Fire on the Mountain
On a windy, spring-like Saturday morning, my roommate and I walked out of our flat in the hills about Thimphu to meet our other roommate in town for lunch. As we headed down the hill, he stopped to photograph some road-workers heating a 55-gallon drum of asphalt over a roaring wood fire. I turned around to glance up the hill, and was shocked to see billows of white smoke rising from the hills. A whole forested hillside was in flames above us. After a quick rendezvous with our other roommate, we ditched our lunch plans and returned up the hill to investigate the location of the fire.
As we got closer to the hill where our apartment is, it became clear that the fire was just above our flat. The constant breeze fanned the flames that leapt through dry pine trees as the fire ran upward. When we reached the three-storey concrete building that houses the flat, we found the owners outside looking up at a charred hill. Family members had been carrying buckets of water up the hill to fight the fire. At it lowest point, the fire had extended down the hill through the dry grass to maybe 20 meters above the house. Police and army men had pushed the fire back above a road about 50 meters above the house, and were continuing to stamp out smoking areas, and to water the hillside with hoses extending from tanker trucks. Fortunately the wind was blowing the fire away the house. Cognizant that a change in wind direction could rapidly change the relative calm of the situation, we quickly gathered laptops, sleeping bags, Ipods, and passports in a pile by the door, so that we could make a quick getaway if necessary.
Then we climbed around the charred area, past a house where police men were questioning several children, to check on a friend who lives further up the hillside, in a traditional Bhutanese house surrounded by pine trees. Phone and power lines were out, and she doesn’t carry a mobile phone, so no one had been able to call her. She had been inside, working on her computer, and had not noticed any commotion until friends roused her by banging on the door. Though the grass and scrub below the house were scorched, the hairpin turns of the road had allowed firefighters to use the road as a fire break to contain the fire.
By late afternoon, as the sun faded behind the mountains, the fire was out and the sky was again clear. It did not appear to have damaged any houses, and was perhaps beaten down extra quickly because a sister of the king lives nearby.
As we got closer to the hill where our apartment is, it became clear that the fire was just above our flat. The constant breeze fanned the flames that leapt through dry pine trees as the fire ran upward. When we reached the three-storey concrete building that houses the flat, we found the owners outside looking up at a charred hill. Family members had been carrying buckets of water up the hill to fight the fire. At it lowest point, the fire had extended down the hill through the dry grass to maybe 20 meters above the house. Police and army men had pushed the fire back above a road about 50 meters above the house, and were continuing to stamp out smoking areas, and to water the hillside with hoses extending from tanker trucks. Fortunately the wind was blowing the fire away the house. Cognizant that a change in wind direction could rapidly change the relative calm of the situation, we quickly gathered laptops, sleeping bags, Ipods, and passports in a pile by the door, so that we could make a quick getaway if necessary.
Then we climbed around the charred area, past a house where police men were questioning several children, to check on a friend who lives further up the hillside, in a traditional Bhutanese house surrounded by pine trees. Phone and power lines were out, and she doesn’t carry a mobile phone, so no one had been able to call her. She had been inside, working on her computer, and had not noticed any commotion until friends roused her by banging on the door. Though the grass and scrub below the house were scorched, the hairpin turns of the road had allowed firefighters to use the road as a fire break to contain the fire.
By late afternoon, as the sun faded behind the mountains, the fire was out and the sky was again clear. It did not appear to have damaged any houses, and was perhaps beaten down extra quickly because a sister of the king lives nearby.
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