Fire safety information

Editor’s Note: Thursday morning we received this email from Pete Smyke, Alpine resident, house painter, and all around concerned citizen and activist. Great stuff. Thanks, Pete.

I went to the wildfire prevention and preparedness meeting in Alpine this evening. There is a website called www.texasfirestorm.org that has information on how to prepare your house and property so it will be more likely to survive a fire, including checklists for preparing your house, and how to be ready and what to take in case of evacuation. You can check it out online or download the information and lists.

This applies to houses in town as well as rural areas, as one of the major causes of ignition is embers carried ahead of the fire. (Alpine folks saw on Sunday how the wind carried ash into town from a wildfire six miles away.)

For information on fires under way, you can go to www.inciweb.org , a national database of confirmed wildfire information from the US Forest Service. Enter the state where the fire is and the name of the fire, and it will give you information on the status of that fire, including area burned and percentage of containment. They said that the Texas fires are linked to the main page right now.

I would strongly recommend checking out the Texas fire storm website to see how to prepare yourself, your family, and your property.

Better safe than sorry!

Pete Smyke, Alpine