My fiery weekend

[hot_pastrami]

As some of you know, I bought new house about six weeks ago, one with an acre of horse property so my fiancée Britt could keep her horses. It's on the mountainside, and is really quite lovely property, though the house needs some work.

Well, Britt and I were planning a trip to Vegas last weekend, so we could pick out a wedding chapel to get married in. We were planning to leave Thursday right after lunch, and we weren't going to be back until Sunday night. Well, we were sitting in the living room eating lunch and talking when Britt let out a loud gasp. I turned to look at her, and she was looking into the backyard through the window. "I see fire!" she yelped. "The pasture is on fire!"

We hauled ass out the door and up the hillside, and the dry grass on the pasture was burning fast, and rapidly spreading. It was about 50 feet away from the house, and almost to the barn with the horse in it. I went for the hose that was connected to the barn, but the hose had burned already. So we opened up the barn so Britt could get her horse out, and I ran like a sonofabitch out front to grab the other hose, crashing through the side gate. I think I made it up the hill again in about three bounds (adrenaline is our friend) with the 120 feet of hose, attached it to the house, turned it on full force, and was on that fire like a pitbull on a pantleg. But, it had spread too much for a meager garden hose to handle. So I made sure Britt was out of the barn and well away from danger, and dashed into the house and grabbed to cordless phone, and ran out back again to slow the fire as much as I could with the hose as I directed the fire department to the house over the phone.

By this point Britt was doing what she could with the damaged hose and I had the other, but the best we could do was slow its spread, everything is too dry because of the last few years' drought, and it was munching up the fuel rapidly.

The police arrived first with a wail of sirens, an overweight officer trotting up the hill, directing me to drop the hose and get away from the fire because it was too dangerous. I did so until the fire starting spreading badly again, and then I just ignored his protests and grabbed the hose again. I had to put out a corner of the barn where it started catching fire, and I barely prevented it from speading to the neighbor's backyard. The fire department finally showed up with a pump truck about five minutes after the cops, but it took them another five minutes after they parked their truck before they were actually putting water on the fire... they did not have their shit together.

Once we had enough water to slow it down, it only took about 15 minutes to quell the flames, and another 30 or so spraying down what had already partially burned, to prevent flare-ups. I wasn't willing to leave town until we'd found the cause of the fire, but a short bit of looking around revealed the cause.... an electrical relay on a power line high above our property had gone bad, and was dropping sparks on the ground. We got the power company out there, and they replaced the relay.

All in all, damage wasnt bad. The barn needs a little repair, some of the yard's landscaping got completely toasted, and some wooden fences are badly scorched, but luckily we caught it before it got really bad. We each got one minor burn, but nothing bad at all. It's scary to think that we could easily have left for the weekend without noticing the fire out back, and who knows what would have been lost. Ick. Actually, there was a small flare-up again due to a piece of fencing which was still smoldering while we were gone, but fortunately it couldn't spread because it was in a place where almost everything around it had already burned.

Anyway, that was my big excitement for the pre-weekend. Vegas was damn fun though.