Fire

Rob and I were awakened at about 3:15 this morning when something exploded outside our house.

We both looked out the window and saw a small orange glow coming from the direction of the street. And then we heard an unmistakeable sizzle. We had no power. Something was burning. And the glow was getting bigger.

With the window open we were able to discern that our neighbor across the street had just called 9-1-1 because a tree had fallen and knocked down the power line that runs in front of our house. It wasn't until we walked down to the end of our driveway that we saw the power line draped across our driveway and several small and smoky fires at the edge of our property.

The power line was very much alive and sputtered and sparked every once in a while as we waited for the fire department to show up. That took about 35 minutes (since the ground was saturated with water and there is a stream between the the fire and our house the house wasn't in any danger, but still it didn't seem as if the local fire folks saw this as an emergency.)

It turned out that they coudn't do anything until PECO (electric co.) showed up and I think that took another two hours or so. I went back into the house in case the girls woke up (Lizzie is very afraid of fire and freaks out when the fire alarm in our house goes off or when she hears a fire engine.) Rob finally came back in around 5 a.m. and PECO arrived very shortly thereafter. We were still awake because by this time Lizzie WAS awake and scared and wasn't about to sleep.

It took awhile but Lizzie fell asleep, the fire was out and power was restored to our home.

This is how it looked last night (Rob took the actual fire photo as I didn't trust myself to get to close!)

In this picture I'm standing at the end of our driveway and shooting towards Favinger. You can see the wire hanging down on the left side of the photo. The headlights are from the firetruck.
There was a lot of smoke that didn't set off our smoke detectors (it was actually blowing in the other direction):

And where there's smoke, there's fire:

This morning the only vestiges of last night's excitement is our front yard littered with the tree limbs PECO cut down (the tree was a live tree, by the way, not dead wood), a few charred spots near the edge of the road, a somewhat tired Mom who had to go and register a dozen or so brownies for my troop next year and a very very tired Dad who couldn't fall back asleep after the fire (of course we all know that nothing interferes with my sleep so I was able to get in another couple hours after the din died down!)