A Burning Sensation

I am sure a lot of people have read about the fires here in the southwest. I had an interesting experience as this is the first brush fires I had ever covered (at least in this large of a scale).

It started on a Wednesday morning. Over night we had a lot of lightning. However one of the oddities of the desert is that the rain that comes with the lightning doesn't make it down to the ground.

So what ended up happening was the lightning ignited very dry brush. I believe that there were 16 fires in and around Las Vegas due to lightning.

The first one that we discovered was atop the mountains. This one was small, but like all wildfires would soon grow, so I was dispatched to get some video of it until our helo came up.

My poor truck was under the weather that day so I was stuck with either 20 or 21; the UgOlPST's as I like to call them. That's pronounced Oog-Ole-Pssst. I have to have an acronym for everything. Do ask why. It's just the way it is. Anywhoo UgOlPST is short for Ugly Old Paint Scheme Trucks.

I grabbed Unit 20 and rolled as far to the west as I could. It was hard to find this fire because basically all I had to go on was a small bit of smoke wafting off the mountain. And, based on my angle of attack, the smoke disappeared several times.

I finally arrived at the intersection of Craig and Durango in the northwest valley. I assumed this was close enough because while I might have been able to get a mile or so closer, I had a pretty unobstructed view from where I was.

No one else was out there so I assumed I was first on the scene. Unfortunately that wasn't true as NBC had a tower cam focused in on it. But we had me! So that made the footage 14% better! It all would have been pretty moot come 6:10 when our chopper ace Dayna Roselli would be up and able to fly up there.

Until then I was able to offer our viewers the closest view of the fires. Closest being 25 miles away. I had my 2X extender activated and the fire STILL looked far away. This is a view from my camera off the monitor in the back of the live truck.

The fires didn't stop there. As I was returning around 8:00 I noticed heavy black smoke coming off the northern mountains. Turns out there were four fires up there that eventually combined into one big ass fire.

There was also a fire in the southwest. This one was the closest one to the city. At one point it came to within a half mile of SR 159. I covered that one most of the weekend (well the over night part of it at least). I wish I had gotten a screen capture of what I shot because it was AWESOME. I had one shot that made it appear that the entire mountain was on fire.

The biggest problem caused by that fire was the closure of SR 159. That's the only direct route from Las Vegas to Pahrump. The highway was closed for 12 hours so people who worked in Vegas and lived in Pahrump had to take a 120 mile detour. How'd you like ot have to make a 2 hour drive after working overnight?! A lot of people simply camped out at this gas station, hoping the road would open soon.

Eventually all the fires in the valley area were extinguished with no damage to the population of Las Vegas. I know that people in Phoenix and in Utah weren't as lucky. But it could happen again. It got very humid here a couple of days ago and people were worried more lightning could come.