Flagstaff residents join to cope with adversity
Flagstaff residents help each other prepare for disaster
Though the Museum Fire continues to breathe down on Flagstaff, such an event brings out the spirit of the city, and the best in its residents.
FLAGSTAFF — At night, when winds are calm, the smoke subsides, revealing a mosaic of orange flames that glows like stars — a galaxy of destruction cradled by the dark mountains sitting below the twinkling night sky.
Mayor Coral Evans saw a similar sight when she was a child.
“I remember walking out my front door and looking up and going, ‘Wow, the whole mountain is a Christmas tree,’ ” Evans said.
She and her twin brother thought it was beautiful. Then her mom came out the door, screamed and rushed to pack. Evans later found out she was looking at what was the 1977 Radio Fire, which was racing down the mountainside toward the city.
“On Sunday, when I left the farmers’ market and I looked up, it was like I was back to being 5 again. It was very scary,” she said.
She knows what kind of devastation these fires can cause, long after the flames are out.
Thanks to the quick response from firefighters and some rain, the Museum Fire is nowhere near as intense as the Radio Fire, the 2010 Schultz Fire and some others in recent memory, and the community is grateful for their work.
Banners hang from storefronts, swaying in the breeze that fans the flames, thanking the crews.
Throughout the week, restaurants have donated food and coffee shops have brewed pounds of free coffee, while the patrons inside murmur about the crews, praising their bravery.
City, county, state and federal agencies are, on the surface, seamlessly working through the logistics of the potential floods they fear will follow the fire.
And residents of one of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods are stepping up to prepare, trying to help those less able to help themselves. Others in areas far from fire and potential flooding are pitching in to volunteer to help people, animals and areas in danger.
None of this selfless generosity surprises Evans. She knows the spirit of the city, she said, and it is good-hearted.
“Flagstaff generally comes together, but this is a really beautiful thing to see,” Evans said.
The constant worry: Flooding
The smoke continues to rise into the clouds looming above the horizon.
As of Thursday night, the wildfire has burned 1,927 acres, with 12% containment. People are confident in the 600 hotshots beating back the flames, and the fire managers assure them everything is under control.
But many quietly fear what comes once the fire is out and monsoons sweep through.
The thick clouds overhead remain from the few faint storms that have rolled through the region this week. They’ve poured a few inches at a time on the San Francisco Peaks, narrowly missing the new burn scar, and spit sprinkles on parts of the fire.
Firefighters are hoping for rain and moisture to help them battle the blaze, but too much rain could hurt the city.
If the growing burn scar sees a few inches of rain, the mountain will cry walls of water that will race down its slopes through drainage systems, some of which aren’t built to handle the torrent, and into the neighborhoods that are nestled closely to what once was a full forest.
Parts of Flagstaff are still recovering from severe flooding that started at the burn scars of fires like this. The longer firefighters work into monsoon season, the higher the city’s flood risk becomes.
Some flooding occurred last year when heavy rains hit, but some of the worst flooding the city has seen came after the 2010 Schultz Fire. That fire’s scar paved a path for the deluge that killed Shaelyn Wilson, a 12-year-old girl, and damaged 40 homes and demolished seven more. It cost the city $147 million to fight the blaze and recover from the fire and flooding.
Now, people are doing what they can — as fast as they can — to prepare for another round.
Anticipating disaster in Sunnyside
Evans is worried about flood-prone areas, one of which is her neighborhood, Sunnyside, a lower-income area with aging homes in the northeast part of the city.
Historically, the neighborhood has flooded, and at times it has not gotten as much assistance from the city as other areas have, she said.
That’s why she’s walking the streets of Sunnyside with two neighbors whose families have been here for generations. She wants to know what needs to be done to help protect the neighborhood that started her political career.
One of them is Richard Duran, a postal worker. He walks her over to a drainage ditch behind his goddaughter’s house that leads into a culvert off Main Street and Dortha Avenue.
He avoids standing in the dog feces that the neighbors next door throw over their fence. It bakes in the sun near some loose twigs and shrubs that should be cleared.
When the monsoons come, water will flow like the river that once ran through here and down a half-mile of poorly maintained, aging washes with cracked concrete walls tagged with graffiti and a dirt floor littered with trash and dead plants.
Many people in Sunnyside don’t have flood insurance. Some who live here are renting, some longtime owners have never had to buy it, while many, according to Evans, probably can’t afford the large upfront cost. Not even she can afford it, she said.
Most of these homes and businesses were built in the 1950s, a lot of them at ground level. Some even have clay piping, and that drainage system wasn’t built to handle the torrent of water that could come.
A few days ago, Duran said, city workers cleared out the wash the best they could, but they neglected a few areas that could put nearby homes at an unnecessary risk.
City crews maintain the washes annually and often leave the follow-up work to residents after the first wave of water trickles through, carrying ash, soot and debris from the mountain.
“Once the first flood comes through, all of these culverts are going to be plugged up and then the backwash from all of these plugged-up culverts are going to flow into our neighborhood,” Duran said.
His goddaughter’s house would be the first affected. He’s already set up a wall of sandbags along her back fence, but he said that won’t be enough. The city should come here to monitor and clear culverts like this more often, he said.
“They’re going to need to be here with pump trucks ready to blow out these culverts and they’re going to need to get more jersey (concrete) barriers and sandbags to the area,” Duran said, adding that he has passed along these suggestions to officials who tell him they will do just that.
The culverts weren’t always here and now there’s no natural water flow, he said.
Duran said the neighborhood floods every year during monsoon season.
Last year, he and others worked during a storm with shovels and rakes to clear the culverts, pulling mattresses, trash cans, furniture and everything else the rushing water carried with it.
Duran said he expects the water flow off Mount Elden to be “out of control” now that a new burn scar is there.
Neither Duran nor anyone can stop the flooding; the best they can do is mitigate.
“If it overcomes those sandbags and comes into the house, we’re going to have standing water, soot, debris and our sewage is going to start to back up into the house … and we’ll have electrical outages because of that standing water,” Duran said.
“Then what?” Duran his shoulders.
What happens next may not matter in the long term, Duran said, if other, decades-long, disparities don’t get addressed, which are part of a web of larger, more complex socioeconomic disparities.
The Sunnyside neighborhood has always “been looked down upon” Duran said, and received less help on many fronts.
People there are of all races, ages and backgrounds, which Duran said has made it hard for them to unify and speak up to the city they claim neglects them.
“Sunnyside has not had a reason to come together,” Duran said. “This needs to be our reason.” asked,
‘Generations of perceptions’
shrugging
Duran and Evans started to walk down the dirty wash and point out some problems that need fixing. Partway through, Evans stopped and wanted to clarify something.
Evans said Duran’s “perception” of the city putting down Sunnyside might have been accurate decades ago.
Almost more than anyone, Evans said, she knows the intricacies of these issues and what has been done to address them.
She started as an activist in Sunnyside and was elected to the city council and eventually to the mayor’s office. Since Evans has been on the council, she said she has been “very clear” about her neighborhood’s needs, and the situation has changed for the better.
“Over the years, with the neighborhood coming together, you’ve seen shifts and more investments,” Evans said, adding that more people have been elected to the council who understand these perceptions.
Before, when she started organizing and testifying at council meetings, one council member didn’t even know where Sunnyside was.
“You don’t hear that anymore,” she said, adding that in the past 18 years, the city has invested in more than $22 million in infrastructure in the community.
“Definitely, there needs to be more. When you have generations of perceptions, sometimes it’s harder to get your arms around it and change it,” she said.
Evans conceded that the city has given residents reasons to think that way. In 2008, when the economy crashed, the city lost funding from the state for programs that included those infrastructure improvements, which led to lost jobs in maintenance teams responsible for clearing culverts.
“Normally, they have cleaned these have,” Evans said.
“We’re trying to address it. Does that make past history right? Not at all.”
According to flood projections from Coconino County, if the new burn scar sees even one inch of rain, a kind of storm that happens one to two times a year, many parts of Sunnyside could see up to a foot of flooding. If two inches fall, which happens about once every 10 years, one to two feet of flooding would come.
If three inches fall, which the county projects has less than a 1% chance of happening, two to three feet of flooding would fill the streets and flow over most hastily constructed sandbag barriers.
That same kind of unlikely and highly unusual storm many fear happened last year on the east side of the San Francisco Peaks, which saw almost six inches of rain in a few hours.
Eventually, people will need to come together if they want to protect their homes and their neighbors’. probably wouldn’t culverts, but they
Flood projections are grim
The National Weather Service reported that over the week, parts of the mountains saw two inches of rainfall and partially missed the Museum Fires’ growing burn scar.
Other neighborhoods at risk of flooding, officials have said, are Mount Elden Lookout Estates, Paradise Road and Grandview Drive.
Those neighborhoods are closer to the Mount Elden and potentially are even worse off, according to Coconino County flood projections.
According to the projections, depending on how much rain falls, homes along Paradise Road could see at least a foot of flooding, while those further northwest near Mount Elden Lookout Road could see anywhere from one to five feet, depending on how much rain falls.
While residents race to prepare for the worst, Andy Burtelsen, Flagstaff’s public works director, and his staff are working with the emergency operations center and evaluating the nature of the fire, running models on where rainwater will flow after the fire is out and if it rains on that burn scar.
“As we get storm events, we’re going to continue to learn more,” Burtelsen said, adding that officials “just don’t know” what could happen until it does, but that they are prepared to respond.
“But we don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like. It just depends … on the rain severity, the burn scar severity, the amount of rain we get and the duration of time we get that rain.”
Historically, Burtelsen said, the city knows how those flows behave, but with a new burn scar will come a new challenge.
For days, his group worked overtime to run those flood projections and are now working to narrow them so they can better help people living in these areas of concern prepare for what could come.
Yet projections only can show and account for so much, as Burtelsen admits. Every other precaution the city is taking is the result of an expensive example of living and learning — and the city has had a lot to learn from, including what happened after the Schultz Fire.
Monsoons roll through the region annually and can bring flooding if storms are strong enough. But the city hasn’t had to prepare for a potential risk like this for a long time, which is why Burtelsen and everyone else involved are willing to spend as much time and money as they have and where they can.
The Museum Fire is burning in an area similar to the location of the Schultz Fire, but Burtelsen stressed while it does pose the same kinds of risks, the risks are not to the same degree.
Sandbagging for others: ‘I have to do something’
For now, most of the city’s efforts are centered around the short-term, putting up jersey barriers and helping fill and distribute sandbags to direct and wall off water.
Evans drove to one of those filling centers, down the street from the ditch, hoping to see plenty of volunteers. The station she visited has so many, some have to wait their turn to dig their shovel into the piles of fine rock.
Overseeing the activity on the corner of Second Street and First Avenue is J.B. DeWitt, a 17-year resident and an executive board member on the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association.
People from all over the neighborhood and a handful of volunteer groups are here shoveling and delivering the sandbags to the elderly, disabled, businesses and anyone else who needs them.
The station is one of three larger ones scattered about the city, and so far all of them have filled and shipped 10,000 sandbags.
Word of the station spread by mouth and over social media and people showed up in overwhelming numbers, some even taking off work early or for the day to help.
“Some are here to help themselves, but it’s mostly volunteers,” DeWitt said, adding that some people have driven from as far as Phoenix to help.
“It’s the city, it’s the county, it’s everybody working together and just kind of coming together into what has actually been a surprisingly efficient way.”
DeWitt said preparations are running this smoothly in part because of the costly lessons the city learned from being unprepared in 2010.
That history has reinforced the importance of helping one another by doing simple things like this, he said.
When bags are filled, they’re loaded into trucks brought by volunteers like Elizabeth Vogler and taken to the houses of people the county says need them. She’s dressed in casual gym clothes; lifting these bags for hours on end can be quite a workout.
Luckily, Vogler said, she had no other commitments this week, so she came here because she understands the value of this kind of assistance. She doesn’t need to get paid, she said, it doesn’t matter; she knows if she were older and in the same situation, other people would do the same.
“Whenever there’s something really drastic facing the community I always want to get involved, and it feels really good to be able to do that,” Vogler said. “I have to do something.” Volger has worked all day; she said she’ll keep helping out wherever she can throughout the week. The other place she frequents, she said, is the local humane society.
Animal shelters filled with four-legged evacuees
At the Coconino Humane Association and at other animal shelters around the city, people who are evacuating can leave their pets and know that they will be fed and have somewhere safe to sleep.
Most of the animals belong to people in the “set” or “go” stage of the city’s evacuation plan.
Some shelters offered land for horses to stay on while their owners left the city, others helped foster needy animals to make room for those evacuating the fire in shelters like the humane society’s.
Cathy Meeks, manager at the nonprofit shelter, was working on a few hours sleep because she and other staff members are are on-call so that they can ensure any animal who needs a place to stay has one.
They started welcoming animals from those evacuating Monday night and have since sheltered 299 animals, including a few uncommon ones.
“Last night at 10:30, I got woken up to take in four pigs and a dog, and I finished at about midnight,” Meeks said Tuesday.
“We’ve gotten everything from rodents to snakes, to birds, chickens, pigs, goats, horses, ferrets. You name it, we pretty much got it in last night.”
Stan and Dawn Sutherland live in Flagstaff, heard the news and headed to the shelter.
“We said we needed to talk it over over breakfast this morning and it took us about 30 seconds to decide that this is the thing to do,” Dawn said Tuesday.
“We heard that they had a lot of evacuated animals in the shelter that needed foster homes to help with that ... so we offered to do that – and I think we’ll enjoy it, they’re so cute,” Stan said, gesturing to the three three-month old shepherd mutts in their trunk.
“This is what we do. This is Flagstaff,” Dawn said.
How to help
If you want to donate to the firefighters or want to help volunteer with people in Flagstaff, contact these organizations:
❚ American Red Cross Northern Arizona Chapter: 928-779-5494
❚ United Way of Flagstaff: 928-7739813
❚ Coconino 928-526-1076
❚ Arizona Conservation Humane Association: Corps: 928526-3820