The Fire - Pictures and Story

If you haven't already heard about the fire, well here's the short version of what happened.

On Sunday afternoon we were driving up to Montana in Jill's Ford Explorer. Just outside of Kallispell, in a town called Somers, we noticed the air conditioning stopped blowing cold air. As we pulled to the side of the road the car just shut down. Smoke started coming out of the hood. As Luke opened the door to go check what was wrong with the car flames suddenly burst from underneath the hood. I immediately felt the heat and jumped out of the car. We got the girls out fast and began running down the side of the road away from the car.

Several people pulled over and someone called 911. A couple men grabbed Luke and ran back to the car to grab whatever they could before the whole thing went up in flames. They were able to salvage most of our stuff but we did lose some things. While our things went up in flames I sat in a women's car with the girls and watched fearfully, crying but trying to hold it together.

The guys only had about 2 minutes to get things out of the car when there were some pops and small explosions. The tires melted and a huge cloud of black smoke was clogging up the blue sky. It took almost 15 minutes for the fire truck to arrive and by then everything had been destroyed. They put out the fire and while they were there Luke started taking pictures. Thank goodness we saved his camera! These are some of the pictures he took.

I feel very blessed that we were able to escape tragedy and we are all safe. We still don't know what happened to the vehicle or what was wrong.

I can't say enough about how wonderful people were to us. A complete stranger drove us all the way to Ashley Lake, about 40 minutes from the site of the fire. There were several people who stayed with us the entire time, helping entertain the girls and bringing us water and food.

I thank the Lord that my girls and Luke are ok. They are the most important thing in my life and this experience really showed me that. We haven't figured out quite yet what we are going to do exactly, but somehow we'll make it through. I've got what's truly important.