Since our July 31st post about the fires to the north and south of us, we’ve had several folks ask what our fire evacuation plan is. Great question! It’s something we have spent a lot of time on. The fire threat for us is not a forest fire but, as I mentioned in that post, a wind-driven grass fire most likely caused by lightning during a thunderstorm.
In that scenario, evacuation is not really an option with this many animals — 40 dogs, 32 horses, and 10 cats. We’d need to own a couple of semi trucks with huge stock trailers … and even then, by the time we got everyone safely gathered and loaded, the grass fire would have swept through. So evacuation is not practical or feasible.
Instead, our fire plan is based on creating "defensible" spaces around the barns and corrals and other buildings. We would bring the horses into the corrals, which themselves are pretty fire-resistant with metal corral panels and nothing else to burn. Each barn and set of corrals has 200 feet of hose and an accessible hydrant.
We had a grasslands and fire expert out for a site review a few weeks ago, in fact, to review our particular situation and our plan. As a result of that visit, we found that our barns are actually well built to withstand fire (and all of our buildings have metal roofs). The one recommendation was to reduce the likelihood of airborne embers getting trapped under eaves and erupting into flames hours after the main fire is out. So our contractor is putting up screens or solid wood panels, depending on the structure, to close off the eaves.
Key to our defense plan is our fire trailer, which is what you see in the photo above. The trailer has a fire suppression unit on board, which includes a 155-gallon water tank (the black square tank) and a 100′ high-pressure fire hose and pump powered by a Briggs & Stratton engine. It’s all contained in that one unit, which is called a Defender 3. The U.S. Forest Service uses a bigger version of this model for its pick-up truck-mounted fire suppression units.
By flipping a lever, the pump can reverse the flow and suck water into the tank for a rapid refilling, which is why we have a 200-gallon reserve water tank on the front of the trailer. The big green hose is already set up to drop into the reserve tank for that purpose. (The tank in the back of the truck is what we use to fill water troughs in the pastures.) We also have two 300-gallon stock tanks filled with water and standing by for additional refill capacity. The pump can suck in far more water, much faster, to fill the main tank than we can accomplish using a regular hose from a yard hydrant.
This fire trailer will allow us to attack a fire as soon as it starts anywhere on the property, so we can (hopefully) keep it suppressed until help arrives from our local volunteer fire department. With a wind-driven grass fire, 10 minutes of containment can make all the difference.
The other critical part of our defense plan is the National Weather Service radar for our region, which we keep running on a continuous loop on our office computers so we can monitor developing storms throughout the day and night. This is what gives us the all-important heads-up if thunderstorms are headed towards us. If we see a severe thunderstorm developing and tracking our way, we bring the blind horses in from pasture and put the dogs up. Then we stay on alert until the storm passes. Here’s what the radar looked like tonight as I was writing this post.
In the photo above of the fire trailer, you can see how dense the smoke is in our valley. Normally you’d see a mountain range to the left behind Beauty’s Barn, but not today. Look at the photo from the July 31st post for a comparison. We’re just packed with smoke.
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