Andy Nelson, photographer with the Register-Guard, went on a media tour of the fire area up the McKenzie Highway. He spoke with KLCC’s Rachael McDonald about what he saw on the tour.
“There were homes that had been destroyed. There were businesses that we had seen, you know if you had played and gone up that way you would recognize some of the homes and structures. And while there were several that had been destroyed, there were also several that had survived as well so it was a very capricious nature of how the fire would hit some places and spare other places. It’s just pretty awful to see.
We went to Ben and Kay Dorris, which is a county park and that’s been burned over and that’s really sad because that’s a place where I know a lot of people who use the river take their boats out or they go past it to get to Martin’s Rapids and that last little bit of fun before pulling out at Helfrich, if people like to do that. So it’s really, it’s hard for people who enjoy and love the river to see things like that.
As we progressed up through Vida, Vida, actually most of the structures in Vida have survived which is good news. The Goodpasture Bridge is intact, which is good news. But once we were making our way through Nimrod again we saw that patchwork of structures that had been destroyed by the fire and those that had survived.
So, there’s going to be a lot of, a lot of work to do up there for folks and a lot of sadness and a lot of grief I think for folks. I hope that as a community if we live here, a lot of us have been up there and love it and you know they’re going to need a lot of help and support. So, I feel it’s important for me as a photographer to go up there and to see what it looked like and to report on it, to try and get information out to folks as best we can and to be accurate with that and I just think that people need to be prepared for the fact that the McKenzie River Drive that they used to take is going to be substantially different for a long time. But, hopefully, we’ll all be able to recover.”
“There’s a lot of trees that are down. There’s rocks and the reality is that none of this has actually been able to be mopped up. So, I’ve been able to cover a few fires in my career and normally you would have ten times as many people on this fire as they have now. And so they haven’t been able to get into those areas and so anybody who is thinking about trying to figure out a way to get up there is really taking a gigantic risk. It’s not worth it, you know. I think there will be plenty of time to see what people need to see. But right now people need to let the firefighters do what they need to do to make sure that we’re all safe if we want to go up there. But there’s big trees that have fallen and there’s big rocks that have fallen and so those can come loose at any time. And that’s a risk that really is not a smart play.”
Register-Guard photographer Andy Nelson spoke with KLCC after touring the Holiday Farm Fire Thursday.
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