Yesterday, we went on a little visit to Lagoon, a local amusement park in in the state of Utah. We had such a good time. It was in the 90's but there was just enough breeze to keep it cool. After spending 6 hours in the fun and sun, imagine going from this..........
To this....................
When we headed around the mountain into the Salt Lake Valley, we saw smoke coming from the other mountain. At first we couldn't tell where it was. As we got closer and closer to home, we could tell it was around where we live. We got to our street and it was blocked by the police and they weren't letting anyone through. In fact, since about 4:30, there was a mandatory evacuation going on. We headed to our youngest sons house, who lives in the same city, but wasn't being evacuated, yet. The picture above was from their back patio looking at the mountain.
The photo below is the view going towards my house, which is about a block away from where we took this picture. Because we weren't home when they started evacuating, we didn't have anything with us except what we had taken with us to the park. Being diabetic, I started panicking that I needed to get my insulin. Got to the police barricade and told them we needed to go to our house. They told us we had to wait for an escort. Another police officer came, followed behind us to our house, sat in front of the house while I ran in to get my meds, and then followed us back out. I wasn't even able to grab pajama's or stuff for the kids. It was just hurry up and get it. It was probably a good thing the cop was waiting because we might have been tempted to just stay.
The above picture was the view from my sons patio after the sun went down. Yes, this fire was on both sides of that mountain. He was about 5 blocks from where they were evacuating. Needless to say, the kids slept great, but the adults maybe got 2 hours sleep.
The above picture was taken this morning. Sorry it was so fuzzy. You can barely make out a house on the mountain. If you look closely, the fire went right around that house. The firefighters were hosing down that house all night. Plus you can see how sad the blackened mountain looks. And the sad thing is, the leaves were just starting to turn colors and it was looking so very pretty.The fire was started by Camp Williams, the Utah Army Reserve dudes. They were playing shoot-um-up when they shouldn't have been. It was a red flag day here yesterday with high winds. But hey, they are the government, they can do what they want.
You can read the news story here
and see other pictures. It's so sad. 3 homes were lost. 1650 homes were evacuated. All because they wanted to play army. Thank goodness there were no lives lost.
This was a little to close for comfort for us. We will be smelling the smoke in our house for a few days, but at least we still had a home to go to.
Until Later.
