Quote:
Originally Posted by nowhereman427
hOW about Idaho City?  |
It's a ghost town that's still has a few residents. The residents spend their idle time trying to keep the rest of town from burning down. The entire town is made from now ancient timber that's ready to light up as soon as the weather gets hot. Something there always does every couple of years.
Wildfire isn't mentioned here very much, but during fire season, if little rural town can be in serious trouble extremely fast.
Those towns typically have a volunteer fire department, and the department usually consists of one hand-me-down fire truck the town got for free from some larger city who had purchase newer ones.
I admire volunteers, but out here in the summer, most of them are going to be out working on the farm or some other rural job, so it could take them some time to get to the fire. If the wind kicks up, the fire can outrun the firemen and burn down a house.
This very thing happened to me once out on the Arco desert. My family had some old Quonset huts that were used on a piece of remote farmland for temp housing. The both had old railroad wood-burning stoves for heat.
We were out working on a half finished building in mid-December when the wind kicked up and started a down-draft in the wood stove, just after a kid who was a farmhand overloaded the stove.
The downdraft acted like a bellows on the fire, and it overheated the chimney, which set the sawdust insulation on fire in the between the inner Masonite ceiling panels and the corrugated steel roof.
We were all outside and never noticed the fire until we went inside to warm up. By then the fire had really gotten going but the old Masonite panels that made up ceiling hadn't lit up yet.
My bro grabbed a stepladder and began opening up the ceiling with a shovel and I ran hunting a water hose.
The hose was frozen solid, so I ran into the hut's bathroom and connected it to the little hot water heater in it.
The hot water in the tank melted the ice in the hose, and we put out the fire pretty fast once ice plug blew out and there was water in the hose.
The kid who was with us had run down the road and called the County Fire Dept. as soon as we noticed the fire, but by the time the fire truck arrived, close to an hour had passed, and the fire had been out for 45 minutes.
The crew chief was amazed we put it out. He said that if we had run outside and waited for them, as is usual, the. Quonset would have burned to the ground in about the same time it took to put it out.
I was trained to fight fire first in the Navy, where there is no Fire Dept. option at sea, and my training made me hate fire like it is a personal enemy. I don't know why my bro had a similar impulse.
We had already planned on spending the night out there instead of trying to drive out in the windstorm. That's what we did, after the fire was out. The place was a stinky dripping mess, but it was still warm and habitable.
Later that night, I realized that, if I hadn't spotted the hose connection on the water heater instantly, both of us would have been trapped by the fire as soon as the Masonite ceiling panel lit up, and it was beginning to smoke by the time water finally hit it.
The fire was between us and the only outside door in the place. We had nothing to chop our way out through the corrugated steel outer shell.
That was back around 1974, before cell phones. But even a cell phone call wouldn't have sped the response; the wind was high, and the only road to the place was full of drifting snow. Zero visibility.
The fire truck couldn't drive that road very fast in those conditions.
That was the only time I every used my naval fire training, but my bro put out another fire later on in a relative's cabin.
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