The Little boy who cried... FIRE!

Yesterday evening, shortly after I got home from work, our seven-year-old Yonah was sitting on the couch resisting all my  efforts to coax a description of his day.  You see, he had a bit of a headache from not having drunk enough water on a hot sunny day of playing outside.

Suddenly, mid-grunt, Yonah perked up and blurted out, "I smell something burning!".

We didn't pay much attention to the non sequitur, since for one, Yonah is the master of the non sequitur... and for another, the farmers who tend the vineyards in the valley behind our house often burn old vines and leaves  (both to dispose of them, and also to raise the pH of the soil with the ashes).

But after he'd repeated that he smelled smoke a couple of times it occurred to me that this wasn't the season for burning old vines and leaves.  That would come only in the late fall after the harvest was finished.

So with Yonah at our heels, Zahava and I went out onto our back balcony to see where the smell was coming from.

To our shock, there was a thick column of smoke rising from some unseen spot further down the slope of the valley directly behind our next door neighbor's home, and small tongues of flame were occasionally jumping into view. 

I quickly called the emergency numbers and reported the fire... and while I was on the phone with the dispatcher, I saw several teenagers running from the site of the fire screaming something to one another... so I added to my report the fact that there might be more kids in or near the area of the fire.

While we waited for the fire department to arrive, Zahava called our neighbors to alert them, and I went out back with Gilad to see if we could get a better view of the situation from the back of our property.

By the time we got to the back edge of our yard, the column of smoke had broadened in all directions, and the roar of flames was clearly audible from the valley.  The fire was spreading quickly; feeding on the tinder-dry brush in the valley. 

Zahava reached one of the neighbors (two doors down) but our next door neighbor answered his cell phone in a town two hours away.  I got on the phone with him and asked if he had a hose in his back yard. 

Our back yard is a tangle of weeds with which we have somehow never gotten around to doing anything productive.  But our neighbor's yard is a beautiful green paradise with fruit trees, grape vines bordered with thick bushes of honeysuckle.

He said that he had a small garden hose, but that the pressure wasn't very good.  I quickly found it and started wetting down the bushes at the edge of his yard as best I could.

While I was doing so, I watched in horror as the fire grew exponentially by the minute... and by the time the fire fighters arrived, the entire valley was ablaze, and the flames were licking at the yard of the people two doors down from us.

I re-routed the garden hose to try to wet down the garden and grape vines two doors down, but before long, half of their yard was ablaze and the wind and heat were pushing me back towards the next door neighbor's yard.

The fire fighters yelled at me to get out of the way, and within moments a thick stream of water was beating back the fire from two direction.  So I went back to wetting down our neighbor's bushes; checking every few seconds to make sure the flames weren't getting close enough to warrant my having to leave.

The fire fighter's weren't happy that I, and a couple of other neighbors had remained in the back yards hosing down bushes, but since the flames didn't seem to be in imminent danger of entering the yards, they left us alone and did their heroic job of battling the blaze below.

By this time, the municipality security force had evacuated all the people from our street, so Zahava, the kids and Lulu (our dog) were on the next street up with the rest of our neighbors.

It took the better part of an hour, but the fire department finally brought the fire under control.  They continued to wet down the borders of the burnt area for another few hours and occasionally had to re-extinguish a small blaze that came back to life. 

By then, the people on the street had been given permission to go back to the houses, and I met Zahava out front.  One of the fire fighters who had been behind our house passed by as I was talking to Yonah and we told him that Yonah was the one who had first noticed the fire.  He smiled wearily and said "Kol Hakovod" (literally 'all the honor'... but roughly translates as 'great job').

As he continued walking, the firefighter motioned for me to go with him to the street above where an ambulance was waiting.  He said that as a precaution, all the people who had been in the area close to the fire were being required to sit and breath pure oxygen for a few minutes, just in case we had inhaled too much smoke.

I felt fine, but humored him and did my five minutes sitting on the bumper of the ambulance with the oxygen mask on.  Afterwards, I went back home and Zahava and I made a big fuss over our little hero Yonah; the boy who cried FIRE!... all the while doing that nervous act parents do when they don't want their kids to know just how shaken up they are.

I'm writing this at 5:30AM... and the entire neighborhood still reeks of smoke.