The land of the blog posts
If you, like me, committed my first post to heart, then you may recall I indicated the next post would be dedicated to BLM. Well, this post is not going to be dedicated to BLM because I am using it to process the stress of yesterday. To be honest I have been agonizing about this decision a little bit, because I don’t want to send the message that I didn’t intend to follow through with my prior statement, or worse yet, that BLM isn’t an essential topic to discuss. But ultimately I have decided it would not devote the proper attention to try to discuss both BLM and yesterday in one post. This blog post is my personal form of therapy, so I apologize for once again being a fundamentally selfish human being.
With the concerns that Andrew could potentially have COVID-19, I have been sleeping in the guest bedroom to attempt to minimize the risk of contracting it also. At this stage, we are pretty confident that he does not have it, but the guest bedroom turned out to be an excellent place to be in the early hours of yesterday. I was sleeping with the window open because our HVAC is broken, which also turned out to be excellent for a few reasons. These two circumstances allowed me to hear fire trucks (I think they were really just SUV type of vehicles) driving through the neighborhood at 1:30 AM announcing "This is the fire department. Prepare to evacuate.” I am a light sleeper so I shot out of bed and went to the window, where I watched the vehicle go past the house and make the announcement again. Looking further past the vehicle, I could see the smoke and bright pinks and oranges that indicated a wildfire burning in the distance. My sleepy brain had initially wondered if this was some sort of test, but I quickly realized this was not, as they say, a test.
After waking Andrew up by announcing we need to leave, we started gathering some things to pack. We still have a lease for the apartment we initially lived in, so it was quickly resolved that we would head there. Fortunately we keep toiletry bags packed at all times, so I grabbed those and added my heart medication. I started gathering/listing all the things we needed to pack for the cats, while Andrew grabbed our important documents and our work computers. A duffel bag was filled with an extremely chaotic selection of clothes. Naturally, all the clothes I wanted were dirty so I filled a trash bag with laundry to pack. If I were to give advice out, I would likely suggest packing clean clothes instead, but my 2 AM brain really wanted the sports bras I wore earlier in the week and the 2 AM brain wants what it wants. The car got filled pretty quickly, and we made a few decisions about final items to pack (litter box did not make the cut, but the air mattress did) before collecting the cats. They were starting to sense the stress, but they were also sleepy and easy to scoop up. They absolutely hate their carriers and they hate the car, so I’m happy they weren’t quite able to figure out what was going on.
We opened the garage door to head out but walked outside to survey the neighborhood and the fire. We had been looking outside at assorted times, and assessing whether the fire looked better or worse, and decided that it definitely seemed to be looking worse. A bunch of neighbors were gathered outside as well, and they also seemed to be assessing the fire. Other cars were already driving out. We met one neighbor who was going door to door to make sure people were awake. She explained to us that the fire department expected the fire to crest the ridge in the next 10-15 minutes. I think it was somewhere around this time that I fully processed that "prepare to evacuate" does not equal "you must evacuate now" but the official orders seemed imminent. We got back in the car and headed out.
I had tried to find some news posts earlier but I was unsuccessful probably because I was using Draper in the search query (fire is technically still in Lehi at this point) and there might not have been that much reporting yet. Honestly I don’t remember how I was able to start searching the right thing, but I learned our fire was the Traverse fire, and found some local news articles and a Utah wildfire Twitter handle to follow. Saddled with some actual information on what’s happening, we also realized several things we did not have that we should have packed: wall chargers to charge our phones, watch chargers, toilet paper for the apartment, our personal computers, and our hard drives with backups. My biggest takeaway: we need a list for the things we should pack when fleeing in an emergency. We also learned that you should shut off your HVAC when evacuating for a wildfire, which is the second excellent feature of our broken HVAC system because it was already off, and therefore we didn’t have to count this as another thing we didn’t do correctly.
After arriving at the apartment, I realized the air mattress was essential because it was entirely empty, and it was around 2:30 AM at this point so sleep in the near future was a good idea. In the chaos of packing I could not for the life of me figure out where the automatic pump was (yes I did think of exactly where it was when we eventually returned), so we only had the foot pump we use for camping. Andrew started pumping up the bed but I took over not too long after, thankful for a repetitive action that used up some of my adrenaline. We collapsed on the bed but spent the next hour or so doomsday scrolling and refreshing Twitter to get updates. The photos coming from Lehi were crazy but we didn’t really have a good sense of what was happening closer to our house. Draper issued the official evacuation order for our neighborhood around 3:30 AM, and we tried to get some sleep shortly after that.
We slept on and off, and did a lot of Twitter scrolling. Draper was very cautious about lifting the evacuation order because of the high winds forecasted for the rest of the day. We looked at a lot of aerial photos of the damage, and footage of planes flying overhead to contain it. I think relatively early we realized our neighborhood should be safe, but it was alarming to see the estimates of the damage and to hear things like "25% contained." What about the other 75%?! I don’t fully understand still, but some Googling indicated that this meant the fire was uncontrolled around most of its border, but local and state firefighters had taken precautionary steps and had control mechanisms in place. At 7:30 PM, Draper lifted the evacuation order and we were back home and unpacked by 9.
Fireworks in a desert is a pretty weird concept generally, and Utah has a patchwork collection of rules and laws governing their use. In the entirety of the state, fireworks are only allowed during certain dates (June 28 is not included), and individual cities and counties can further regulate them as they see fit. They are banned entirely on Traverse mountain. It was pretty immediately revealed that fireworks were the cause of the Traverse fire, and the "suspect was cooperating with authorities." The suspect probably called the authorities, if I had to guess. Most of Utah was under a "red flag warning" yesterday, which is the highest level of warning for fires, because of extremely dry and windy conditions. There were several other fires yesterday as a result. We learned later that the Traverse fire was initially expected to be a lot worse than it ended up being. The winds died down a lot during the early morning hours, and it ended up raining a fair amount. Overall, no homes were destroyed. It is estimated that 467 acres burned, and it is now 100% contained because the fire is out. Well let me tell you, I am just so relieved that one person’s irresponsible actions happened to only result in 467 acres burned, instead of torching the 230 homes that had to be evacuated. So relieved.
If you had asked me yesterday how I was, I would have said fine, just tired. That seems mostly accurate. When I woke up this morning, I thought wow I’m really tired but that’s all. I went downstairs to make breakfast, and I had been pondering taking a sick day because wow I was really tired, I had a headache, and I just overall felt lousy. I turned to say something to Andrew and I just started crying. (I might cry as I write this part, too.) I realized I’m so tired because on top of trying to return to a normal schedule in one night, I held all the stress of yesterday and I haven’t given myself an opportunity to process it. I feel so frustrated and upset that I knew so little about what we should have done yesterday and we were subsequently pretty poorly prepared. Because the fire wasn’t as bad as expected, we were incredibly fortunate to have been able to use yesterday to learn more about how to be prepared and how to get the information we would need in another event. But I keep thinking about how we were so lucky that was the case, and that our lack of preparedness didn’t end up having real, material consequences. I keep thinking what if I hadn’t heard the fire department announcements? What if I had been sleeping in the main bedroom with the windows closed? What if the neighbors hadn’t knocked either, because we are new and no one knows us? What if everything had burned down? The what-if’s are heavy, and they are weighing me down today. So yes, I took a sick day, I wrote this post, and I’m working through them. I’m always impressed at how effective adrenaline is at letting you function like a normal person, and somehow I’m always surprised at the subsequent emotional hangover you get when the adrenaline wears off and you finally have the time to feel everything you had been ignoring. One day I will write a post that isn’t so long, and is a little bit happier, but I guess that day is not today, and I thank you all for making it to the end.