My family and I are still working through our thoughts and emotions related to the Waldo Canyon Fire. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose one's house -- the sheer mass of paperwork and shopping and looking for a place to live, and then add to it trying to counsel one's children? And keep them fed/dressed/clean? Let's not even go there. I don't know how I'd do it.
So when I say we're still working through our thoughts and emotions, it feels a bit ridiculous.
This week it will be one month since the fire started. The fire is still burning, and expected to continue burning until December. As a way to commemorate the first month, Scott edited the videos we took during the fire and put them to music that reflects how we were feeling as we watched it burn. It's about 7 minutes long -- don't feel bad fast-forwarding. For me, watching it for the full seven minutes is a bit like meditating. I take a deep breath and watch and listen and pray.
Waldo Canyon Fire from Hillary on Vimeo.
This video is very powerful paired with that music. It seems the cause of the fire is still under investigation. Natural wildfires are Mother Nature's way of 'cleansing.' I'm thinking that if a human was the cause of the start here, the natural one wouldn't have been far behind, since it's just going and going. The devastation is almost incomprehensible.
ReplyDeleteHi, Jeanne! I am waiting with anticipation to hear the cause of the fire. That it was probably man-made breaks my heart. But, yes, a lightning strike in that area (or really, any area in Colorado) could have caused the same devastation.
DeleteMy husband read recently that before we started fighting wildfires in the late 1800s/early 1900s, fires were much less hot and they rarely reached the canopy. They were cleansing then because they cleaned out the brush underneath and allowed room for the trees and forest to grow in a healthy way without damaging the whole forest. I think he said there were something like 80 trees per acre then. Now we have closer to 1000 per acre, so when a fire gets going it burns much hotter and instead of cleansing, it kills everything in its path. I wish I had a source for that info so I could read more about it, actually. Our family was in the Hayman burn area recently and, 10 years later, almost nothing is growing. It left nothing behind to help with re-seeding or to prevent erosion.
It seems like forest management is something (one of many things, right?) that we haven't quite figured out yet.