Weather: OKLAHOMA WILD FIRE PICTURES, 1 by JLD_II

JLD_II wrote:
Hello friends
I just returned from a lovely long weekend in OKC and looking at all the wild fire damage. Lttle did know, I was about to become part of the story. Sadly, we didn't have the reaction to grab the camera but my brother took 2 pictures with his cell phone while driving in the truck behind me.
On Sunday, we were driving North on I-35 just North of OKC in Guthrie Ok. We could see several huge clouds of smoke in every direction then we got close enough to see the actual 50 some foot tall "walls" of fire consuming everything in its path while being pushed by 50-60 mph winds. Suddenly, we saw a huge grass fire closing in on the hiway in front of us. The next thing I knew, we were driving beside 1 of the fire walls as it began to try and cross the hiway we were driving on. Then traffic slowed and cars/trucks began driving everywhere trying to figure out where to run. many just stopped right in the grass! We kept on driving hoping we might drive just in front of the fire before it cut us off the road and that is what we did. Before I knew it, the visibility was ZERO and smoke was blowing into our Blazer through a/c vents as if they were smoke machines. We could no longer see any other cars and it just kept getting darker. It seemed like minutes when it was maybe a few seconds. Just as I was about to try a U-turn, we began to see a little lightening in the dark smoke and drove towards it. We were safe and out of the way, PHEW! At that point we saw the sherriffs had shut down all S. bound traffic already, I guess they couldn't get South of the fire in time to block our path in time.
The only reason we weren't consumed by the fire IMO was an over pass of the road that provided a small fire break which gave us that crucial 30 seconds or so needed to get passed the fire before it blocked us off. I thought the smoke was going starve our engine of oxygen and make the engine stall if we didn't find clean air fast.
Here are a couple sad photo's my brother took, I'm driving the SUV in the pictures as we entered the smoke. The picture quality is bad due to it being taken with a cell phone.