21st- fire

Yesterday afternoon there was a pretty big fire in a neighboring County. York VFD and others were paged to assist. I met one of our trucks near Helena and we drove the 30 miles to the fire.

It was a controlled burn that got out of control when the wind started blowing hard. By the time we got there, the fire was under control but still being put out. A warehouse and some other buildings had burned down.

The truck we brought is used to haul water.

A fold-a-tank was placed next to an engine and we dumped water into that. The engine then pumped water from the tank to another engine which was putting out the fire.

I took some pictures while we were waiting for the truck in front of ours to dump.

Newspaper article about the fire:

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2007/03/21/helena_top/a01032107_01.txt

18th - high about 65

Warm weather this weekend. I think it got up over 70 yesterday.

Brandon learned how to use the GPS. Here he is on a "scavenger hunt" finding the 2 flags and the deer antler.




He also has been having fun shooting his bow.

16th- high ~ 50

I took off today to get some work done on the bridge. After cutting the curves out of plywood, I screwed them together to make the long curves.

Next, 2x4 s on 12 inch centers.

And then I covered it with 3/8 inch plywood.

This will be the form for the bottom of the arch bridge. I will have to make another form for the top. The idea is to pour 3 arches, each 4 feet wide. Then they will be placed side by side over the creek using a crane. The side arches will also each have a wall and will weigh about 19000 lbs.

Here is sort of a side view of the bridge. You can see the shape of the wall. The arch is the bottom circular part. Gravel will be used to fill in between the walls.

Brandon is flying in today and it looks like we will have nice weather. We plan to do some mountain bike riding and who knows what else.