After the Harris Fire
Cliff November 5th, 2007
I’m sorry that I forgot to post a follow-up on the status of my sister Mandi & her family (thanks for reminding me, FRL!). Their house survived, and Mandi was busy working as the small animal Veterinarian for two different clinics during and after the fires. Here’s a clip from Jeremy’s email:
Monday night it sounded like they had it back under control and we went to bed. I got up a little after 2 am to check on things and the fire had come over San Miguel and was working down the western shoulder. The pictures Amanda took around 3 am right before we left. The grey dots on the one are actually falling ash. The other pictures I took Thurs. during the day to show where the houses were. The shoulder of the mountain is w/in 2 miles of us, so we decided to leave and beat the rush. It seemed to be moving slowly, but as you can see the flames were large, about 20 ft at times, and I felt if the subdivision at the base of the mountain went up, things would deteriorate extremely quickly. We loaded up the dogs and left at about 3 am…
So needless to say, we are very very very grateful to everyone who prayed and sent energy (but didn’t light candles!) for the safety of Mandi’s family and house, and that of all the firefighters and families in the area. It meant a lot to receive all those good wishes.
It still stinks that I missed IL2007, but I know I would have been a hot mess. At one point of major chaos, I was trying to use my “mad librarian skeelz” to find a ground line phone number for the house of the folks that Mandi was evacuating to. As it was, I was unable to concentrate on much of anything here anyway for the rest of the week. If I know I’m going to do a less-than-stellar job, I’d rather not do it in the first place. So at this point, I’ll just plan on seeing everyone at CIL2008!