The Herriman Fire

We went out for a walk on Sunday afternoon. The winds were so strong, it was not very enjoyable. I looked over at the Herriman hill and saw a large dust cloud (or so I thought). It was hurting my eyes, so we headed home. A few hours later I was getting the boys in the bath and Lukas said he saw a dark cloud. I went to the window and told him that wasn't a cloud, but smoke. Then I looked further and saw the flames. It was unreal. We all went outside and couldn't believe our eyes. It was just miles away coming down that hill fast. Our neighbors were outside and we tried to find out how it got started and where it was. After an hour or so we could actually smell the smoke in our house. I got the kids to bed and couldn't stop checking facebook & watching the news to find out what was going on. Some machine gun fire at Camp Williams started the fire and due to the strong winds, it came over that hill towards Herriman. It went from 700 homes being evacuated to 1200 to 1600. The evacuation zone wasn't past 134th or even close to 126th, so I felt okay. I did check to make sure I knew where our 72 hour kits were and our binder of important documents were just in case. I couldn't sit there anymore so me and a friend drove to Maverick to see what we could see. I recorded a few minutes of the fire on the hill and then we went home. All this time Pat was sleeping (he had to work early in the morning). Finally he woke up and realized how close the fire was so he started calling his family. It was hard to go to sleep, but we did. In the morning the fire was still not contained, and 3 homes were burned. After another day the fire was finally contained and the people that were evacuated were able to go home again. Crazy that my little town of Herriman was on the news and in the spotlight. We felt so blessed to be safe and that the fire didn't do more damage. We also felt grateful for all those firefighters and police officers that worked so hard to contain the fire. Here are some pictures that I stole from other peoples blogs and from ksl.com