On March 21st a raging wildfire spread over the Harrisonburg mountain side due to extreme winds. After class that evening, my friend Jack and I decided to go capture the event. We headed up Route 33, then headed north before we got into the mountains. We spent a few hours moving around the mountain to make our own assessment of how large of an area the fire had already engulfed. 50mph gusts of wind were ripping through the valley all day and spread the fire from the top of the smaller mountain pictured all the way to the bottom in about 4 hours.
The hills of Harrisonburg are normally quiet but there was lots of traffic frantically trying to get a good view of the fire and checking up on their friends and homes. We stopped and talked to a few locals that had homes that were past the roadblocks and most were confident in the fire department to save their homes. Locals also remembered the fire that had devastated the Harrisonburg region more than a decade ago so this fire is something they were not a stranger to. This fire is mostly under control now but it still continues to burn and spread smoke from D.C. north of Richmond.
To view all the photos I captured and find out more about the fire, read the Wavy 10 article!
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