A little rattled!!!

The pictures don't do justice for volume of the fire and the atmoshpere that came with it.

All you could hear was the roar of the fire and the sound of emergency vehicles flocking to the scence.

As Jeff and I were sitting in our living room tonight, settling down from a full day of errands we heard a load sound…initially I thought of thunder because I had never heard anything like it in my life. I looked at Jeff with a strange look. We had just walked inside a few minutes earlier and the weather didn’t look like it was going to rain. But the resounding boom lasted for about 10 seconds and was followed by a humming roar all the while our house was shaking. Jeff jumped up to look out the door. I ran to the window… for the half- second it took me to reach the window I honestly thought it was the end of the world. But what seemed right down the street was a gigantic wall of fire with flames shooting out. I have never in my life seen flames like this, they were huge, engulfing, a red hot color, and shooting up into the sky (come to find out later they were over 200 feet tall). I remained calm (for the moment) and not knowing what had happened we got in our car and were going to get as far away as possible. Upon turning out of our subdivision ashes were falling out of the sky and landing on our car like little snowflakes. The fire looked like it started about ¼ mile away and was getting closer to our house. Not knowing anything about the explosion/ fire or how fast it would spread (it’s been a really windy night) we made a quick turn around to grab some stuff from the house in case it went up in flames.
***side note: you know in youth group when you played those ice breaker games with random questions like if your house was on fire and you could only take a few things what would you grab?*** In all honestly you grab what is easiest and fastest. I threw some freshly laundered clothes of mine and Ty’s into a suitcase and grabbed our file of important papers. In addition I got our digital camera and all the baby girl clothes I had bought (they were easy b/c I had them all hanging up in a section of the closet). Jeff grabbed himself some clothes, my wedding rings, and his laptop. We already had our dog in the car (Elle had run off by this point). We drove off prepared to say goodbye to all our material belongings… a little dramatic I know! I wasn’t sad about losing all of our earthly possessions I had all that I needed, with my boys safe beside me I didn’t care about anything else. I started to cry…not over anything material but just to the shock and jolt to our peaceful night...how in a split second everything can change. Seeing me cry typically sends Ty into a tailspin and he usually joins me in tears but instead tonight he said, “Mommy, God’s going to take care of us.”

We found out later a gas pipeline exploded about 1.5 miles away from our home. At the time I knew nothing about natural gas fires/explosions or the fact that all they had to do was turn off the gas for the finitial fireball to go down. Had the fire not been a gas fire I not too sure it would have been as easily controlled. It happened in an open field which sparked alot of grass fires but Praise the Lord there are no reports of injuries and no homes were damaged.