ATF Investigates

Skruffy’s latest bit of excitement is to stick her head out the window while I am driving while Marcia holds firmly to her leash.  She will ride like this for a long time, if we let her.  Kind of reminds me of when we were traveling through Texas a couple of years ago and hit a head wind….at a rest area I put her up on a dead tree and got these shots below.

 

Gotta love that little girl….

Yesterday after I got our insurance papers notarized at our bank (for free ) I drove by the Storage Area and saw a ATF Truck similar to this one pictured above at the site.  As I was pulling out of the condo’s carport I had received a call from an Officer Mahoney (not sure if that spelling is correct) and he identified himself as being from the ATF.  We talked about the age of our motorhome, if we ever had problems with our batteries or refrigerator, etc.  I told him that we had not even owned the motorhome for a year…and were headed out of state in 33 days from the day the fire took place for Alaska.  He chuckled….  I mentioned that it wasn’t a funny to us, but that I totally understood.  He said that he wasn’t laughing at our predicament, it is just so ironic with a tragedy on top of a tragedy.  I chuckled with him because I knew what he meant.  I gave him our website address in case he wanted to see any pictures.  He sure was a nice guy, just doing his job....and he told me that he had a whole lot of phone calls to make still. 

Today as Marcia was at the eye doctor, I took my camera over to try and capture a picture of that ATF truck...but it was gone.  I did see this guy named Charley whom I had met before.  He has a Class A motorhome which is unharmed… he is parked at the far end on the south side away from this middle area that burned.  He said that he has come by every day since the fire, and has been allowed to visit his unit only once for a very short visit.  All the other RV's along his row seemed to have blistering due to the heat, but his unit, being at the far end, was further away from the fire and appears to be undamaged.  He said that he hung around for a long time yesterday while the investigators went through the rubble.  Much of their concentration was in this area on the north side where they pulled out a lot of stuff.  We were in the first unit on the south side.

Finally got a picture of the front of our unit….like I said, not much there.

  

Picture on left is the north side, the picture on the right is the south side.  You can see they pulled a bunch of stuff out of the north side, but also along the south side. There has been much speculation as to if someone did this on purpose, or if it was a malfunction of one of the units.  Not sure we will ever know, although if the talk is true about having “someone on cameras”, well I hope they catch the person if that is the case. 

Charley was one of the lucky ones…. their unit was down at the end, right side.  He and his wife will be traveling up through the Dakotas, and I think he said into Canada.  He just wants to get his motorhome out of there so that they can have access to it and get it ready to leave if it checks out ok.  I hope their dream for the summer is still intact…. too many dreams have already gone up in smoke.