Denver fires

I'm safe - thanks for the thought. However, I'm not out of the woods, yet. The nearest mandatory evacuation order is 5 miles from my house. I'm at this moment watching the fires using the remote cameras I have at work. Definitely a smell of smoke outside, but we're not in danger yet. I'll probably stay up all night to make sure, and we are ready to leave if needed. The Prime is charged!

From work:

 

Taken earlier from a camera at work, on a 440' met tower:

 

Tesla repair facility?

 

About 300 miles. Which, as I understand it, is about the median distance between a Tesla owner and a Tesla repair facility.

 

I noticed that Louisville & Superior were mentioned prominently. That's pretty close to where we used to live in Broomfield. Hopefully, snow will douse the fires later today.

 

The fires were pretty well out over night, with just some hot spots. Amazing what the wind dropping from 75mph to 8mph will do to assist the fire fighters.

 

I remember those winds in the winter. Always got my ears packed with sand walking to school when the chinook was blowing. Once watched a storm door blow off a house and disappear. The coolest was an empty 55 gallon barrel going end over end along a downtown Denver street. Thankfully the street was pretty empty. I think it was a Sunday morning or a holiday or something. Most alarming was getting blown over on my motorcycle. It was late at night and I was going north from Golden on 93 and I was afraid it was going to lift me off the road. I spotted a turn that would get me farther away from the mountains but was too late to make it. When I stopped to turn around, over we went.

 

I work in wind, at the mouth of El Dorado canyon. I've been there when the wind hit 128mph and was outside at 100mph. Anyone who is on TV and is standing up saying the wind is 100mph is severely over-estimating the wind. At 80, you can't stand up *at all*. At 100, I couldn't crawl on my hands and knees without getting knocked over. I had to crawl on my chest.

I've seen strong winds pick up a 30,000 pound construction trailer and I saw it toss over a wind turbine blade that was tied to 4 2-ton blocks of concrete, tossing the blocks like they were made of foam. One time we had a guy get seriously injured by a flying blanket.