Fire!

Photo courtesy of Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News

Our house sits between that fire line and this pond. We stood on our front lawn and watched a Blackhawk helicopter (flown by one of our neighbors who is in the National Guard) taking water from this pond and dumping it on the fire.

Rewind about two hours. We got out of church and saw a fire on the other side of the mountain. We weren't too concerned, but did notice that the wind was blowing toward our house and decided we better stay home just in case. The smoke got thicker and pretty soon it smelled like a campfire inside. We heard about neighbors south of us who were being evacuated, but had a firefighter tell us that they wouldn't evacuate as far down as we live. Then we saw flames come up over the mountain, and we could tell that the fire was moving quickly. That was when the police cars started driving up and down our street with their lights on telling us that we were under mandatory evacuation. We got our important things together and loaded up the car. Each time we went outside it seemed that the fire was ten feet closer to our house. I took this picture from our front yard just before we drove away:It was hard driving away thinking that we might never be back in our house again, but we knew that we had to keep our family safe. Luckily we were able to stay with family, but had a pretty sleepless night keeping up with the Twitter feed about the Herriman fire.

We feel so lucky that our house wasn't one that burned. I am in awe of the ability the firefighters had to keep the fire away from so many houses. We still haven't been able to go back, but look forward to being able to do so. Here are a few things I have learned after going through this:

• Make sure you know where all of your important papers are. I have a fire-proof box that I keep birth certificates, car titles, and insurance policies in. It was nice that I could just grab it and know I had everything rather than hunting through files.
• Cell phones will not work in an emergency. We tried calling and texting, and neither would work. I was trying to call Jake and tell him that I was stopping for gas and was frustrated that I could get a hold of him. I can't imagine the panic I would have felt if I had needed to call 911. I am so glad we have a landline because it worked the whole time. We have debated getting rid of it because we didn't want to pay for it, but I will never consider that again. We actually get ours through Ooma, and it's pretty much free. You should check it out if you don't have a landline.
  
• Make a list of what you would grab if you had to evacuate. Even though we knew it would probably happen, when the moment comes you panic and start grabbing random stuff. I think I got everything that was most important, but I can see how easy it would be to forget something.
• Make a video or take pictures of everything in your house. I remember a college professor telling us to do that, and now I think I will. I thought a couple of times that I probably wouldn't be able to account for everything if we lost it all, and I'm not sure how easy insurance companies would be to deal with. That is definitely on my list of things to do.
• When it really gets down to it, most of the stuff I have isn't important. I love my family with all my heart. Even when I was faced with the prospect of losing everything, I knew I would be okay because we were all together.

Hopefully we will get to go back to our house tonight or tomorrow. I have a feeling googling "how to get smoke smell out of..." a lot, but at least I know my house is still there. It is a little sad to think that my new house smell is probably gone, but I can deal with that.