Sacramento is on fire ladies and gentlemen. Well, not the entire city, I mean this isn’t like LONDON IS BURNING or anything like that. But we’re sure as heck having a big problem at the moment.
A section of railroad basically exploded into flames this afternoon around 5:45pm PDT, with the entire trestle (wooden framework holding up the rail lines) going up into a big ball of blackness that, as you can see, spread its way across the Sacramento area.
The news was all over it of course, breaking into every show they possibly could, and the news anchors beginning a workout of adlibbing everything they were saying. Helicopters flew overhead with live video of the blaze…We heard from railroad reps, and we heard from crew on-the-scene, we even heard from a guy who works at the Sacramento Railroad Museum. We discovered that passenger trains were heavily delays, with impacts to exactly ONE person at the station.
We also watched as hundreds of absolute idiots decided to stop their cars in the MIDDLE OF THE HIGHWAY to watch what was going on, and the even more dense idiots walk up onto the track to watch the fire first-hand.
We watched as brave firefighters hosed the thing down, while trying to get more supplies of water to the area which is pretty remote, and thus has no fire hydrants. (They did a really awesome job BTW…it was incredible watching them work)
Here you can see the massive billowing black smoke coming from the burning pillars underneath the railway. From a distance, it looked like rope light…all in a neat row, sparkling and shining, but then of course you saw the 2000+ foot plume of blackness, and yeah, it’s not really that sexy any more. Bill Thompson, our railroad volunteer who was kind enough to talk to the silly KCRA reporters, gave us details about those wonderful pylons covered in flammable material.
We also heard from the doc, who reminded people not to go into the smoke. Thanks doc. Helpful hint. Glad you stuck around after the 5pm news.
Big excitement. Which we really needed on a pretty dull Thursday. I mean, something had to take the place of no American Idol tonight.