Heartbreak in Ore. as fires burn hundreds of homes
More than 1 million acres are lost in the state, leaving many families with nothing.
PHOENIX, Ore. – Betty Stevens stumbled down the street that had until a few hours ago seemed so familiar, her feet crunching through ash and debris as she entered the smoking remains of her neighborhood. There were melted street signs. Trees burned down to stumps. Power lines across the road. And everywhere she turned, choking, acrid smoke.
Sobbing behind the face mask she wears for her job as a hospital respiratory therapist helping coronavirus patients, Stevens, 31, video recorded herself earlier this week as she stumbled through the neighborhood, raw emotion in her voice, sometimes unable to form words, moaning in obvious pain.
“I think everything’s gone,” she says as the rising sun illuminates the destruction. “This doesn’t do justice to how terrifying and horrific this is, seeing how devastated everything is. Our homes are gone. Our homes are completely gone.”
The Almeda fire is one of more than 2,000 wildfires that have burned through the western United States in the past weeks, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes from Colorado to California and Oregon, and enveloping millions in choking, toxic smoke considered hazardous to breathe.
In Oregon, the fires have blazed through more than 1 million acres, and the National Weather Service issued a “red flag warning” Sunday, warning that winds of 40 mph could “likely contribute to a significant spread” of fires in southern Oregon.
In Almeda, before the fire stopped burning, intense winds fanning the flames made the fire skip around, burning some neighborhoods to the ground and leaving other properties across the street untouched. Many of the destroyed homes were mobile homes or trailers housing some of the area’s poorest residents. Tens of thousands of people were evacuated in the initial fire as authorities feared it would burn into Medford, one of the state’s most populous cities with roughly 83,000 people.
“It is apocalyptic,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon said Sunday on the ABC program “This Week.” “I drove 600 miles up and down the state, and I never escaped the smoke. We have thousands of people who have lost their homes.”
Experts say helping people left homeless by the fires will be complicated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and dramatic rise in unemployment. Four people are confirmed dead.
For families who have lived through the historic natural disaster, it has been a week of widespread loss.
For 15 agonizing hours last week, Stevens and her husband, Fred Andrews, had worried about the fate of their townhome in this suburb of Medford, Oregon, as the ferocious winddriven Almeda wildfire raced toward their community.
At first, they figured the evacuation was just a precaution. Andrews assumed they’d be out for a few hours at most, and then they could return. That night, he fell asleep listing to the crackle of police radios on his iPhone, exhausted from trying to make sense of what he was hearing about a fire that was supposedly two towns away. While he slept, Stevens picked up an extra shift at the Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center, filling in for colleagues who couldn’t get past roadblocks.
She got home just after 2 a.m., but was too anxious to sleep. Almost everything they owned was in that 1,600square-foot blue-gray townhome and its garage, from their new SUV to baby Eleanor’s birth certificate issued 23 months ago. Diapers. Clothes. Food. It was the first place they’d ever owned, a real home for their little family.
For hours, she worried about its fate, and what had happened to the neighbors who’d become friends, who’d brought over cookies and welcome gifts in the 11 months the family lived in the 18-unit complex. So she slid into her Birkenstock sandals, drove to the Home Depot near her home and started walking into the fire.
“Not knowing was absolutely tearing me up,” says Stevens a few days later, reflecting on her dangerous decision to walk alone, in the middle of the night, into a disaster zone. “It wasn’t just my life. It was everyone else’s I was carrying. This was so devastating because I knew these people. It wasn’t just a neighborhood. It was a community. And I realized I had the responsibility to tell 17 other families they didn’t have a home, either.”
Authorities say at least 600 homes were damaged or destroyed as the fire rampaged through Ashland, Talent and Phoenix before firefighters stopped it close to the Medford city limits. Although the main fire started around 11 a.m., on Tuesday near an Ashland skate park and began racing north, several other smaller fires broke out as the winds threw embers into neighborhoods and along Highway 99.
In the first few hours after they learned their house had been destroyed, Stevens and Andrews contemplated leaving Jackson County entirely, maybe back to Portland or even to New York.
Andrews had spent the day on the phone, dealing with the mortgage and the car loan and their insurance. Like many who lost their homes, Andrews and Stevens don’t yet know whether insurance would cover rebuilding, or what federal aid might be available. A relative established an online donation fund and friends quickly chipped in $700.
Exhausted, Stevens collapsed into bed. She woke up a few hours later to discover people had poured in more than $20,000 toward the fund.
The display of support has convinced the family to stay and rebuild.
“We needed to see that we mattered to this community, and they’ve shown us that,” Stevens says. “It would be wrong to take their kindness and leave. We need to stay and pay it forward. These are people who are so called to action they’ve dropped everything and ransacked their own homes to help us. And not just us. All the others. I have never been part of a community so willing to help. I don’t think we could live anywhere else.”