Lightning Strikes!

One of the many safety precautions that we take at my job, is to take cover and sit in a safe position when lightning is less than 7 miles away from where ever we are. We call this "lightning drills." We spread the clients and sometimes ourselves as staff out, sit on our sleeping pads and wait for the storm to pass.

Here in the hot desert mountains, in the middle of summer, it is usually the rule and not the exception that we get a storm every afternoon or evening. This could mean that we are bogged down for as little as 45 minutes or as many as several hours. Depending on the time of day, this might turn into Staff cooking a meal for the clients. Apparently, our safety is less important than theirs.

A couple of weeks ago, we had several consecutive days of lightning drills. One afternoon on a sickeningly hot day, a storm rolled in quickly. We promptly got into lightning drills and waited for the storm to pass. As we sat there, the lightning got closer and closer to us and we could literally feel the ground shake on a couple of occasions. I the distance we hear a client say, "staff, I see smoke." We immediately ran over to examine this and realized a strike had started a fire about a mile away. Because there was a pretty major gravel road between us and the fire we weren't alarmed at first. But then, we noticed another fire about a quarter of a mile away. We quickly got the group and ourselves packed up, notified backup and started hiking away from the fire. Luckily, it started to rain and both fires seemed to diminish. That week, there were several fires causing groups to move and we were all being showered with ash. Thankfully, nothing major happened and all groups remained safe.

Some of the lightning drills that week lasted up to 5 hours. Us as staff were forced to cook dinner for the clients three times this week. Myself and my co-worker took on this task and actually had a lot of fun with it. One day we cooked in the pouring down rain. Because the clients have to stay put where they are, they can get rather needy during these times. They would shout out different requests for their "bear bags", "the spices", etc. I can tell you first hand that this gets a little annoying after a while. Luckily I was working with an awesome staff and we were able to laugh it off.

Mother Nature is a curious creature.