Jan's fire and my fires

A little after 8 am this morning Jan called me to ask for help with a fire getting out of control.  I was confused as to whether the fire was in her house or outside.  The fire was outside.  This was strange as she has an underground sprinkler system and her lawn is green.  Add in the all day rain on Tuesday... how could she have a fire outside?

Sure enough she had a fire outside.  She had her lawn mowed last night and the guy mentioned he saw a spark from the lawn mower when mowing her lawn.  The lawn debris all Summer had been dumped in the corner of her backyard where her large garden used to be.  Somehow the spark survived in the green wet grass and migrated overnight into the old lawn waste.  A woman driving by somehow saw the fire this morning and alerted Jan.

The fire moved from the lawn waste to an evergreen tree whose branches went all the way to the ground.  Looking at the tree (the greenest tree near the left in the photo) it appears the fire went up high, which may be why the woman driving by saw the fire.  Jan had the fire out when she called me but it was still smoldering.  I raked the lawn debris to the middle of the former garden and away from the rows of evergreen trees.

This afternoon my two smoldering tree stumps were barely smoldering.  Tuesday's rain had put a major damper on the smoldering.  It looked like some of the stumps were still up to ground level.  So I gathered some more dead branches and bark and coaxed the fires back to life over the stumps remnants.

Stump 6

Stump 7