Washoe Drive Fire

Yesterday was a bit exciting for our family. After lunch, I got a call from my neighbor.  She told me there was a fire at the bottom of the hill, about two miles from our house. Reno has not gotten any moisture all winter, so it is very dry outside. And then the winds were completely nuts, with 80 mph gusts.  A fire was not good news.

But I just kind of blew it off and kept doing my stuff. About 30 minutes later, I looked out the window and I was astounded. Right at our tree line I could see tons of dark smoke billowing menacingly close.  I was like, oh crap.  So, I started packing a bag and calling people to warn them.  Then people started calling me.  It got a bit hectic. I was able to get us all out of the house in about 30 minutes.

Here is the beginning of the fire.  The road to the left goes straight to my house, and I actually was running on that road Wednesday.  All of the wind was constantly blowing northwest, towards Reno.

This is the intersection at Rinar's work.  They had to close the freeway because that is where the fire was.

There was just nothing to stop the path of destruction because of the winds. Luckily, our house was to the west of the fire, at the beginning, so we were just out of harms way.

I had a whole bunch of people from church calling to check on me and offer their houses as a place of refuge. The only problem was that their houses were in a lot more danger than mine and they didn't know it. I ended up going to the McDonald's for a few hours because it had a playground. There were actually quite a few refugees there. This was the view from the parking lot.

The houses at the bottom of the hill are all houses in our ward.  I started calling all the people who checked on me and told them they needed to pack their bags and get out of there. They couldn't see what I could see because of all the smoke.

Gratefully, the winds died down and no houses were lost in that neighborhood.

We were able to go home at night.  I was really happy about that.