The Humboldt Fire

Ok, Thursday started out normal enough. I got up and picked up my mom at the repair shop, as she was having the CV joints replaced on her car. A few hours later we went back to pick her car up.

On the way home my car completely died. It was idling fine, then as I started to go I had no power what so ever. I got down the hill I was on, but couldn't make it back up the other side. I stopped and backed down and off the road and called a tow truck. After an hour the truck showed up and he towed it to my house.
I started working on my car, not exactly what I had planned for my day off, and on my way back home from Auto Zone I took this picture of the smoke from the fire burning just out side of town. I got back home and they had given me the wrong distributor cap, so I went back up to exchange it. As I got home I happened to catch this photo of the DC10 that Cal Fire is using to dump retardant in the path of the fire. At this point the fire and evacuations were still about a mile away from where I live.
I got back to working on my car and was getting ready to change the fuel filter, and then the cap, rotor and plugs. As I got the air cleaner out, which is necessary to change the fuel filter, a get ready to evacuate notice came out over the public radio broadcast that Paradise has set up for times of emergency. I closed down the hood on the car as best I could and moved my dad's van over to start loading things into it to be ready to go if we needed to. As soon as I got the van by the house a police officer drove by using his PA system to let us know that we were in an immediate threat evacuation area. We hastily loaded a bunch of things in to the van and car and made arrangements with friends on where to stay and headed out.
On the way out of town we had to stop and pick up a lady that my mom takes care of, we were in her apartment complex for about 45 minutes and then got back on the road. There are 5 roads that go down out of Paradise only 4 of which are really usable for evacuation purposes. Well, 3 of them had been closed due to the fire actually jumping across them, or burning right up to them. So all 9,500 people leaving town were headed to a 2 lane road with one being used to get out of town and the other being used to bring emergency personnel into town. My first stop was to help some friends load a moving truck as they are moving to Las Vegas. I was going to meet them at 5:30, and left home at 2:30. Their house is about 25 miles from mine using the road I had to, to get out of town, and I got to their house at 8:30. Taking into consideration that I stopped for about an hour total, once to help the lady my mom cares for, and the second time where we were supposed to meet her family to drop her off, that makes it an average of 5 miles an hour to get out of town. I actually got this picture of the traffic while at a particularly long stop.
Once down the hill, I went to where they were loading the truck, knowing that they would be done, but I wanted to call the people I was going to be staying with to let them know where I was and what was up. I then left their house and stopped and grabbed a quick bite to eat and headed off to the West's where I would spend the next 36 or so hours. I caught this video on the way to their house as I had to drive back along the other side of where the fire was burning to get there.