Lots of things are on fire right now.

[mistressofmuses]

In the literal sense this time.

There's one in the northern-ish part of the state that's up to 6800 7648 acres as of 7:00, which started on Monday.

There's one that's very close to that one that started yesterday. It's smaller - 1500 acres - but has destroyed 5 homes and killed at least 1 person.

One that's less than 10 miles away from my office started late last night and they've held it to a mystery number "over 200" acres. Very close to homes, but nothing lost yet. They got air support, which they weren't sure they would get today, because so many resources were diverted to the first two. The ground crews have complained that it's difficult to get to the fire due to the terrain... and also because of the rattlesnakes.

Another fire was started near the side of the road by people who had stopped to watch the above fire. That one was contained and extinguished at only 2 acres, due to super fast response.

Another started in the same county as the first two ("human-caused but not intentional") a few hours ago, and reportedly destroyed a home, but is only about 6 acres and it sounds like it's been fairly contained.

None of these are record-setters yet: last year we were pretty lucky, but in 2020 we set the record for the top three largest fires by acreage in Colorado - we'd set one record, just to break it a short while later. Cameron Peak was the largest at 208,913 acres. The first fire I mentioned in this post is "hopefully" about to hit the burn scar from the Cameron Peak fire, so it'll likely slow down.

Comments

[olivermoss]

That's really stressful, I'm sorry. Most of the PNW fires are human caused and it's just beyond infuriating.

[mistressofmuses]

The biggest fire here is "under investigation" for the cause, but it and the others are all at least suspected to be human-caused. I don't think any are currently suspected to be deliberate, but are likely caused by unattended campfires. It's absolutely infuriating to me how people can be so careless, and ultimately end up costing people their homes and lives, to say nothing of the environmental damage. Just so shitty.

[vriddy]

Wow :(

[mistressofmuses]

Fires are so scary. They're an upsettingly "routine" part of summer, but that doesn't make them less awful.

[adore]

That's terrible :( wishing safety for you.

[mistressofmuses]

Thank you.

[umadoshi]

Oh, yikes, that's so much fire. :(

[mistressofmuses]

Way too much fire. I know there's a lot of it this summer, but it's especially scary to have three fairly threatening ones whip up in three days.

[scarlipswolfwife]

You guys aren't in the line of any of these fires, are you??? Stay safe!

[mistressofmuses]

We aren't too close. The smoke plume from the third one is very visible from my office, and the smoke is really bad. While that fire continued to grow today, it was "luckily" into open space, so mostly moving away from us.

After the fire a couple years ago though, it scares me that even living within the city could very easily wind up in the path of one of these big fires. The Marshall fire from a couple years back caused multiple entire towns to be evacuated, which I initially thought must have been a mistake in the evacuation order. Multiple entire towns?? Tens of thousands of people? Huge areas up there still haven't been fully cleaned up, much less rebuilt.

[scarlipswolfwife]

Oh good, but at the same time, the smoke is horrible - not healthy and it just makes you feel like shit. When we get smoke from either the fires in Mexico or when some of it actually drifted down from Canada, it was horrible - hazy brown and headache-inducing smoke smell. But the same thing happened in Corpus and even worse because it's closer to Mexico. I really hope y'all don't wind up in the path of one of those fires. That's scary. We worried about that in San Marcos when that huge fire was started in Bastrop back in 2011 or 2012, whichever year that was. We were far enough away but still close if it had kept spreading. Not fun.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, I think the smoke may be part of why I'm just feeling so crap the last few days. I'm tired and stressed from work, but I doubt breathing all the smoke in is helping.

Yeah, we've had some years where the air quality is just horrible. It's actually not AS bad this year, even with things pretty close. Like, the mountains are hazy, and there's a lot of gross thick brown scunge when I look toward the city or the horizon, but I can still *see* the mountains. A couple years ago I remember taking pictures where the smoke haze was so thick we couldn't see across the highway from one side to the other.

It's always scary when you're potentially in the pathway of something.