Jan 27th - Some Needed Rain (Drizzle)

We got slightly over a tenth of an inch of rain during the night and morning. It sure would be nice to get more.

Kelsey, Andy & Lydia came over yesterday evening. When they came in they mentioned something about my fire. I thought the boiler must be firing and that they were commenting on the smoke from it. As we started eating Andy asked me what I had been burning during the day. I had not been burning anything. We all looked out the front windows and saw 3' flames on the side on one of our buildings. YIKES!!!

I connected the hose to one the frost proof hydrants and turned it on. Fortunately it was warm enough that if there had been ice in the hose it had melted during the day. (A good reason to make sure the hoses are properly drained before putting them away again.) Andy dragged some boards that were on fire away from the building and I sprayed water on the fire. The flames were gone pretty quick but getting the coals put out was more difficult. I sprayed the heck out of everything and yet when I went back out to check an hour later there were still a few hot coals in one area. I sprayed them again. An hour later, when I checked again, I didn't see any hot spots.

The problem was caused by my dumping some hot ashes on the ash pile. Usually there aren't many hot coals in the ashes but when I cleaned out the ashes during the afternoon there were a lot of them. I thought that maybe the combustion blower had just run so everything was still "hot." I tried to be careful and dump the buckets of ashes directly on top of the pile of old ashes. Apparently enough of the hot coals came in contact with some leaves and set the leaves on fire. The fire tracked up to some boards that were piled along side the building and set the boards on fire. It is amazing that the old wood siding on the building didn't catch fire. The only damage to it appears to be a little scorching.

 This was a huge Praise the Lord event. If Kelsey and Andy had not decided to come over for the evening I would never have noticed the fire until it was much worse. As it ended up it was just a learning experience. One of the other times emptied the ashes I left them in a metal bucket overnight. The next morning the ashes had drawn enough moisture so that they stuck to the bottom of the bucket and were a little difficult to get out of the bucket. That was one of the reasons I didn't do the same with yesterday's ashes. In the future I won't mind having to knock some stuck ashes out of the bucket.

Have a great day. May God bless you and yours.