Fire and Rain

As you can see by the rain gauge, we have received 3 3/4" of rain this past week.  It's a wonderful thing in this drought stricken part of the country.  It isn't a drought breaker, (we'd need this amount every week for at least a couple of months before we could say that)
but it is a step in the right direction.

So when we have a chance at a few days of drizzle and the county lifts the burn bans we get to work on much needed chores...which are burning burn piles.
Let me just say this for the record.....I am skeered of fire...very, very skeered.  A wild fire through here, with the conditions such as they are could do an incredible amount of damage (look at the reports of the Bastrop Fire a year or so ago ) in a short amount of time.

One reason is that when you live rurally like we do you are only covered by small independent Fire Stations.  We don't live in the city limits so we don't have the infrastructure (fire hydrants) that a fire truck could pull up to and start spraying water.  We are limited to trucks that can carry their own water.  There are not roads everywhere and the terrain can be treacherous so fighting the fire is just altogether difficult.

IMPORTANT NOTE HERE:  I'm having trouble posting pictures....but wanted to publish this so I'm just going to continue this post and maybe add the pictures later...although it won't nearly be as interesting without the pictures of FIRE!

 

Even though we have an established road and driveway....vegetation continues to grow...even in a drought and we do have to do some trimming from time to time.  What usually ends up happening is that we do a fair amount of trimming and put it in a pile or two and then when the conditions are right we burn it. 

It's always a little scary for me in the beginning...even though we've done this a time or 10.  When that first bunch of branches finally catches on fire and it's on it's way.  And for some unknown reason...even though it's been dead calm...the minute the match lights the first branch on fire...the wind begins.  Maybe it's because fire creates wind...I don't know that to be true but it sure does seem like it. 

So we got the rain and the burn ban was lifted for a couple of days and we thought that we'd take advantage of  it all and burn, baby, burn.

We actually had two piles to burn but decided that we'd just do the biggest pile for now and wait until we had more rain to do the second.

The whole process took around 3+hours from start to the ash pile.