Some new pictures

The smoke over the west side of town has been horrible since Tuesday.  We dropped Nate off with Rachael on Wednesday and the smoke was even horrible clear out there, but it finally started to lift Wednesday afternoon and pictures have started to come out. We felt reasonably sure our home would be okay, but feel good to know that pictures of the area have reassured us that is the case.

These are some of the pictures that have struck me in the last day:

This is maybe half a mile to a mile north of us.  The home in the lower right corner is our home teacher's house.  

Panorama of the city the night it came down into our area:

This is what it looked like as we evacuated with the thick smoke:

As scary as these pictures look, the ones that are truly amazing came out as the smoked cleared:

The neighborhood straight west of us across Centennial the night of the fire as the fire started to come down the hill:

That same area now:

The fire came over the ridge driven by 65 mph winds.  The fact that none of these homes burned is absolutely amazing to me and a real testimony to our firefighters.  Officials are telling us almost nothing about what was actually lost, but we do know the Flying W Ranch was completely burned to the ground and there are probably at least 200-300 homes that were lost, but the fact that they were able to save so many is truly amazing.  In the top picture, you can see our church steeple and then our neighborhood right behind it. You can see that there are scorched areas all the way to the street across from our church.  As an aside, our church had to have the foundation fixed last month and every bit of vegetation that was around it was removed down to bare dirt. 

We are hoping we may be able to go home by the weekend.