Danny Keith

So today is my birthday…I woke up early to a beautiful sunrise and an equally beautiful wife and son. It wasn’t until I walked out my front door that I realized today was going to be intense.

You can see the smoke rising from the canyon which is about 5 miles as the crow flys…what happened next has only happened two other times in my life. One was the ‘89 Loma Prieta earthquake and the other was 9-11. I went in and woke my wife and told her to come and look out the front door, I needed another opinion. I didn’t want to overreact, yet I also didn’t want to be complacent. To make matters worse we had a high wind advisory with gusts over 35 mph.

After calling our next door neighbor (he is 72 and lives alone) to let him know we would make sure to grab him, we both spent the next few hours watching the news, checking websites and fielding phone calls from friends and family from all over. Basically, we didn’t know what to do. The fire was moving fast, it seemed every report added another 1000 acres. Most of what is on fire is rough, unihabited forest with pockets of houses and neighborhoods almost impossible for fire crews to reach them. To make matters worse these people have livestock and only one way out. Think about it for a moment…what do you take? When do you decide to leave? I mean the fire hovered 5 miles from our neighborhood all day…so we decided to get our most important things together in case we had a short amount of time to evacuate, photo albums, baby books, wedding stuff, financial papers, pet food, some clothes to change into and hard drive backups in case we had to leave our computers behind. I was suppossed to be enjoying my day off with my wife and new son and instead we are getting prepared in case shit hits the fan. Numerous friends and family called throughout the day offering a place to stay or help getting anything we wanted out of the house which really warmed my heart. I look at it this way, the most important thing for me to get out is the family…if you have time for extremely important valuables then cool…otherwise it can all be replaced. I only state this because they were showing people with truckloads of furniture and useless materialistic items evacuating their homes…I mean a couch is not that important. Anyhow, after being glued to the TV and computer for 5 hours the fire has now consumed over 4000 acres and is 0% contained. They predict over 10,000 acres and hopefully contained by Sunday. For now, the winds have died down which might help, but we are still in harms way until this thing is somewhat contained. Hopefully all the people that are displaced have a roof over their head and some food. Tonight will be a long one as it will be hard to sleep knowing it could turn this way, it probably won’t…but that doesn’t make it any easier. I will pray for the people who lost their homes and are displaced, the fire fighters that are putting their lives on the line and the kind people that are opening their homes and hearts to help. Below are the remains of a pickup that didn’t get out in time and an end of day shot of how the smoke is moving around.