Fire!

Will keep this short since we’re six hours into a power outage that’s supposed to last another seven and I need to conserve my phone battery. We had some excitement today that resulted in a call to 911. (Everyone’s fine!)

Edith was upstairs reading when she called down about 3 p.m. that she saw flames out her window. About that time I smelled smoke and heard some weird noises. I yelled at the kids to get outside, grabbed my phone and ran out too. By that time I could see that the fire was in our neighbors’ backyard, not too far from our garage.

I called 911 while Edith banged on the neighbor’s door. (Neighbor had already seen it.) Meanwhile it is absolutely pouring rain, which ended up being a good thing because the fire was out in about three minutes, while the fire truck didn’t arrive for another 5 or 10 minutes.

Turns out a tree I few doors down and catty-corner fell on a wire during the storm, taking down a wire and causing an electrical fire. No lasting damage there, but the felled tree damaged the garages of two neighbors — one garage is decidedly leaning forward.

I write this at 9:30 p.m. Monday, and the ETA for electricity is 4:30 a.m. We’ve been watching the utility workers hard at it all evening. Hopefully we’ll have power by the morning!