I'd be willing to bet, that MOST had no idea the fire was even upon them, until it was basically too late. Remember, there was 75+mph winds up high that night where it started. I even posted somewhere that night, that there was especially intense winds (I'm near Fontana dam) that I feared might take some of my trees down on the house. Sometimes sounded like a freight train outside ahead of the rains that night. It basically jumped 10 miles in just a few hours. I've had an 8000 acre fire burning a mile away, for 3 weeks. Another 600 acre fire just 200 yrds away. The wind was what did it. Then quickly overwhelming resources 10-fold. Hell, prolly 100-fold. 700 building fires? More or less all at once? Look at that vid... all those cabins looked hopeless regardless whether a fire truck was on each one of them or not.
Yeah that shit got real quick. Plus the wind knocked down a bunch of trees that blocked roads. One of my employee parents lost everything. She said it jumped from the top one ridge a pretty fair distance away to just up the road from the house in about ten minutes. They left 30 minutes before the fire got to the house but got blocked by a tree in the road. They had to run about 3 miles down the road to a safe area. 70mph mile winds blow shit around a bit I guess. Death toll is up to 13 I believe.
A local guy was interviewed on the radio here, says his family was in the Gatlinburg rental cabin playing Scrabble one minute, looks outside a minute later and FIRE everywhere. They were able to jump in the car and blast off, leaving all their stuff... And kept driving all the way back here to Cincy.... They have no idea if the cabin survived or not. And did anyone see this?? Melting aluminum wheels - Not a beer can in your fire pit, but 20+lbs of cast alloy 1" thick... Yikes!! http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/tennessee-forest-fires-liquefy-aluminum-rims
Wild land fires scare the piss out of me. Those guys fighting the fires have huge balls. Stay safe out there.
Gatlingburg is a disaster. Had a friend lose everything. The fire was so hot, and so fast, that shit basically melted away. Some people will never be found...
Depends on what you consider warning. They had to know there were fires in the area but people don't get how quickly they can grow and/or move. So I can kind of see thinking the nearest fire is miles away so you can just stay where you are.
The local news stations are saying that there were NO text messages sent out to cell phones because of some kind of restriction within their texting system. At the time this all took place on Monday evening, the nearest fire, if I am correct, was over in the Smoky Mountains at Chimney top area......miles away from some of the areas that were hit the hardest. There were three factors that greatly contributed to this disater... 1. Extremely high winds that evening.....reported to have reached 87 mph 2. High winds that blew down tree all across the county, including some of the areas that were hardest hit. The downed trees in many cases, fell across power lines and then the sparks from that, ignited MANY new fires 3. The extreme drought conditions that much of E. TN has been experiencing for the last couple of months. It was reported, and I don't know how true it is, that some of the embers from the fire at Chimney top blew for several miles, sparking a bunch of new fires in the Gatlinburg area. The Gatlinburg fire chief and a bunch of local officials have been giving press conferences everyday at 11 AM and 4 PM local time. I remember the Fire Chief saying that on Monday evening they went from Zero issues as far as fires are concerned, to over 20 reports of structure fires in a 15 minute time span. That is just unbelievable how quickly things went south.
Tru Dat, but that second pic has the *engine block* melted..... That's a whole 'nother ball game..... Crazy!
Serial question here...would the alloy used in the rims (some, if not most contain some magnesium) result in a lower melting point or could the magnesium actually contribute to the combustion. Hey Dave, this one's for you.
I simply don't understand what would compel anyone to do something like this....they said they may push for an adult trial.
Apparently there were four of them. They made a video while going up into the mountians with a background song og burning the woods, burning the city burning the whole mfer to the ground. The video has since been deleted from YouTube, but a few people recorded it with their phone. Let me see if I can find it. They are due in court within 72hrs. Several charges can be added. And they are contemplating charging them as adults.
Damn.@drop if that's true they should be locked up for a very long time, and charged with the deaths of the firefighters and people that died.
