OKLAHOMA WILD FIRE PICTURES

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.

Here is the only other picture. man I wished we would of thought to take pictures ourselves but we were in "survival mode" thinking of nothing else.
Lord please help those that have been effected by these disasters and please try to prevent more from spreading.
I've seen many fires and a bunch of burned up land but nothing that compares to this. All up and down I-35, there were enormous patches of black earth from earlier fires and you can see plumes/towers of smoke in almost every direction.
JD

I'll try to edit these to enlarge and clean them up so you can see better.
Thanks, JD

JD. . .even without further adjustments to your pics, can tell that your family must have been frightened to death during that experience. It really seems we're helpless in onslaughts like these, and sometime give it our best guess as to how to get through it. Thank goodness you kept your wits about you and kept right on going to safety. Thanks for sharing your photos and glad you and yours are safe.
Janet

hi JD, just reading your thread. Am so thankful you made it out of there!

tamara

Looks like you did the right thing and kept going. Next time turn off the A/C though.
Good post, thanks for sharing.
Andy P

Still not raining. ;(

January 2006 in Oklahoma now goes down as the warmest January in 118 years of record keeping. TV news reports are saying 1% of the the state has burned. Pray for rain for us.

Add the Colorado Plateau [four corners region] to that prayer please.

Our prayer's have been and are still with you all.
Over New Years, we went down along the Red River Valley(Lake Texoma area) and on to Dallas. Our family owns some properties around the State Park and Madill area. This was 2 days before the photo's above were taken. We went to water, make sure the grass was cut, debris picked up etc. We went to lunch then tried to return to turn off the sprinklers. Just in that short time, fires had crept up on that area and the police wouldn't let us go back to turn off the water! I don't think we were able to drive anywhere for more than 5 miles at any given time with out seeing more fires or burnt/scorched earth. These 5(10 miles tops) mile intervals stretched all a long I-35 from Texas to Kansas and about 1/2 that distance East to West...Those images are still so fresh in my mind and I pray I never see anything like that again.
My little run in with the fire on the interstate was so very scarey but incredibly brief. I couldn't imagine the same scenario except for sitting at my home with the fire racing at me. Tens of thousands of people(who knows how many for sure) are surely shaken and tramatized for the rest of their lives. I can't imagine what that would feel like and there is no way any of us could help in any way. There are no ways to make donations to any kind of fire prevention programs or the like...I'm sad there isn't anything anyone can do to help except to pray for rain... So I'll continue.
JD

There is talk of really coming down hard on smokers who throw 'em
out the window while driving.

It's so bad here now that all grilling out of doors is banned unless you are using propane as your source of fire.

I was at a freind's house when we got the news that she might have to evacuate. Talk about a wake-up call. She had loaned her pet carriers to her sister. I'm telling her I can put the cats in the mesh laundry bags if need be. We are looking around at what she needs to take and all the items that could be destroyed by a fire. She was fortunate that she didn't have to evacuate.

I always hear stories about how people are so upset to lose their wedding and family photos in a disaster. I've going to talk my husband into scanning our favorite photos on a disc and sending them to his sister in another state. I'm also planning to video tape the contents of our home and property and leave it with another relative. If our home did burn, and there was a disagreement over money with the insurance company at least I'd have some proof of what we had.
I think everybody who is living in rural Oklahoma is nervous about these fires.

It's so dry here that the number of calls about repairing house foundations has doubled. One of the local weathermen recommended watering around your house 30 minutes twice a week
as a preventative to foundation problems.