When Rachel and I were driving home from campus today, I noticed a plume of smoke rising around the corner.
"Something's happening up there," I said. "You need to move over."
Fortunately, we were fairly alone on the road at that moment (changing lanes can be tricky). We rounded the corner and immediately saw the cause of the smoke. A large vehicle—what seemed to be a moving van—was engulfed in flames.
We could see there was furniture inside the truck trailer and there were three men scrambling up the hillside to get away from the inferno.
"What do I do?" Rachel asked.
"I don't know," I said.
What could we do? We pulled over, I ran down the road to the nearest mile marker (which we'd neglected to look at in our panic) and then called 9-1-1. The operator told me they were aware of the fire, were on the line with the people in the vehicle, and help was on the way. So...we got back in the car and headed home.
We just didn't want to play into the bystander effect or anything. No one else had seemed to stop so we wanted to make sure emergency services had been called for sure. But there really wasn't anything to do (at least from our end of things).
Driving past it was wild though! It was so hot. Incredibly, unbelievably hot.
All those videos of people driving through fires to escape in LA right now...
...I can't even believe it.
So awful. So terrifying.
We drove by a truck with its load on fire recently. It was a removable bed thing that had been lowered to the ground, presumably to spare the rest of the truck. It was on the shoulder and we were in the right lane and Prima and I both noticed the heat!
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