When David got home from work today (Friday, the 29th), I headed out the door to pay rent and run some errands. I noticed a big cloud of smoke shooting straight up into the air. The sky was perfectly blue, with little clouds, so this smoke cloud was quite obvious. I went inside the main office at our apartments, handed them our check and asked them if they knew if something was on fire or not. I had no idea that for a couple of hours, at this point, our mountains were on fire! The ladies in the office directed me to their big screen TV to show me the footage. Immediately, I was covered in goose bumps as I saw a house on fire. They told me how many in Herriman had already been evacuated. We technically live in Riverton, but go about 2 blocks West and you are in Herriman. We go to church and our boys go to school in Herriman. We love Herriman and so it was a little scary to think that this fire was so close.
I went home to grab my camera and this is the first thing I saw when I got out to the main road!
Sometime after 3:00 this afternoon, a car was parked on dry weeds when it's hot exhaust caught the weeds on fire. Most of the damage was on the mountains but it did end up burning down 3 homes.
I felt pretty safe knowing that we didn't live on the mountain and also knowing that the fire would have to go up and over this part of the mountain and burn MANY homes before ever getting close to our apartments.
This is as close as I could get to "the action" but that was good enough for me. The last thing I needed to be was in the way of those trying to evacuate and those trying to stop the fire. The pictures don't show it but it was amazing to watch all the helicopters and planes coming in with their fire retardants and huge buckets filled with water. Here is a picture I found online of the Herriman fire up close.
It looks like it is pretty much contained now but as of last I heard they are not letting residents come back until later to make sure it doesn't start up again near homes.
This reaffirmed my decision to never buy a house on a mountain in Utah. Fires are very common here in the summer months but they are usually contained to the mountains. If you go to South America, the people living on mountains are usually very poor. Here in Utah, if you live on a mountain, you have money and usually a huge house. In South America the poor live on the mountains because of things like landslides. Now, I understand that we don't usually have a lot of landslides here in the United States and I definitely understand the beauty of wanting to live on a mountain. The views are AMAZING! They really are but most fires here in Utah start in the mountains.....so no thank you!
Hopefully I won't have an update for the Herriman Fire. I hope that we wake up to find that it is 100% contained. The people here would be grateful, I'm sure. It was just 2 years ago that they were battling a fire in this same area, evacuating over 1,000 homes.
1 comment:
And about a couple of years back there was also a disastrous fire in Herriman Apartments.
Post a Comment