Too busy for a POTD, I was out shooting photos this afternoon of a brushfire in South Kohala. Even though it threatened homes, evacuated residents and closed a road it wasn’t much to shoot.
A cop wouldn’t let me down the road closer to the fire, he told me ‘they’ said not to let anyone down the road. So I shot some photos from the fire dept command post. The fire officials in charge said I should go down the road to get photos, and that I should tell the cop that they said it’s okay. So I tried that and the cop got pissed like I was making it all up. Then I saw the fire officials in charge again and they wanted to drive me down themselves and weren’t happy that the cop didn’t let me down there. At this point I passed, no need to get between a pissing match between fire fighters and cops who want to show who’s in control with me as a pawn.
I’ve been covering fires (brushfires, structure fires, lava fires, wildfires) for about 20 years now. I’ve never been hurt, never got in the way of firefighters and I ain’t ready to start causing trouble now. Why not just let me down there? In the end it was just as well because you probably couldn’t see the homes being threatened by the fires anyway. From another spot I got a photo of the smoke rising and the homes that were evacuated (click on this link to see the photo on the newspaper’s website). Not great but had I gone down the road I probably would have just gotten the smoke and no homes since the fire was in a gulch.