Smoke On The Horizon

I remember summers in northern California as a teenager. They were a lot like the one California is having now. We pulled a hose to the top of the house and attached it to the Rainbird sprinkler we had attached to the peak of the roof. We made sure the clothes in our two emergency trunks were still the right sizes and checked on other items that might have gone stale since the prior summer. Summer in the woods was a real learning experience.

I really learned to appreciate fire crews. One summer we had an OES fire truck parked between our house and my grandparent's home. We had a 16' x 33' Doughboy swimming pool that held 16,000 gallons of water. The firefighters said that we had about 17 minutes of protection for our homes and that we wouldn't have any trees left, but the houses would still be standing if the fire got to our road. They also noted that we would most likely not have any neighbors left since they had no ready source of water, so there was only one other fire unit on our road, and it was just a tanker truck that had no means of spraying the business next to it.

Luckily, they never had to use any of our water, but it was a comfort to know that they were ready and willing to assist. They also got to eat my grandmother's apple cake and get some much needed rest.

A couple of years later, I was home alone when I heard a truck coming down our cinder road a lot faster than the posted speed limit of 15 MPH. I looked out to see a tanker truck from our "local" volunteer fire deparment racing toward one of our driveways. I calmly walked over to our pool, opened the gate and motioned them back to the pool.

They probably thought I was psychic since the gate was open before they got there, but I knew that sooner or later the day would come that they needed our water. The sad thing was that they were getting water to control a house fire from a home that was already burned to the ground about six miles away. We had the only known supply of water in the vicinity. There were a lot of people who lived between our home and the one that burned, but we were the only ones who had thought ahead for such an emergency. The gate had been put in soley for such an event.

I learned a lot that day about the need to be self-sufficient in an emergency. I guess it stuck. There may come a day when I will need to lean on someone else because my preparation wasn't quite enough, or the disaster was too overwhelming for my resources, but being prepared takes away a lot of the anxiety I see in the faces of neighbors and friends when emergency scenarios are discussed.

- Mark

Value is based on perception.