Saturday, June 23, 2012

Fire in the House

Whenever there's a fire nearby, you can always count on seeing a magnificent sunset. Such was the case last night. I took the top photo with my little camera and the other two with the big camera. The sun is setting behind West Mountain. In the middle picture you can see the towers up there (astronomy equipment belonging to BYU) if you click on the picture. But the fire is on the mountain directly west of West Mountain, Lake Mountain.  As of last night, 8,000 residents had been evacuated from Eagle Mountain (west side of Lake Mountain) and from Saratoga Springs just to the bottom on the east side of the mountain.  

I haven't listened to the news this morning so I don't know if any structures have been burned. The wind has died down and the sky is clearer this morning. I hope no one lost their homes. We have a few friends that live in both cities.  Utah is tinder dry this year.  We have had 400 fires so far this year, according to the news, and we are just entering the fire season. I believe they said 368 have been human caused. This one started with some guys shooting targets on the hillside. I would suspect that target shooting, fireworks and open fires in campgrounds will be restricted this year. Last year at this time we had floods and snow half-way down the mountains. We need rain!

 I imagine if/when the world burns it will look like this:



 You can barely see the smoke rising from the mountain top.




2 comments:

Jess and Jen said...

We went to Utah Lake Saturday afternoon and watched all the action while we played on the water. We even got to see the helicopter hover over the lake, suck up thousands of gallons of water, and leave for the burn scar. It was pretty cool! -Jess

frody said...

La naturaleza, nos muestra su cara más bella, recortando en el horizonte luces y sombras para deleitar nuestros sentidos ¡preciosas!