Evacuation

Apparently Jeremy dislocating his shoulder last week wasn't exciting enough.  This week we got to evacuate our home due to a wild fire!

Thursday afternoon a target shooter started a fire in our area.  Thursday night we had fun looking out watching the helicopters dump water on the fire and enjoy the beautiful view.  (I took these from my back yard.)

Friday morning at about 10 am, we got a knock on our door.  It was our neighbor informing us that we were being evacuated.  Luckily Jeremy was working from home, so he could help me gather a few things.  It was an eery feeling deciding what was important to take and what could be replaced if the worst happened.   We also got a lot of phone calls from friends and family that morning asking if we were on the evacuee list, so it took me a lot longer to get packed than what I thought.  At 11 am, we had the police knocking on our door telling us what our neighbor had an hour ago.  The interesting thing about that was we knew the police officer from when we lived in Orem!

Something else that took a while was our little Clara.  We decided to have a family prayer before we started packing.  We told Clara why we were randomly having a prayer, and she started crying.  She wasn't worried about our house, but about her special things.  I learned quickly to get her helped before doing anything else otherwise she was a HUGE distraction.  But once I found the toys she was so worried about, then gave her a bag that she could pick out her most special toys and put them in, she was almost excited for our adventure.

The other fun thing was that Jeremy couldn't do any heavy lifting because he's still recovering from his shoulder injury, and I can't do any heavy lifting because I'm 32 weeks pregnant!  Luckily our wonderful neighbors checked in on us before they left and were able to help us load our car.  I'm so glad to live where we do and have such thoughtful neighbors.

After checking on Jeremy's home teaching families, we headed up to Jeremy's parent's house for the weekend.

Shortly after arriving at John and Sharon's, we found out that our subdivision was no longer a mandatory evacuation.  We decided to stay put because I didn't want to go back home just to have to leave again.

On Saturday we got to have a picnic.  When we told Clara that we were going to the mountains for it, she refused to go.  All of a sudden I realized she probably thought we were going to the mountain with the fire on it.  After I explained that we wouldn't go near the fire, she was so excited to get outside and go for a little hike.  Here we all are on our outing.

The evacuations were lifted Saturday night, but we didn't find out until almost 7 pm.  We decided to just stay there one more night and came home on Sunday.  This is a picture I took from our back yard of the results of the fire.  You can see the black line of what got burnt and what didn't.

The fire ended up burning 5,676 acres.  (That was the last known report before people were allowed back into their homes, so it's probably more since the fire was still burning, just not next to any homes.)  It came withing 20 yards of some homes (not any from our subdivision.)  The rest are pictures of the fire I got from our local news station: ksl.com

And in this last one you can see how close the fire actually came to some homes!

I'm so grateful to be safely home again.  I knew our house was far enough away from the fire that it would be ok.  I was more worried about smoke damage than anything else.  The reason why we were evacuated was because there were a lot of strong, unpredictable winds that day, so officials had no idea where the fire would go.

Thanks for everyone's prayers during this exciting weekend!  :)