Still Trying to Get This Done

Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

As the chinook winds have eaten our snow cover and dried out the grasses and downed trees, the fire hazard went up to a red flag warning on Wednesday. That means that if a fire happens, it has a good chance, a very good chance, of getting out of control. Not that I needed more to concentrate my mind on fire mitigation.

The chainsaw has sat idle for some weeks now as arthritis and snow cover combined to keep it in the garage. Though I could get out now, I haven’t. On some days the winds have been too high, on others I just didn’t feel like it. I still have several trees to remove, almost all now in the back, a few trees to limb and several trunks to cut into fireplace size logs for curing.

That I can do. What I also want are external fire sprinklers. They exist. It’s possible to imagine a system for our home, but external sprinklers are not part of the fire mitigation culture here. Even the Colorado State Forest Service recommended against one in a letter to me: “…too many variables that could go wrong with the system, including losing power during a wildfire, or forgetting to drain the system during cold weather and the pipes freezing.” Well, we have a working generator. At last! And, draining a system…well, we can get that done.

Still, because of this hesitancy, the folks who do fire mitigation have not developed products or services for homeowners. So this week I’m going to start contacting irrigation companies. They understand the technology and might be able to construct our system.

When I had the assistant chief of the Elk Creek Fire Protection District come out and do a fire mitigation analysis for our property, he said that external sprinklers do work and they would work here. Just not many folks doing it. Well, we’re gonna be among them, one way or the other, and I need to get this work done before May.