Just about a week ago a lightening strike in the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge sparked a fire that has to date burned about 42000 acres in Northeastern North Carolina. There’s a great deal of information and some very good links at this site, InciWeb, so I wont bother to rewrite all the many details. Suffice it to say its still not contained (40%) thus far and its effects reaching way beyond the area that is burning. This picture is from my front door in Grandy, NC yesterday afternoon on a day with cloudless skies. that isn’t just a summer time haze but smoke from the fire itself reaching us, and it got even thicker as night fell with the way the winds shifted. Needless to say with temperatures near 100 degrees, it was miserable to have to be outside. And several smoke warnings along with the heat advisory have been issued since this fire began. The photo of course doesn’t do justice to the acrid thick air that burns the eyes. I cant imagine what its like for the firefighters there on the scene.
We’ve had some relief today with the wind once more shifting and coming from the northwest, and this cold front that passed through last night has really cooled things off as well so its been a very nice day. Well the bad news is this fire is in an area that basically is a big pile of peat moss which will smolder and burn fro possibly months to come, It would only take a deluge of rain for several days straight to come close to getting this thing completely out. Not likely to be happening anytime soon.
I remember last Wednesday morning and walking outside on the deck after i woke up and seeing the area around here very smoky and thinking too myself someone was burning leaves or trees stumps, that sort of thing which is sort of common in a rural area like this with fields being cleared and such, but then it occurred tome being that early no one would likely have been up long enough to have a fire causing that much smoke, so my next thought it was a house fire nearby but I hadn’t heard any sirens or anything like that. Well like i say its sort of common to see smoke in the area as it is legal to get a burn permit around here for clearing land. Well i just took it as a good reason to stay inside for the day and be lazy :) It really wasn’t until the next morning I was waking up and getting ready for work that I checked the news and found out it was a wildfire and one expected to grow. I wish I had thought to get a picture of it then as it reminded me of driving in the mountains when the clouds are hanging low and its resembling a fog. By that afternoon the wind had shifted some and it wasnt so noticeable. So its been like this a week now depending on the wind and what area is having to deal with this. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of it here either. Not that I am hoping to get any more photos by any means, but if it gets bad again I sill post a few.
Somehow with all these different natural disaster type of incidents occuring with so much frequency lately; floods, tornados, fires, earthquakes I am always thinking of this line from the Cowardly Lion in the “Wizard of Oz” - “Unusual weather we’re having, ain’t it?”
It is a very dire situation isnt it that the fire remains to have ‘extreme growth potential’ as quoted on the site Inciweb , well we can only pray it subsides and gets under total control soon , oh it is fortuante that no human life has been lost yet and hopefully will stay that way. I know that in Cyprus last year in June 2007 they has some very bad fires around the island forcing many vilages and holiday homes to be evacuated , lack of water is always a problem here but fortunately we had help from some of the friendly countries such as Israel and Greece and also from The British Bases here in Cyprus who sent special fire fighting aircraft over the area with water.
There was also the same year a much worse situation In greece where raging fires took the lives of quite a few who got caught up in some villages with no espcape, and the disgraceful thing was that these fires were reported to have started by arsonists, its a scary world we live in .
Oh the land can takes absolsutely hundreds of years to recover from some of these disasters all those trees and plants destroyed, lets hope and pray its over soon .