Things I Learned in the Fire

On Sunday September 4 Cass and I walked outside to go to the grocery store, and our neighborhood was on fire. The visual we got when we stood in our driveway was black smoke filling the whole sky with helicopters dumping water. The power had been turned off. It was pretty immediately obvious that this was serious.

Our neighborhood is positioned in a bend of the Lower Colorado River, and there is one main road that goes through the center from north to south. In order to evacuate the neighborhood, everybody has to drive out on that one road. Steiner Ranch has about 15,000 residents. You can imagine what a nightmare scenario an evacuation is.

I admit it, I freaked a little bit. I just wanted to get the eff out. I didn't pack wisely for myself or for the kids. I did manage to grab our fireproof box with our passports and birth certificates in it. I got my new expensive camera, my laptop/chargers, and that's about it. I didn't have clothes, we didn't have dog food, the kids didn't have toothbrushes. I did think to look for valuable jewelry, but I couldn't see in our bedroom with the lights off and I couldn't remember where a flashlight might be.

We got out before much of the neighborhood did, since we were able to pretty much drive right out. The sheriff's office had blocked off the main outlet highway, so there was no traffic to deal with there. I heard that later, it took people over an hour just to get out onto the highway. We drove straight to Cedar Park to our Canadian friend's house (aka the Canadian Embassy, according to Cass). We quickly realized that we weren't going back, so we had to go shopping on Monday.

In the end, 23 houses burned completely and another 3 had serious damage. 28 houses had minor damage like burned fences, decks, backyards. The cause was high wind from TS Lee blowing large power lines, causing them to arc and set the greenbelt on fire. We don't have any close friends who lost a house, but the kids' music school owners lost theirs. A girl in Cami's varsity choir lost hers. The firefighters probably saved over 100 homes. The photos I've seen show plenty of houses where the fire burned right up to the back door.

The drought out here is ridiculous. Avg rainfall up to this point of the year is about 27 inches. We've had 7 inches. Everything is dry as a bone. Lake Travis is 33 ft below average September levels (49 feet below what's considered "full") - there are island chains forming in the middle of it. We are under Stage 2 water restrictions. It's going to be a long time before things return to normal out here.

So after all that, here's my advice for escaping a wildfire. I'm sure a lot of it is similar to hurricane preparedness.


-I have all our important papers in a fireproof box - birth certificates, passports, SS cards, etc. It was easy to grab it and go.

-Make sure everybody has their medications. Pharmacies can get replacements for you, but it's much easier if you have the info.

-Get a cheap memory stick and put all your pictures on it. Grab and go.

-Unless there's a fire at your door, take a few minutes and pack a few changes of clothes for everybody.

-Take all the computers/laptops, phones, and chargers for all.

-A big one - take a video of each room of your home and save them on the memory stick. It will help if you have to make an inventory of anything lost in a fire. I took photos of all the rooms and uploaded them to Picasa.

-Also, I learned that your freezer will keep for 24-48 hours without power. Ours was off for about 26 hrs, so we only had to throw out a small number of things. Luckily, we didn't have much in the refrigerator.

-Always know where a flashlight is located. They cut our power, and I was trying to find my jewelry to take - and I couldn't see a thing in my bedroom. I never found what I was looking for, but they were things covered by our rider anyway.