When Tim Flynn evacuated his house on Aug. 22, he took a moment to say goodbye to it.
The Flat Fire was making a run-up nearby Whychus Canyon, and the home he shares with his son and daughter was just blocks away.
Driving back into his subdivision on the edge of Sisters, Oregon, Flynn pointed out signs of the fight to save his neighborhood. Large inflatable water tanks were spread out on yards every few streets. Light red fire-retardant clung to roofs and treetops perched along the canyon.
“This was probably a major battle point,” Flynn said, pointing toward a cluster of homes. “The last time we were evacuated, a few years ago, that was where they stopped the fire.”
The neighborhood was still under a mandatory evacuation order when Flynn returned, but officials had allowed residents back in to check on their properties.
The Flat Fire erupted in Central Oregon near Sisters on Aug. 21. Within days nearly 4,000 homes were under various levels of evacuation — over half of those, like the Flynn’s, were at Level 3, Go Now.
Despite the anxiety evacuees like Flynn felt, a combination of swift firefighting efforts and fire prevention long in advance meant the Flat Fire’s legacy is more about the thousands of homes saved instead of lost.
‘We used just about everything we had that night’
At its peak, there were more than a thousand personnel assigned to the fire. Multiple large aircrafts spent days dropping fire retardant and water to slow the flames. In the end, only five homes were lost.
“We showed up in the field literally as the fire was encroaching on the homes,” said Damon Schulze, the operations section chief for one of the state’s three fire marshal teams. His crew took over command less than 24 hours after the fire was first reported.
Without time to assess and plan an attack, Schulze and the other team leaders decided to implement point protection. Crews would go house to house and stand between flames and properties with hoses pointed.
“We just did what we could to prevent each house from catching fire,” Schulze said. “We used just about everything we had that night.”
Jeff Puller, a fire marshal with Sisters-Camp Sherman Fire District, also worked the fire. His engine was leap-frogging homes as fire moved through neighborhoods. At one point, the crew found themselves trapped.
“We had two flame fronts that approached our house and for over an hour we had active flames all around us,” Puller said.
A video he took from that night shows flames dancing around the property, burning up trees and structures away from the main house.
Puller’s crew had time to prepare the property by limbing up trees and clearing space around the house before the flames crossed the driveway and blocked them in. His wasn’t the only engine surrounded that night.
“There was an engine from Bend Fire that pulled up and a tree was ignited right next to the house,” Puller said. “They were able to knock it down and save the home. And that just happened over and over.”
Aside from the firefighters’ efforts, both Puller and Schulze credited homeowners for practicing Firewise guidelines, which recommend measures like clearing combustibles away from the first 5 feet of a home and keeping roofs and gutters clear of leaves and pine needles.
It’s a community-wide effort that Schulze said he saw throughout Sisters.
“Just driving through you can tell that there’s been a lot of Firewise prep in this area,” Schulze said. “And rightfully so. It’s probably the worst area in Oregon for fires. So I guess they’ve learned a thing or two about it.”
Sleepless nights
Valori Wells grew up in Sisters and built her house 22 years ago on the edge of Whychus Canyon. She is an artist and owns a shop in town with her mother.
As a sixth-generation Central Oregonian, she knows the risk of wildfires well.
“Friday night the fire wasn’t in my neighborhood yet, but it was getting closer,” Wells said. “I was definitely anxious.”
After evacuating, Wells spent the next night watching her neighborhood on a livestream from an Oregon State University fire camera placed on top of a nearby butte.
“It was one of the most horrific things ever to watch the right side of your screen, which is the other side of the canyon, explode in fire,” Wells said. “And then our side of the canyon was black except for the lights of all of the emergency vehicles going in and out down there. I had no idea what I’d wake up to on Sunday.”
The next day, she got a call notifying her that her house survived and had a fresh layer of pink powder.
“The firefighter that I talked to out there flat out said, ‘What saved your house was the retardant,’” Wells said. “‘The air support is what saved your house, and what saved the majority of the houses on the canyon.’”
Wells said she likes to think her grandfather, Cal Butler, was watching over her that night. He founded Butler Aircraft in Redmond and died in 2004. The company was primarily a firefighting operation, using aircraft to drop retardant on fires locally and throughout the country.
“In 1955, he took an old Navy surplus aircraft and retrofitted it to release the retardant,” Wells said. “And it was the first in the United States, from what my mom says.”
All the firefighting efforts and prevention paid off, as very few homes were lost.
But not everyone had their property saved. Braxton Holly’s home was devastated in the fire, according to photos provided by his close friend Erik Dolson. Dolson is raising money to help Holly resettle and rebuild.
Looking ahead
The Flynns are settling back into their home now, cleaning up spoiled food left out for nearly a week and moving their many animals back in. While the tragedy of losing their home was avoided, the pain of evacuating and the uncertainty during those few days is immense.
Standing in the backyard with his daughter, Truly, and dog, Dandelion, Flynn pointed to a large smooth rock. It’s a replica of his late wife Terry Ellis’ headstone. The family had it made in 2018 when she died after a second battle with cancer. They brought it with them when they moved to Sisters.
“If we’re celebrating Mother’s Day or anything like that, this is where we come,” Flynn said, bending down to point out the ash resting in the words etched into the rock.
Truly was 5-years-old when Ellis died. She’s 12 now and about to start middle school. For her, evacuating was especially difficult.
“When I was in the car, I was crying the whole time because I had to leave my very favorite stuffies behind,” Truly said. “And also, my dad would not let us take any of our mom’s stuff with us.”
With the speed that the family’s home went from Level 2 to Level 3, there just wasn’t time to gather many belongings.
But now that Truly’s reunited with all 400 of her stuffies and her mom’s items, she said she’s looking forward to something a little more fun than the past few days of evacuation.
“My dad might let me get another guinea pig,” she said. “I’m hoping for a longhaired guinea pig with that really long hair that covers their whole body and they look like a giant mop head.”
Flynn is focused on the future, too. He’s thinking of ways the family can be better prepared for the next fire, the next evacuation. Some of the trees in the backyard feel too close to the house now.
The preventative measures that fire officials credit with saving neighborhoods this time only help if they continue.
For those who live on the edge of the wildlands, there is always more that can be done.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
