had died) and got me in my grungy sweats. I'm not going to share them with you.
About 4pm, the suspense was killing us! What was going on! Cell service was down, we had no information (had I known that a local radio station was reporting most of the whole thing, I would have made sure we had tuned in. But most stations here are live only in the morning and a satelite feed the rest of the day). So I fed the baby, and left all the kids with Linda and ventured out.
I went straight to my house and was relieved to find it still there. But so much was burned around it for miles! I went back to the inlaws and gathered my brood and went home. My lunch was still sitting by the computer. I threw it away. The whole place smelled like smoke.
The fire burned about 35,000 acres.
Here is the town of Floyd. The WHOLE town. The highway goes right thru the middle of it. The fire came to the back door of the Baptist church (you can see the steeple to the left of the middle). It burned thru the cemetary. It was even at the back door of the old gym at the school!
It got so close to this teacher's house, it melted the vinyl siding!
If you know where to look, you can see most of our ranch (but not our house). It's almost all gone. Remember back when I said Don came and got the feed truck? We had cows in that field. The cows followed that feed truck like a lifeline to the recently vacated summer pasture. He said that he saw the last cow come out of the gate, then saw the flames sweep across the gate itself. That's how close it was. He then had to evacuate the cows AGAIN when another branch of the fire went thru the summer pasture. The cows were moved to the pens by the house. Thankfully the firefighters were able to keep the flames away from the house and the pens.
This is our neighbor's place. In fact, they hadn't even moved in yet. They had just bought it and were remodeling. They lost 2 or 3 outbuildings. There is a bit of land towards the top of the picture (but not all the way to the top). If you know where to look, you can see a bunch of little dots all the way to the left of the picture. These are our hay bales, they weigh about a ton each. They were all in a neat line thanks to the handy dandy accumulater the baler has. But now the fire was using the line to jump from bale to bale of hay! Jeff had raced home and was using his pickup to break up the line of bales to keep the fire from burning it all! The hay was already sold and paid for, but he saved all but about a semi load.
In all, the damage was one habited house, several abandoned ones and outbuildings. No injuries, but several cattle had to be put down. And many, many miles of fence. As I drove my crew home that night, our road was lit by the cedar fence posts that were still burning.
There were dead rabbits everywhere. Even in the road. One neighbor said he would see rabbits on fire running as fast as they could to get away from the fire, and therefore causing more fires! The school smelled like smoke real bad. There was no school on Thursday or Friday so the cleanup people could put their Ozone machines in there to clear it all out.
The fire was bad. But the long dry winter was to be miserable. That was the year we had no snow. And the rain was turned off from October before the fire until about June. Jeff says, "It was dryer than a popcorn fart!". It was also WINDY. It was probably just normal. But with no vegetation to hold the ground, the dirt just BLEW. One day it was so bad, that Jeff actually MISSED our driveway as he drove home!
The sand was horrible! The fence that wasn't burned was getting covered up by the sand dunes.
This used to be a fence post.
This is the parking lot for the community building and school busses. The Lion's Club storage shed was burned, as well as the sound equipment for the annual Jamboree and their grill.
More of the bus parking, and the preschool playground. The sand was all the way up to the bottom of the kids' swingset. Not pictured is the monkey bars in the Elementary playground. Put it this way: they didn't hang from the bars anymore, they just walked across.
Some friends of ours moved to town. This is there front yard on moving day.
And here is Chance playing on the sand dunes in the yard.
Of course, we are VERY thankful that no one was hurt, and that our home was saved. I think 14 fire agencies worked on this fire, and over 200 fire personel. We suffered about a 700 acre loss, including our entire winter pasture. When the claims people arrived, they asked why we had let the grass get so tall. Well, it was to feed cattle all winter! Duh!! We also lost about 7 miles of fence that had to be rebuilt.
But out of the ashes...or however that saying goes. Even though we had no rain until summer, after a year or so the grass was back better than before. You can never tell now where the fire was. Jeff sooned joined the volunteer fire department and is currently working on his EMT-Intermediate license. But whenever we see smoke in the distance, we remember our fire.
This is a branding chute. And we don't even use the horses anymore. Our cows are "trained" so that when they hear the feed truck, the come a'runnin'!! Gotta be the feed truck. You can go out there in a regular pickup and they won't even look at you. But the FEED truck (in our case, a 1986 F-250), they KNOW that sound!! We can also use a 4-wheeler to find any that wandered off (but that doesn't happen with our cows. They want that FEED!).
About 5 minutes ago. Hey, its starting to look like a barn!
