On the night of October 9th, 2017, an area known as Fountain Grove in Santa Rosa California was consumed by the Tubbs fire. In less than 24 hours 1500 homes didn't just burn to the ground, they were incinerated by the intense heat in most cases leaving nothing but ash. Houses, cars, trees, the fire seemed to spare nothing...but the lamp posts. I started photographing Fountain Grove just after the fire and the more pictures I took of burned and empty lots, the more the lamp posts started to tell a story, a story of the unimaginable firestorm that devastated everything in sight. 

An incredible fire raged through this area that night with temperature so high that cars and trucks melted into blobs in streets and driveways, wheels of steel forming puddles on the ground, glass lamp bulbs 16 feet above the ground melted and spun in the wind into hair thin strans that wrapped themselves around the lamp posts in the wind, and melted down the length of the posts to pool on the ground. 

Some lamps simply caved in and folded over under the heat while others liquified and spun through the air like cotton candy, or dripped to the ground like a melting candle. Imagine the intensity of the heat it would take to melt glass like candle wax, imagine how hot the concrete would have to be for glass and steel to pool on the surface. The lamps literally tell the story of what happened here that horrific night in 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_Grove,_California