My friend, Mary sent me a text message on Friday to see if I wanted to join her for a building burn. She works for a school district and if they have a vacant building they donate it to the fire department to do practice drills on...they really start it on fire and get real life experience, without the trauma that a fire causes to those affected. I said I'd gladly go and we settled on doing brunch first. We went to the Old Town Battle Grounds coffee shop as they have vegetarian (for Mary) and gluten free (for me) meal options. It is housed in this old church and it is really adorable. I resisted taking photos. It was hard. We ordered and sat outside in the semi-muggy for this area weather. It had been months (really, like 6 months) since we'd caught up on life. There was a lot to fill each other in on.
After eating, we headed up to Amboy, WA, where the building was. The scheduled burn was supposed to start at noon and we arrived at 15 til, and it had already been going. We headed over after parking and watched from one side, then made our way to the other side. It was fascinating.
Mary at the burn. You wouldn't normally take pictures of yourself for fun in front of a burning building, but something like this isn't normal, so we did.
Check out all that black smoke.
The intensity of the heat made me acutely aware of the fire related struggles many in the country, especially the Colorado fires, are experiencing.
We kept waiting for this wall closest to us fall...it did...after we started walking back to the other side and couldn't see the area.
Thanks for the unusual adventure, Mary!
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