Fire and Smoke

When I showed you these photos the other day we were still breathing just fine because there was some wind.  But by Wednesday we were advised to stay inside and by Thursday I'd bought an air purifier for our house (which hasn't stopped running since).

On Friday we left for the weekend and on our way out I stopped to take a picture in the same spot.  The above picture was taken while standing on top of the rock in the lower left corner of the photo below.  This time I didn't even get out of my car.

One thing I noticed, by the time we were halfway to Seattle all of a sudden it occurred to me that I was seeing shadows.  The sun was out the whole time, but the smoke was so thick there were no shadows... spooky.

So we left for the weekend and stayed with my master teacher from my student teaching days.  Our kids had an absolute blast together!  Last night we came home and today I've packed up anything I can think of needing to be gone up to a month.

This was the sun setting near Brian's school last night.  The fires have burned those mountains in the foreground and are not really contained at all.  They've been able to do a lot of back burns since there hasn't been any wind, but that's just making the air quality worse.

According to our local paper the scale for air quality measures "microparticles per cubic meter" and grades it: good, moderate, sensitive, unhealthy, very unhealthy, and hazardous.  The line between moderate and sensitive is 50 microparticles/cubic meter and hazardous starts at 250.  On Friday afternoon our air measured at over 800.

Same sun as above just taken near my house

It blew out a little bit over the weekend which allowed us to come home, but no wind is forecast for this week at all and we are down in the bottom of the valley collecting it all so it will only get worse this week again.

Please pray for slight wind, rain, and cooler temperatures!  Although I'm sure some of it will still be smoldering until the first snow fall.  That's the way these things work...

We will be off to stay with friends this week in Seattle (anyone want to meet for a playdate???) and if it doesn't get better then we'll head on down to Oregon indefinitely.  Brian has to stay for school so he's bought some masks and an air purifier for his room.  Hopefully it won't stay bad for long!