The fire today enters its third week with no signs of
slowing down. Yesterday’s Red Flag Warning weather delivered a dreaded punch
when winds pushed the fire north of the Poudre River, not just more small
spots, but an established fire line. This spread up the hills and into housing
areas, causing what I believe are the first home losses since the first couple
of days of fire. 191 homes have been confirmed lost, but until this latest run,
authorizes believed those homes were all lost in the first 48 hours of burn.
Today the weather warnings continue. We have 100 degrees in
town. In the fire zone, they have predicted 90s, wind gusts to 35 mph, and
humidity in the single digits—a bad recipe for fire. We are now up to 75,000
acres burned, nearly 2,000 personnel on site and more expected today, and
gearhead’s dream collection of American heavy metal: three kinds of
helicopters, heavy air tanker fixed wing craft, water tenders, dozers, and
feller bunchers.
Hundreds of families have been evacuated now for two weeks.
Some have been let back in only to be re-evacuated. Smoke comes and goes over
town; the wind will shift and the blanket of ash revisits us. People are tired
and stressed. A woman I know confessed today that she has diagnosed herself as
grieving. Her house is safe, but the beautiful wild lands that we value so much
are charred. I can’t believe it will be long before the anger kicks in. We can’t
help it. It is part of the process of grieving.
I wrote a small essay about my previous fire. Although the
original went off on many tangents that, at least in my mind, were connected, I
would like to share the elements actually related to the fire. It is
instructional to me. I feel so experienced now. Maybe there is a small way that I can
be of service. I haven’t figured out how yet. Throwing money, yes. But I also
know that this is a long process. We are not even out of danger yet. And oh how
deeply grateful we are to our valued professionals. (first a few pix using my Hipstamatic iphone app)
Fire
The Owens Valley
of California doesn’t feel like the deepest valley in the United States, though
it is; but its geography does exert certain rules on our lives. Highway 395
runs north/south between the Sierra Nevada and the Inyo/White range with few
opportunities to divert another direction without ending up on a rough dirt
road or dead-ending at a trailhead. Villages are spread out and built around
year-round Sierra Nevada streams. Lone Pine is on Lone Pine Creek; Independence
is on Independence Creek. Just as water determines the occupied landscape,
mountains dominate our frame of reference. Named peaks, canyons, and the lone
rock of Winnedumah on the crest of the Inyo Mountains to the east mark our
place on this dusty earth. That feels like enough—to say that I live in a
little red house on Oak Creek, just down from the Baxter Pass trailhead, south
of Division Creek where the lupines bloom riotously in the spring of a wet
year. No one thinks to add that her home lies on the side of a slope that can
catch the afternoon wind just right to carry the heat of a lightning strike to her neighbor’s doorstep. But that, too, is a feature of my personal
landscape.
Fire of the
destructive kind comes to everyone, in some way. One late-winter night I woke
to the smell of smoke and had time to slip shoes on, walk out the back door and
register Tamara’s house on fire, and come back in and calm the dogs before the
knock on the door. We went out in the night and hosed the guest house between
the burning house and mine. We neighbors kept its roof and sides watered as the
local fire department attacked the house on fire, falling to a failure of
wiring. Unlike the previous spring, though, when a man north of town lost his
house and surrounding houses to a barrel fire on a windy day, the cold, still
night kept the fire contained, and never did I think to pack the car.
Day One
Reports told
us that the rainfall for the Owens Valley was down for the twelve months before
the fire by seventy percent, only 1.52 inches recorded instead of the thirty-year
average of 5.02 inches. We residents knew these figures as a winter of meager
snowpack, a spring with few flowers, and an increase in political friction as
valley water flowed south to Los Angeles. Fire professionals knew it as a contributing
factor to the low live fuel moisture in the native vegetation, or in other
words, “extreme drought.”
The
South and North forks of Oak Creek supported a riparian wonderland of willow,
water birch, and cottonwood trees. Live oaks provided cover for our houses, and
up the creek deciduous oaks gave the creek its name. Away from the creek, the
alluvial plain sustained black brush, rabbit brush, Great Basin sage, Mormon tea,
and a variety of buckwheat. From my desk window, I watched scrub jays, oak
titmice, a regular parade of California quail, and an occasional Cooper’s hawk.
On the
afternoon of Friday, July 6, a storm gathered force over the Sierra Nevada. Multiple
lightning strikes along the steep eastern slopes of the Sierra were urged on by
strong gusty winds. A feature of the mountains there were the steep drainages
that help funnel the afternoon winds from the crest down to the valley. One
official reading gave a high temperature of 103 that afternoon and the relative
humidity hovered in the single digits.
At work
we got a call that a lightning strike had caused smoke to billow above Oak
Creek. Ours was a little settlement of twenty houses tucked into the trees
along a small creek north of Independence. At the end of our row of houses
stood the historic Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery, a local landmark and tourist
destination. I left work early to pick up one of my dogs at the vet forty miles
north in Bishop. When I arrived home to change my clothes I could see smoke
coming from the north fork. My first phone call was to tell the vet to keep my
dog another day. The second call was to my two coworkers who also lived on the
creek to tell them to come home immediately. Then I packed.
As I put
my red and white trunk in the car, along with the computer, dog food, the
healthy dog, and a few clothes, a Sheriff’s deputy drove in and warned me of an
impending evacuation. I gave him my phone number and as much information on
neighbors as I had. Then I drove to town.
Independence
was busy with people monitoring and fighting the fire, an emergency shelter for
evacuees at the school, and simply the excitement of something new and
different. Because there was nothing to be done, we walked over to the west
side after dark and watched the hillsides burn, spectacular and terrifying. Pictures
taken that night of the foothills and eastern slopes of the Sierra showed red
mountains covered with illuminating sparkles. But what the photographs didn’t
convey was the immensity or the closeness of the burning mountains. By the time
we bewildered souls made up a bed for the night and fed our dogs and children,
the winds had stopped the advance of fire, and it smoldered, relatively
harmlessly, yet in such a bigness.
What did
it mean that the world was on fire? Curiously, I was not worried about losing
my house, although this was a possibility. I was more impressed that I was
gaining a certain knowledge and experience. My first summer with the National
Park Service at Bryce Canyon, my housemate was on the fire crew. Her dedication
to her job inspired me to learn important dates: the 1910 fires of Edward
Pulaski, Mann Gulch in 1949, Storm King Mountain in 1994—fires that claimed the
lives of firefighters and had been recorded in books. In Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean wrote about 1910 when the
transformation of the landscape occurred, “when thousands of people thought the
world was coming to an end, and for eighty-seven people it did.” I believed
that our fire would not come to this. But I was beginning to be aware that in a
way, a world does come to an end—a world of thinking it can’t happen to you.
Day Two
On
Saturday, the fire seemed in retreat, and I was able to go home. I stopped and
got coffee at the gas station and met an engine crew headed north. Then I went
to Bishop to fetch the sick dog. We returned home by noon to find that the fire
was not going away as we had thought earlier in the morning. The breeze was
unnaturally hot and carried the omen of smoke. From the edge of the trees I
watched fire personnel and equipment maneuver in the heated haze. I took a shower
and ate lunch, then repacked the car with the dogs. I got the call to evacuate
again, and we went to friend Misty’s house in town.
Memory
of that long afternoon burns up and billows away in the downdrafts of a summer
Sierra afternoon, like so much overheated black brush. I remember driving up
Market Street on the west side of Independence. From there we watched the
activity on Oak Creek. I remember watching multiple fixed wing aircraft and
rotorcraft working the fire, dropping red retardant over the Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery.
I remember the bobcats who lived in the sagebrush. I remember being on the
phone with my friend Holly who sat at a hectic dispatch console in the middle
of the nerve center. I remember when she told me that nine firefighters had
just deployed their protective shelters. Later a local Forest Service friend
relayed to me their radio transmission, the one that led people listening to
believe the nine had no hope. I remember asking the Universe to take my house in
their stead.
The
afternoon of July 7 was hot again, a hundred degrees by lunchtime. The day
before, the Seven fire started near the Onion Valley road on Independence
Creek; the Oak fire was burning up Oak Creek. Together now as the Seven Oak, the
fire was burning down the South Fork of Oak Creek, through the Bright family ranch,
destroying many buildings, and toward the hatchery. Firefighters on scene
prioritized protecting the landmark granite hatchery building, just below the
confluence of the South and North forks of Oak Creek and a third of a mile up
the creek from my house.
As the
day grew hotter and the afternoon winds started down from the Sierra crest,
conditions existed for extreme fire behavior with rapid spread rates, long
flame lengths, spotting potential, and blow-up conditions. From the west side
of Independence, three aerial miles from the hatchery, we lined up in our cars
and on bicycles to watch the fire burn. Leading trails of smoke made it hard to
determine how far down the fire had come. In addition to the main fire,
firefighters built a backfire on the south side of Oak Creek Road. Norman
Maclean warned against the possibility of the wind changing and a backfire
blowing against you. Indeed, the winds came up and pushed the backfire across
the road toward the firefighters. Later reports said the main fire would have
crossed the road anyway and produced a similar or worse result.
Fire spread
quickly into the riparian area with flames in excess of fifty feet. Gusty and
erratic winds caused the flames to make multiple runs around the property just
upcreek from the hatchery where the nine firefighters and two engines were
trapped. In the midst of the conflagration, stores of flammable gasses and
liquids around the property exploded and contributed to the overwhelming heat
and choking smoke. The firefighters sought relief in a nearby pond, under their
thin foil shelters.
The
official report of the Seven Oak burn-over called the final run affecting the
accident site as an intense fire whirl. Norman Maclean wrote that, “A big crown
fire can make its own weather. The hot, lighter air rises, the cold, heavier
air rushes down to replace it in what is called a ‘convection effect,’ and soon
a great ‘fire whirl’ is started and fills the air with burning cones and
branches which drop in advance of the main fire like the Fourth of July.” In Fire on the Mountain about Storm King in
1994, John Maclean wrote that a blowup “can sweep away in moments everything
before it, the works of nature and of humankind, and sometimes humankind
itself.” In those moments above the hatchery, the fire was the only work of
nature that mattered. Humankind was on its own, and all I could do was watch.
Not long
after we watched airplanes dropping retardant on the hatchery, Holly called and
told me the west side of Independence was about to be evacuated. Just as on
Friday when the fire looked benign until the winds came, Saturday’s crisis took
place in the afternoon with the winds. Fire shouldn’t burn downhill, but it did.
The fire picked up the vegetation of Independence Creek, burning down toward
town and damaging the campground on the edge of town and the town water tank. As
I helped Misty pack her truck, the Sheriff’s deputies came around and made it
official. Cats crying, dogs dancing around, we loaded up and drove fifteen
miles south to Lone Pine.
We
caught our breath in a friend’s back yard now full of dogs. I felt a stillness,
then, in the late afternoon—not in the weather or in the fire, but deep within
myself as I believed that my house was gone and that people may be hurt or
killed. And in the quiet came a voice that I knew to be my own suggesting a
different path. I scratched my dogs ears, ate the food offered to me, and
wondered where the next road led.
I read
that firefighters risked burn injuries to the respiratory tract when tissue
temperatures rose above a certain predictable degree. The elevation of internal
tissue temperature was determined by a host of internal and external factors
including blood perfusion, thermal conductivity, metabolic rate, air velocity,
and respiration rate, as well as the air temperature of the fire ground. The
upper respiratory tract suffered injury immediately after exposure, while
deeper tissues suffered damage after a longer period of exposure. Researchers
at the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that, “Clearly, facing a fire, the
human upper respiratory tract will easily subject to serious burn if a quick
enough getting away from the fire ground was not successful.”
The
night of our fire I walked across the street to where the Red Cross was setting
up a shelter. I was in a fog, plowing through, part of a carnival where nobody has
rehearsed her role. We heard that the fire had jumped Highway 395, which seemed
to say so much. I ran into a friend from the Eastern California Museum who had
stayed behind packing precious objects as long as she could and watched the
foaming of the roof.
Finally around
9 p.m. we got word that the evacuation of Independence had been called off. The
fire had receded with the change of wind in the evening. The hatchery was saved.
In the burn-over of the Seven Oak, the firefighters survived in the pond, under
their shelters. Protected by the water and a small distance from the fire, they
walked away with burns and damage to those fragile respiratory tracts, and the
haunting knowledge that they were not immune from the proximity of tragedy.
They were following a tradition a century old of young men and women risking
their lives—not for my home, per se, but for the physical challenge, the
camaraderie, and to be part of an epic struggle. There is vitality, I have been
told, to the work on the fireline that comes in few other ways.
Day Three
Against
the penetrating stench of smoke, I spent Sunday morning laundering clothes,
bedding, curtains, and anything that wasn’t tacked down. I walked across the
creek out of the trees and watched. Fire burned everywhere, still, in the
mountains. Fire burned up the nearby slope in the trees along the North Fork of
the creek. I could see the fire crews working it in their yellow shirts. A
helicopter made trip after trip with its water bucket from the aqueduct to the
fire. The pilot seemed to dance with the fire, dropping with seasoned precision.
Although the fire was close, it had been tamed. The fire would burn in the
hills for many days. But for those of us on Oak Creek, we lost or we didn’t,
and the immediacy of the danger was past. It felt like the fire had rushed in
and consumed all of the oxygen and left us gasping for air, relearning to
breathe.
After
I went
back to work on Monday. Holly came for dinner after two weeks and two days of
dispatching for the Inyo. She was exhausted, so she napped while I attended a
public meeting at the Legion Hall. The cycle of our collective grief was stuck
at anger, and I found myself angry at the angry people. The Forest Service man
guarding the entrance of our road explained the commonness of anger in these
situations. The wheel ground; anger seemed more active than denial or
depression. If we were angry, we could blame someone.
Later
that month two bodies were found up the mountain near Baxter Pass, victims of
the fire. They were discovered as part of a local law enforcement raid on
illegal marijuana gardens in the Sierra Nevada, damaging to the ecosystem and a
threat to hikers. Flying over a known grow site, the tactical team discovered
that the grow operation near Baxter Pass had been destroyed in the Seven Oak
fire. The newspaper reported that it appeared the bodies were those of
cultivators.
I noted
the lack of coverage of the identities of these men, but this is what I knew to
be true, so big and so small: two men died in our fire. They were not
firefighters. They were not my neighbors. They were immigrants from Mexico who
died in the high country of the southern Sierra, a rocky paradise of lakes,
pine trees, and cool summer breezes. I thought of the age-old tradition of
introverted Spanish speaking mountain men in the Sierra Nevada and across the
west, running sheep and carving their names in aspen trees, trying to make a dollar
to get back home.
After
the fire I spent a day helping the Bright family sift through the debris of
charred outbuildings. We all wondered quietly how this elderly couple would
muster from such a loss. I separated metal from ash, for the recycler, from what
had been Keith’s shop. After lunch, their daughter Mary walked me up the canyon
to see new growth pointing up through the blackened ground among a graveyard of
burned trees only a week after the fire.
The
insistence of nature to keep going takes as well as it gives, and in the
following winter two creek residents died: Jane Bright, the matriarch of the
South Fork, and Ken Avey who lived down-creek and was spared the fire. Ken’s
casket was carried to the cemetery by a horse-drawn cart owned by ranchers up
the highway who lost a year’s supply of hay in the fire. The bleak winter ended,
and like the green rushes we emerged again in the spring, to the laughter of
children and the fellowship of neighbors.
