Couldn't post this until today because of the server problems. Posted it on my sister site, though, but am reposting it here now:

Sunday morning started out slow. I was tired and decided not to go to church when my wife awakened me at 9 am. I had a broken down car and wanted to try to fix it.

By the time I woke up to go out and work on the car, the winds were gusting up to 62 miles per hour, and the plan to work on the car was scratched. I ran across a friend who asked why I wasn't out fighting fires. I am a volunteer firefighter, and hadn't heard any of the pages, because, being in town, I was out of range of our radios.

I high tailed it back to town and it was a mess. Everything we had was on the road, and we were calling for any tankers that could roll. The base was handling incoming calls on new fires popping up, and all we could tell them was we would get on them as quickly as we could. We had three of our trucks on the road, two from the nearest larger community, and two from another volunteer department. Our guys were fighting the fire on two fronts.

I got into my turnout gear to be ready to roll when a truck came back in. I assisted with everything I could around the firehouse until one of our men called in needing relief. I was ready, and hopped on the first truck out.

We passed several smaller fires to get to the main fire, and the smoke was so thick you couldn't see 10 feet. We rolled through that and finally found the truck we were looking for. I got on and prepared to fight the grassfires which were raging all around us.

After a half hour, our unit was called back, because one of our trucks had rolled. We came through the smoke and saw the truck in a bar ditch, gasoline and water cascading from it like a waterfall. One of the men was loaded in the ambulance, the other two were being treated on the road. Fortunately, all three would be treated and released; considering the magnitude of the accident, they were truly fortunate.

We rolled back in and I was relieved by another, more experienced firefighter. The town had to be evacuated, and my wife, who does not drive, was evacuated, along with our five children. We were called back to the highway to defend the town, and were assisted by air from the US forest service. Two passes with their large plane to dump retardant on the fire were enough to keep the fire at bay so we could concentrate our efforts elsewhere.

As it grew dark, the fire raged on. We followed reports from our department, and from other area communities, and listened as a total of five communities were evacuated and two large subdivisions within the larger community. Veteran firefighters of 30 years would later say this was the largest fire they had ever seen.

The Salvation Army provided us with food, as did several area businesses. In the early morning hours, we began bringing the fires under control, and were able to keep one of our trucks at the station to keep an eye on a fire we couldn't reach that was self contained within a ravine. If it left the ravine, we knew we would have trouble.

The fires raged well into Monday, and several of us had to go to work because of jobs from which we couldn't be relieved. As I rolled across the north Texas landscape and saw the large patches of smoking black landscape, I thought of how fortunate we had all been. The property losses will take weeks to estimate, as county sheriffs reported stretches of road made impassable by dead and dying livestock, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of acres of good pastureland was laid barren. There were two main fires, one left a swath of destruction 45 miles long and 15 miles wide, the other was 30 miles long and 11 miles wide. General Sherman, in his infamous march to Atlanta, could not have been so effective in so short a time. We were fighting the blazes for a total of about 30 hours, and even as we returned home, we did so knowing that there were spots where the fire could flare up again.

We will heal from this in time, but we count ourselves fortunate. The loss of livestock, while tragic, is alleviated by knowing that we didn't lose many lives (in our small community, we lost none). Our community, which suffers from divisive elements as do many small town, was, for a few hours the true community it could and should be, as suddenly the name of the church you attend became less and less relevant than helping to protect the town. And I, for onw, have never been prouder to wear the emblem of my unit on my jacket. The fire came within less than a quarter mile of the city limits and, had it jumped the highway, it would have been MUCH worse. We would probably still be fighting.