Freedom Hill blaze lingers in residents’ lives five years later
MANNFORD — It was a fire like no one in Creek County had seen before, and five years later the landscape and the people still show the effects — for better or for worse — after the Freedom Hill fire.
At this time five years ago the embers finally were dying after 12 terrible days, Aug. 3 through Aug. 14, 2012, when fire ravaged 58,500 droughtstricken acres and destroyed more than 300 homes.
Residents of the area have memories that are colorful, endearing and horrifying. They continue on with hope, determination and, in some cases, little else. The tragedy brought out the best in some people, the worst in others.
“It was a fire tornado. ... It came right up the road here, right here, just right up the road, you couldn’t do anything.” That’s what 72-year-old Charles Daub remembered of the fire as it approached and then took his trailer home.
“Trees just exploded. It went from the top of one to the other and down the trunk and whoosh!” said Phillip Holbrook, who also lost his trailer home.
Roxane Sparr looked at a clump that used to be a jar, maybe a cup, among the rusted, skeletal remains of her husband’s workshop. “They say glass melts at 2,000 degrees,” she said.
Theresa Lackey and her now ex-husband had just finished a remodel. They nearly doubled the size of their home to almost 4,000 square feet just before it went up in flames, complete with a freezer freshly filled with a butchered steer.
“We said it was when hell relocated to Creek County,” she said.
In the aftermath, President Barack Obama and the Federal Emergency Management Agency accepted Gov. Mary Fallin’s request for a major disaster declaration on Aug. 22 to cover Creek County. FEMA reports $7.1 million was approved for household and individual assistance claims to cover 389 applications.
A preliminary assessment by FEMA noted the burn area population was 14 percent elderly and 61 percent low-income families.
Jim Sparr got a hug from Fallin when the governor toured the area.
His wife, Roxane, laughed as she recalled the memory. The stout man with a drywall business who just lost his shop and several vehicles was a little tired of people stopping and “rubber necking,” she said.
“He was pretty hot and bothered,” Roxane Sparr said. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, Jim, I think that might be the governor.’ ... Then he got a hug from her.”
The burned-out skeleton of the workshop and a few old vehicles remain on the property. Sometimes people stop and dump trash on the gravel pullout at the charred rusty steel remnants of the shop.
They still plan to build a steel home-shop combination, but the property is tied up in some legal issues, they’re not getting any younger as they near age 60, and they have health care bills. In the past four years she learned she has lupus, underwent a heart bypass surgery and suffered kidney failure. She is on daily dialysis treatments now.
People still gawk and ask the obvious when they see the old shop, “Were you in the fire?” Neighborliness is a lost art, she said.
“Come on by, be friendly,” she said. “Some people are still hurting out here. They could use a hand. People think we’re low-lifes, but we’re just regular folks surrounded by a burnedout property.”
Holbrook, who lives on disability due to a serious lung infection called histoplasmosis, didn’t muster much help with the $30,000 he received from FEMA.
“Ah, I had friends I didn’t know I had who kind of came out of the woodwork and swindled me out of it,” he said. “I have my good days and I make a little money, and I have my tough days, too.”
He still lives in a camper, meant to be a temporary situation. He has four little dogs in the camper and eight more that stay outside.
“I have a thing for dogs. Cats, too, I guess,” he said. “I can’t just let them run off and get killed.”
His aunt Bettie Neely, 74, lives about a mile up the road on another piece of what once was a large family property, broken up over the years. Charles Daub, a longtime family friend, lives in a camper on the same piece of ground.
Neely’s constant companions are an oxygen tank and a mouthy Chihuahua named Bambino who is a certified companion dog. He can tell when she is having a heart attack.
After the fire, her health declined rapidly, but not before she rebuilt her one-room beauty parlor down the hill from the mobile home-size house she built for herself.
“I took these frames, and I built them both,” she said. “The kitchen cabinets, the tile — I did most of it. It’s not like what I had, but it’s a roof.”
The $31,000 from FEMA only went so far, Neely said. She learned some lessons along the way.
“I hired people to do some of the work, and I learned my lesson. From then on I didn’t pay anyone until after the job was done,” she said.
Medical bills pile up, but she still cuts hair. She doesn’t complain much about life.
“You just have to keep going,” Neely said.
Steven Janzen doesn’t complain at all. Not any more. Insurance covered all but $10,000 of the mortgage left on his home. In the process of being injured after the fire and ending up on disability, his lifetime of hard physical work simply came to an end.
“I couldn’t even get a job at McDonald’s,” he said.