The Humboldt Fire

Last Thursday night we were driving north on Interstate 5 returning to our hotel at Disneyland after having a wonderful dinner at Numero Uno Pizza when our cell phone rang. When we answered it, it was my brother in law Fred calling to tell us that a fire was currently burning near our property on Williams Road and that most of Paradise had been evacuated. Whenever we hear about fire now we become very concerned as last year my older sister Tere and her family lost their home in the fires in San Diego. Fred assured us that even though the fire came close to our house, the fire had passed by us and there really was no real threat anymore to our home. One of the first things we wanted to do upon returning home on Friday was to check out our property, however the Durham Pentz Highway was still closed and we had to wait until Saturday to check out our property. Now I realize that concern over a piece of land burning is rather low on the priority list, but our property really needs the trees that it has as it is a rather hot and dry part of the county. If our property had burned, which it really looked like it did from Highway 99, we could easily deal with it, but we would be saddened to lose the trees. The entire area looked like someone took black fabric and laid it across the entire area. So we set our mind to accept that our property had burned. Our primary concern was our neighbors and how their houses faired. I took my camera and recorded the following pictures. We were quite amazed to find what we did.


The is Williams Road as we are driving up to our property. The hill in the background is where our property is. You can see the sea of black, however it appears that our property still is golden brown!
We stopped the car to get a better picture of our property from a distance. The smell of burned grass was heavy in the air.
Here is our property. Not a single blade of grass burned.
However, our neighbors across Williams Road were not as lucky. The great news is that no one lost their home in this development. The firefighters put up a tremendous fight and at each house you see how the first came right up to the edge of each house, but no further.
The is the other side of our property that is along Cory Canyon Road. Again the neighbor on the other side of the road had all of their land burned.

The is a close up of the land on the other side of Cory Canyon road. Our neighbor had just put up a new wood fence and it is hard to see it in the distance, but there wasn't much left of the fence, but you can see their house stands untouched.
This is our second driveway into our property. Our neighbor put this concrete driveway in and as you can see on the left of the driveway the land is untouched, while the other side is blackened. Our neighbor stayed up over night with his son and fought along side the fire fighters.
This picture was taken from our building pad. You can see our road down to the secondary building site in the bottom right of the picture, the golden grass on our property, Cory Canyon Road and our neighbor's scorched land.
This picture was taken on our other driveway and on the right of the driveway is our other neighbor's property and as you can see his land was burned. The other side of the driveway is our property and is as golden as it should be this time of year. We took the following video to show a 360 degree view of the area.