Holy Smokes.....Literally

It is fire season in Montana....again. Usually we get hit with a couple fires a year and its bad for about a month. But seems like every 10 years or so we get hit REALLY HARD with the fires and it doesn't feel like fire season is going to end. This is one of those years. There hasn't been too many fires in the area where i live (until recently, like 2 days ago) but the wind has been blowing in the smoke from the fires everywhere and its been so smokey here for AT LEAST the last month.

 

 

In the above pic you can see the fire that is in my area. Last night it was 800 acres, this morning it was 1300 acres which i guess is about 2 square miles. However this evening it is now 2600 acres, it doubled in size in just a day.

 



 

 Here you can kind of see some flames as the fire has crested over the top of the mountain. I tried to take a picture of the glow of the flames tonight but i couldnt get a picture to turn out, it was to dark.

 

 

 It is literally "raining" ash. Those are some pretty big pieces that were found about 5 miles away in town. Most of the ash is like course dust in the air but there are some pretty big chunks that make there way off the mountain (PS I cant take credit for any of these pics, i got them all off of my friends facebook profiles)

 

 

This picture is from the News Cam that they have on top of a bank in town to show the weather. You can kind of see the sun. The best way to describe it would be to compare it to being a stormy day when you cant see the sun behind the clouds, except there is more of an erie glow to things.

 

 

This depicts how smokey it is and has been for the last month. The smoke has been far worse this year then it has been any other year that i can remember fires. The last time we had REALLY bad fires in our area was 2000, where our house was in potential danger and the fire was less then a mile away before they managed to get it put out.

 

Although i do know fires are unpreventable and no matter what they are going to happen i do think that they could do a better job of fighting them and trying to prevent them. There is so much beetle kill in Montana and they are choosing not to contract sections of the national forest out to log the beetle kill. Not only would they create jobs if they did this they would be clearing out a lot of the "materials" that are fueling the fires making them harder to fight. I know it also creates jobs for the firefighters but it seems like sometimes they just let fires burn on and on when they can really attack them hard and put them out. There was a fire a couple years back in pretty much the same spot but a little closer to town and man they had that thing out within a week. They attacked it hard, had nonstop water helicopters and dropped several loads of fire retardant on it. So why don't they do this for all fires? It would cost them far less money and a lot less grief for all the people who are having to evacuate their homes. It hits everyone in the community hard when Natural Disasters hit and being from a smaller community it is really great to see how people come together to help one another out in a time of need.