Our Experience with the Holiday Farm Fire

(Posted by Danny)

I'm writing and publishing this on September 7, 2021. It smells like a campfire outside right now, but not in the good way that evokes images of s’mores and stargazing. Instead, it’s the smell that makes you wonder whether there’s a new fire nearby or if you’re just downwind from one. As I write this, there is a haze of smoke around everything and everyone and I’m reminded of what happened on this date exactly one year ago.

If you remember September of 2020, you'll recall that we were about six months into the pandemic. We were all now very used to the news headlines listing the latest statistics that I was, at this point in time, completely numb to. The heat of the summer was just starting to wane. School (distance learning, of course) was just about to start for the boys and we were making the best of the final days of summer break by visiting an orchard to pick apples.

The unintentional lens flare even adds to the ‘summery’ feel of this picture.

The day was perfect. The temperature, the blue sky, the light breeze – it could not have been a better day to be outside picking apples fresh from the trees. Sasha had been wanting to make apple butter, so we all set off and picked our assortment. We made sure to stop by the playground so the boys could let off some steam and admired the cows they had out in a fenced pasture. Not knowing the future, of course, we daydreamed once again about how nice it would be to live out here and have a cow of our own someday.

The rest of the day was rather uneventful, but in the best way – one of those lazy afternoons where everyone just does their own thing and enjoys the day.

And then the sun went down. The wind picked up a bit, then a bit more. Then I began to wonder if any trees branches were going to fall to the ground from all the gusts.

And then the power went out. I stepped outside onto our suburban road to find all the other houses were dark as well. The wind was lukewarm, not like the cool breeze from earlier that day. This evening was not cooling off like we were used to. That made sense though –we’d just been warned in the local news of a hot and dry weather pattern coming through.

The power outage wasn’t terribly concerning at that time. I had our modem and router setup on a backup battery, so our internet and fully charged phones and tablets kept us well connected even in the dark. I checked the neighborhood Facebook group page and someone posted that a transformer had exploded and started a small fire several streets down. The fire was addressed quickly. Sasha’s apple butter project was in limbo with the slow cooker shut off.

My memory of the sequence of events starts to get fuzzy at this point, but I found history on my phone of my searches back then. I searched for “Blue River Oregon” and “Lane County Emergency Management” just after midnight on September 8th. At this point, we knew there was a fire and that it was in our general area, but still a ways off. Nothing to be concerned about.

In the morning I remember walking around the house to find leaves and branches everywhere, as well as things around the lawn blown over generally disheveled. We’d had windy days before, but not like this. Ash was beginning to fall like a flaky rain, and the sun looked a lot like the thumbnail photo of this post – red and dim through the haze.

Ash rain.

That far away fire was growing now. The size of the map showing areas under evacuation continued to creep in our direction (and in every direction, it seemed). After consulting with my parents – who had actually lost their home to a wildfire a few years prior – and others, we decided to be proactive and evacuate ourselves now.

And that is a question I had never seriously considered: if you had 30 minutes and only the cargo space of your car available, what items from your home would you consider so essential that you could not live without them? How would you know you grabbed everything you actually wanted?

With a pickup truck, we had a lot of room for things to bring and used every cubic inch of that truck bed. Still, when we pulled out of the driveway, I could not help but imagine all of those items we left behind being gone when we returned. It wasn’t a good feeling.

We stayed with Sasha’s parents for a few days and I stayed glued to real-time coverage of what had now been named the Holiday Farm Fire. Our neighborhood did eventually fall into the official level 1 evacuation area map, and I received texts and calls from neighbors and friends nearby with their status updates. It really felt like the definition of “hurry up and wait.”

In one moment of panic, I realized that I had left my grandfather’s rifle at the house. He had passed away less than a week prior, and I wasn’t about to risk losing his rifle too. I hopped in the truck and drive back, crossing a road checkpoint where they were beginning to turn cars away (as a resident of the blocked area, I was still allowed through). I was able to collect the rifle and return to my in-laws’ house.

We were luckier than many in that our home never did get very close to the fires, thanks to the first responders who fought the blaze and the weather that began to change in their favor. Its containment slowly increased over the days. But it wouldn’t be fully contained until the end of October, and not before burning through more than 173,000 acres and decimating communities like Blue River, Oregon. 470 homes were destroyed by the fire. Some of those residents didn’t have any time to collect belongings and to leave with just the clothes they were wearing.

When we pulled up to our house when the evacuation was lifted, everything was covered in a layer of ash, and the air quality was so bad it surpassed even the top threshold of what was considered “Hazardous”. There was no escaping that smoky smell that clung to everything.

I knew before even going to the store that the air filter aisle would be barren. However, I managed to find two that I later attached to a box fan for a homemade indoor air filter that worked surprisingly well. So we kept that close in whatever room we shared in the house and waited until things began to clear.

Remember: when you really need something, a lot of other people probably do too.

We learned a lot of lessons from that whole experience, and those lessons played a role in our decision less than two months later to sell our home and move out to the country.

Preparing for events like these is a key tenet of homesteading, in my opinion. I look forward to sharing what we learned in more concrete detail with future posts and videos. But here on this one year mark of the start of the Holiday Farm Fire, I thought I would summarize the events our family experienced.

If there’s a takeaway here, it’s this: just because a disaster hasn’t come knocking at your door does not mean that it won’t someday. Preparation isn’t just for doomsday preppers. I encourage you to schedule some time (how about 30 minutes this week?) and discuss the most likely scenarios that could occur where you are. It’s so easy to put off, I know, but getting this done can only pay off for you in the long run. There’s no downside to preparing.

This was a long post, but it was on my mind. Thanks for reading.

Note: Sasha was able to finish her apple butter, and it was delicious. :)

Links:

Start preparedness here: https://www.ready.gov/

Links about the Holiday Farm Fire:

https://www.klcc.org/post/city-club-eugene-fire-river-during-and-after-holiday-farm-fire

https://kval.com/news/local/fire-weather-watch-for-western-oregon-due-to-hot-dry-conditions