By FELICIA FONSECA Associated Press
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — In a small enclave in northern Arizona where homes are nestled in a Ponderosa pine forest and tourists delight in camping, hiking and cruising on ATVs, high winds are nothing new.
But when those winds recently ramped up and sent what was a small wildfire racing toward their homes, residents in the close-knit Girls Ranch neighborhood near Flagstaff faced a dilemma: quickly grab what they could and flee, or stay behind and try to ward off the towering, erratic flames.
大多数财产所有人离开了。一对夫妇站在自己的地面上。另一场比赛是为了拯救邻居的财产。
大火开始复活节席卷vacant lots, scorched tree stumps and cast an orange glow on the parched landscape. Flames licked the corner of one woman’s porch and destroyed two other homes, leaving a mosaic of charred land as the 30-square-mile (77 square-kilometer) fire finally neared full containment this weekend.
Elsewhere, firefighters in northern New Mexico on Sunday continued to battle the largest active wildfire in the U.S. as strong winds pushed it closer to the small city of Las Vegas.
Bulldozers, Aircraft Used to Fight Fire Near NM City
Officials said the blaze had damaged or destroyed 172 homes and at least 116 structures since it started April 6 and merged with another wildfire a week ago. Officials said the fire had grown to 162 square miles (419 square kilometers), but was still 30% contained.
The blazes are among many this spring that forced panicked residents to make life-or-death, fight-or-flee snap decisions as wildfire season heats up in the U.S. West. Years of hotter and drier weather have the exacerbated blazes, leading them to frequently burn larger areas and for longer periods compared with previous decades.
Some who live in Girls Ranch had just minutes to react.
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Polly Velie rushed out of a physical therapy appointment when she learned her home was in the evacuation zone. She sped through embers and thick smoke to find her husband hosing down the driveway. Her voice shrieked as she yelled above the smoke alarms going off throughout the house.
“Bill, we gotta go!” she hollered.
But Bill Velie — who cut fire lines with a dozer in multiple states for years — was intent on staying. It’s the same decision the couple made in 2010 when another wildfire in the area forced evacuations. Polly Velie said she’s never been more scared, but the choice wasn’t difficult: “This is our house, and he’s my husband.”
The couple watched neighbors load up horses and donkeys and haul them off. They saw torched tumbleweeds fly across a major highway, flames tear through an old stone house and a propane tank burst.
“Boy, that made her jump,” Bill Velie said. “Just like a bomb went off.”
Firefighters encouraged them at least a handful of times to leave, and they agreed to if the winds shifted. More than anything, Bill Velie reassured them he had things under control.
He had thinned parts of the national forest on the other side of his property line, and he regularly mows the grass. They kept sprinklers running outside, and Bill Velie bladed the edge of the forest a few times where it looked like the fire was crawling toward neighbors’ homes. At night, the flames twinkled on the hill behind them like red stars in the sky.
“I’ve seen some exciting stuff, but not like this for a while,” he said. “Do I miss it? No.”
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Ali Taranto and her husband, Tim, own a house in the neighborhood. They saw news about the fire on a neighborhood Facebook page and drove from Winslow, where she works as a nurse about an hour away, to check on the 5-acre (2-hectare) property.
Ali Taranto drove past the neighborhood’s namesake Girls Ranch property, once a home for troubled girls, and saw parts of the white fence melted to the ground.
She checked on her neighbor, Marianne Leftwich, who said she was fine. But Taranto didn’t hear from her for about an hour. Then, Leftwich’s daughter called to say her mother was stuck in her house.
Taranto alerted emergency responders, she said, but dispatch told her she’d probably get to Leftwich before they could. Taranto found the woman semi-conscious and gasping for air, in need ofhelp to evacuate, Taranto said.
“As a community in an emergency like this, all the systems were totally overwhelmed,” Taranto said. “Thank God I got there and got her out in time.”
塔兰托（Taranto）将左下角的狗带到狗窝，然后返回以营救一只山羊和一头牛，她在附近漫游。
Other than some burned grass and brush, Taranto’s property was unscathed.
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哈丽雅特·杨（Harriet Young）的房子俯瞰着附近。去年，她雇用了一名树木师，去除死树，并切成低洼的树枝作为防火措施。她在长车道和房屋前的前面铺设了粉红色的砾石。
Young believes it saved the home she and her late husband built in the 1990s. The wildfire burned all around it, sparing the house and the invasive olive trees that her daughter wished hadn’t survived.
“这是一个奇迹，这就是我要说的。”扬的女儿史黛西·奥尔德斯塔特（Stacey Aldstadt）说，大火席卷大火后，她和妈妈一起住了几天。
一周前周日被允许回家时，他们没有热或热水。Young花了四天的时间与丙烷公司作斗争，以使其重新打开。最终，她说服了一位前消防队长来修复它。
Everyone here knows Young, the staunch Democrat who regularly hosts Christmas parties. She made call after call as the fire progressed and planned to stay home, based on what she’d heard.
But neighbor Jeanne Welnick saw the plume of smoke that seemed so distant grow and move toward their neighborhood, and urged Young to leave.
“I owe Jeanne a huge ‘thank-you,’” Young said.
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The Welnicks initially bought the house behind Young’s as a vacation property. The previous owners built it with wildfire in mind.
The 14-inch-thick (36-centimeter) exterior walls are concrete sandwiched by Styrofoam cells topped by a metal roof. Those walls are still standing.
The rest of the Victorian ranch-style home painted orange with green trim isn’t.
Flames tore through, twisting strips of metal that creaked as the wind blew through. Shards of glass and nails shot out onto the driveway where the Welnicks wrote their names and the year they bought the house, 2004.
一个天使雕像，韦尔尼克人将外面放置在外面，以纪念他们失去流产的孩子，低头看着瓦砾。在房屋被烧毁的特ellis拱门的材料后，韦尔尼克人计划在他们的菜园聚集时，将两个包裹运送到人行道。未燃烧的摊铺机和一袋沙子坐在车库的侧面，准备放下。
中午，在前门附近欢迎他们回家的铃铛响起，隐藏在一堆碎片中。
Jeanne Welnick scanned the property, wondering which trees would survive. She grieved the loss of her paintings and a squash blossom necklace that was passed down through her husband’s family. She kept it in a glass case.
“I’d like to look for that, but it’s probably not even there,” said Welnick, an artist.
Their dogs, guitars and some sculptures made it out with them, through what Welnick described as a roaring train, dark, scary, like Armageddon.
In the aftermath, some neighbors struggled with the right words to say to those who lost their homes. Some offered food, clothes, a place to stay and set up fundraising accounts.
“They kept saying, ‘We love you so much; we love you so much,’” Welnick said. “And they do.”
