Wildfire smoke was thick when Tye and Melynda Small went to bed on Labor Day, but they weren t too concerned. After all, they live in a part of Oregon where ferns grow from tree trunks and rainfall averages more than 6 feet a year.
GILLIAN FLACCUS and ZACH URNESS
Associated Press and Statesman Journal
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OTIS Wildfire smoke was thick when Tye and Melynda Small went to bed on Labor Day, but they weren t too concerned. After all, they live in a part of Oregon where ferns grow from tree trunks and rainfall averages more than 6 feet a year.
But just after midnight, a neighbor awakened them as towering flames, pushed by gusting winds, bore down. The Smalls and their four children fled, leaving behind 26 pet chickens, two goldfish and a duck named Gerard as the wind whipped the blaze into a fiery tornado and trees exploded around them.
OTIS, Ore.
Wildfire smoke was thick when Tye and Melynda Small went to bed on Labor Day, but they weren’t too concerned. After all, they live in a part of Oregon where ferns grow from tree trunks and rainfall averages more than six feet (1.8 meters) a year.
But just after midnight, a neighbor awakened them as towering flames, pushed by gusting winds, bore down. The Smalls and their four children fled, leaving behind 26 pet chickens, two goldfish and a duck named Gerard as wind whipped the blaze into a fiery tornado and trees exploded around them.
When it was over, they were left homeless by a peril they had never imagined. Only two houses on their street in Otis survived a fire they expected to be tamped out long before it reached their door less than six miles (9.6 kilometers) from the Pacific.
Deep in the densely forested foothills of southern Oregon, near the town of Butte Falls, Lanette and Steve Martin lived with their son and his family until last year, when a wildfire chased them away from their home. As embers the size of charcoal briquettes landed on their front deck, the retired couple and their family jumped into their cars, leaving behind five chickens and a cat. “If we’d waited another 10 minutes, we would have been engulfed in flames,” Steve Martin said.
That same day, Sept. 8, 2020, an urban fire fueled by hot, dry weather and strong winds tore through the nearby towns of Talent and Phoenix, in the Rogue Valley. Alma Alvarez, a migrant worker, was working about 15 miles away when the fire began raging toward Phoenix, where her two younger children, aged 10 and 13, were home alone. Alvarez rushed back to find the neighborhood already in flames. The family escaped with the kids’ birth certificates and their cat, but everything else was gone. That nig