My worst nightmare has always been a fire in the woods. It came true Friday night - there was a fire in the woods!!
Let me back up and start at the beginning.... Thursday afternoon a HUGE thunderstorm hit our area. It poured, rain coming down in sheets sideways. The sky turned black in the middle of the afternoon. The wind picked up, gusting in all directions at once. Two thunder cells collided, causing a lot of wind and rain, lightening and thunder. Many places were flooded from all the gushing water on the ground. Trees starting falling left and right. And power lines came down.
Over a hundred thousand people lost power Thursday night in this area. Our entire area had no power. When we don't have power we don't have water, either, as we are on a well system. We also lost phones. Friday night rolls around, the electric company has been working around the clock fixing trees and power lines in our county.
It is so very dark here at night when there's no power. The woods are sheer blackness. On Friday night at 11pm our power is suddenly turned back on. We were sleeping, but got up, started the dishwasher and clothes washer. We checked around the inside of the house, everything seemed fine. An hour later the power goes off again. Sometimes this happens when crews are working on power in the area, they turn it on and off several times before getting it going again. We figured it would come back on overnight, and we went back to sleep.
Saturday morning, still no power. Hmmm... Wonder what happened? Saturday morning we drive down the street, see everyone else has power but us. We decide to climb through the jungle of woods to follow the power and phone lines that go from our house to the main road.
Here's the phone line, running from our house into the woods. You can see it right in the center of this picture.
Whoops - here the phone line goes through a tree branch! Careful!
We continued following the electric and phone lines to our first telephone pole in the woods. The pole has a transformer at the top.
Directly after that pole is where the problems were found. This picture shows the pole on the right, and power and phone lines are running straight down to the ground from the pole. We cannot see through the jungle what's down below, so we venture closer.
This picture is tough to understand without seeing it firsthand. The power lines are running from the upper left down into the jungle. And that dark line running through the left portion of the picture is a dangling power line.
We continue to move on through the jungle.
Then we come to this, and suddenly we are very afraid. the power line is on the left. On the right is a smoldering tree branch.
The tree branch was still warm from the fire. It must have happened Friday night when the electric was turned back on for the neighborhood. It appears lightening struck a large tree, breaking off branches. The power lines were knocked down to the ground, but not broken, by tree branches, causing the lines to start arcing when the power was turned on. Then the fire occurred, and the power went out again.
When damage to power lines occurs, intense arcing and power outages usually result. The highly visible, bright arcing from a damaged power line is often referred to as a 'power flash'. If we were looking outside at the time, we would have seen all this going on.
Another smoldering tree branch.
I cannot believe that all the brush, vines, and grasses didn't catch on fire. I can only assume it was all still wet from the massive rains on Thursday. Thank goodness. But, let me say, nothing was even a little wet when I found this fire damage on Saturday morning. The woods all were very dry.
The woods here are very close to our house. We are very lucky a major fire didn't break out.
When I look at this I just cannot believe the tree limb burnt, but all the leaves and other kindling on top was not set ablaze.
Here is the tree that was struck by lightening during the storm, causing the top to break off.
Now we are on the other side of the broken tree branch and fire area. the power line runs through the trees and jungle to the next pole.
Needless to say, after feeling the warm tree limbs smoldering, I called the emergency number for the power company. In no time flat we had three crews of electric company men out here. They worked here all day yesterday. They trimmed the trees in the area of the downed branches and ran new power lines to the house. They were hard workers and worked efficiently. I assisted by moving branches and limbs out of the way after they were cut down. They took their trucks down into the deep and hilly woods. I was concerned they may never get out of there!
After the work was done last night, the electric company guys enjoyed the farm views - they saw the mama and spotted baby deer that have made a home in our backyard. They looked at our pile of deer antlers that we've found scattered in the woods. They checked out the chickens and guineas - many of them didn't seem to know what guineas were. They thought it was interesting to see how friendly the chickens are. They all wanted to touch Leggy's monster, rubbery comb when I was holding him. They all smiled at the baby chicks. Farm animals even make the biggest, toughest guys smile.
The power company is supposed to come back to clear the woods around the power lines so this doesn't happen again. That's a different crew, the guys here today were the emergency linemen. These linemen were actually not even from this area, they were from Delaware. They were called here to assist our local power company. Thank you!
Hopefully that's the last fire I ever almost see!
