Evacuation

Ash falling

Last Thursday Jim was down in Sonora getting some supplies for the basement remodel.  He saw a bunch of fire trucks with lights on so he asked for me to check to see if there were any local fires.   I didn't see anything on our regular information sources so we figured they were going to help at the other fires in California.   About an hour later, I decided to check the CHP website. Sure enough, there was a fire that started at 12:39 pm at the bottom of the Priest Grade and it was now 12:40 pm.  So just by chance, I found out about a new fire about 6 miles from us.  And that was quite fortuitous since there was so much smoke in the air from existing California fires that this new fire didn't make any changes to air quality.

Leaving and wondering if we would see the cabin again

We monitored the fire and I continued to work....until at about 3:15 Jim came and and said, "I don't like what I just heard".  He was listening to the firefighters scanner and the incident commander was pleading for air resources and said this was "going to go to a major event".  We started talking about what we would pack up and then started putting stuff aside.

Heading down our street - you can see how dark it is from the smoke at 5:15 pm

Then ash started falling.   Then at 4pm the power went out and it changed from calmly packing to throwing stuff in the truck, readying the house and bugging out at about 5:15pm.   At 5:30pm, when we were about 10 miles from the cabin, we got an emergency call from the Sheriff saying that there was an evacuation warning.

Heading thru Coulterville to evacuate

We had to head west to then go south and south west.   The other roads were closed.   That was one of the reasons we decided to leave early - the egress in this area is limited.   We got home to SJ at about 8:30 pm and at 9pm the evacuation order was issued.  At that time, they were telling people they could evacuate through Yosemite!

 

When we left, we put this sign on our front door so that first responders wouldn't waste time trying to evacuate an empty house.   We are safe and sound and are glad we decided to leave early as there were reports of chaos when the order came out.   Plus, the night before we evacuated we decided to gas up my rig "just in case"!