Fire at Emerald City (Twin Oaks)

by Paxus (from Your Passport to Complaining)

Shortly after the equinox ritual called the element of air, wind blew hard enough to send plastic chairs flying around us. When we called water, clouds blocked the sun and it felt for a moment like we might actually get rain. And less than 15 minutes after we called the element of fire into the circle, brown clouds from the neighbors land started billowing overheard in the courtyard.

This is what the fire looked like from the Twin Oaks grave yard

I broke from the ritual to check in with the office person. Kathryn had already dispatched Sabrina to the graveyard to see what she could see. When i got there half an hour later i took the above picture and was relieved to see the first so far form our property like. My relief was misinformed..

This picture is about where the fire started. but did not give any real indication of how far the fire had spread at that moment. Within half an hour of this first sighting the local Louisa Fire Department was here in force. They blocked traffic on W. Old Mountain Road. They told us to go across Vigor Road (which the Twin Oaks driveways are on) and wait for the all clear. And so almost everyone stopped doing what they we and went across the street. The preparation of dinner was interrupted, so Keenan and Kelpie went and got a bunch of pizzas for everyone. Things seemed to be improving and the fire department let us come back and eat our pizzas in the courtyard.

But things were not getting better. Before 7 PM, we were being told we needed to evacuate the entire Twin Oaks campus. A school bus was brought in and took people to Acorn and the Louisa middle school, where they waited out the fire fighting.

Emerald City is gone

The fire spread from the neighboring land and took out the kilns, the warehouse and all the woodworking spaces (called ECW). It also spread to the conference site and destroyed the pavilion, the kitchen and all of the material storage up there. Miraculously, Oz (which is the spray varnish building that had burned some years back and had been replaced by a steel and concreate building) survived the blaze.

After some hours, after surveying briefly the damage i spotted a number of small fires in the woods between Tupelo and EC. I spent a couple of hours extinguishing these, while the fire fighters were working on bigger blazes. Perhaps most scary was their work on a fire which was quite near Tupelo, one of our larger residences.

After the fire fighters had largely controlled the fire, there were still many fires in the trees.

The problem was several trees were still on fire higher up than could be reached and were dropping burning branches to the ground. But fortunately the cool night air was reducing the spread of the fire.

In all this tragedy there is some good news. No one was hurt, none of the various pets, many of which could not be found at the time of the evacuation, have been reported missing. No residences were harmed (though Tupelo had a close call).

At about midnight a young fire fighter came across me doing my small fire extinguishing thing and encouraged me to go home, saying these small fires in this cold night air were unlikely to spread and that the fire fighters would be monitoring the woods for any spread and would be there until the whole situation was under control.

Exhausted and covered with ash i returned to the courtyard where some of our members returned, while many stayed overnight at other locations in town.