An entertaining storm system blew through this evening… scads of wind, a whole lot of lightning but only a little rain. I stood on the front deck and watched the lightning to the north when *blammo,* a bolt hit a distant hill and started a fire. It’s hard to be sure, but the hillside is on the order of five miles off. I called 911, but was apparently not the first… they already knew. A few minutes later a whole bunch of fire fighting vehicles went tear-assing past the house, eventually visible *way* off in the distance approachign the scene of the fire. However, before they got there the fire seemed to put itself out. The smoke seems to indicate that the wind kept changing direction, which means it would be blown back over where it has already burned. Coupled with the rain, limited though it was, the firefighters didn’t have much of a job. But every year the Utah news is full of thousand-acre fires started by lightning…
Even though the straight line distance was almost certainly less than 10 miles, it took more than half an hour from the time I saw the fire start to the time I stopped watching, and in that time the flashing emergency lights were still working their way towards the site of the fire. I’ve often wondered why the Utah DNR or some such doesn’t put one or more local cropdusters on retainer. The weather today was not a surprise; the radio has been yapping about it since at least yesterday. So on days like this – hot, after a long dry spell, with a high probability of lightning – have one or more cropdusters stationed at various out of the way airports, their chemical tanks full of fire fighting water or foam or some such. A plane could have reached the site of the fire in just a few minutes. Circumstances need not have been wildly different for that fire, which seemed to naturally snuff itself out in half an hour or so, to have sprung up into a full-fledged wild fire. But if a cropduster had popped up right about then and laid down some aerial anti-combustion whoopass on it, that might have shut it down, or at least slowed it until the ground forces could get there.