The Beachie Creek Fire was just one of the many fires that devastated parts of Oregon on Labor Day 2020.
In our continuing coverage of the fires, five years later, KLCC’s Love Cross headed to the Santiam Canyon to catch up with an old friend in Lyons to hear her experience.
Cathy Griswold’s home of 45 years was one of the few on her road that survived the fire. Sitting on the deck of Cathy’s home on the Little North Fork of the Santiam River, Cathy explained what happened on the night of Sept. 7, 2020.
Smoke from the Beachie Creek fire was blowing down the canyon.
The power had gone out, so she went to bed early and was awakened at 2:00 a.m. by a phone call from her husband, who was in Coos Bay. He told her a friend was at the door, but he didn't say why.
She opened the door to find their friend Bob, who told her that she had time, but she needed to evacuate. Even with ash falling around her, she said didn't sense the urgency, so she took a quick shower, gathered up her cats, and headed west. She had to drive under a downed tree on her way out.
“I get out to the highway fully expecting to see many, many cars, and there were none,” explained Cathy. “So then I'm thinking, well, either I'm the last person left or nobody's left. I don't know. I don't know what to make of this. So I went as far as Stayton and went to the church parking lot and sort of sat there for a while thinking, seriously thinking, that in a few hours they'll tell me I can go back home. You know, it'll be fine.”
After several hours, Cathy was still in the parking lot, waiting for the sun to come up.
“7:00 in the morning I'm waiting for the sun to rise and it didn't. 8:00, it's not. Finally, close to 9:00 in the morning this blood red sky starts to lighten enough so you could still barely see anything, but it was blood, blood red and that gave me some pause to think ‘oh this is this is big. This is a real big event’,” explained Cathy.
As she made her way to a friend’s home, she got a call from a neighbor who told her, through tears, that their houses were gone.
Cathy said she was disoriented by the news.
“I went a good chunk of that day trying to process the idea that my home was gone and mostly I'm just in shock,” she said. “I had a spiral notebook with me and I'm trying to start writing down things for insurance and stuff. I turned to a new page in my notebook and I just started writing down the names of people I knew that had lost their homes. And I filled a page. And I think that's one of the things that made it seem the most real to me that there were so many people that were losing homes.”
Later in the day, Cathy received a video from a friend whose husband had driven down her road.
“I could see different places burning. They were still burning or they had burned, but when he turned the corner, I couldn't see,” Cathy explained. “The camera didn't show my house, but I could hear him say that our house was intact. But it's still hard to know, and I'm still getting reports of things still continuing to burn.”
“That night, another friend sent two pictures and through the smoke I could see the house was there,” Cathy continued. “I'm still kind of very cautiously hopeful.”
Coming Home
A call from another friend the next morning told her he was at her house and saw the ground smoldering through the recently laid bark dust. She decided it was time to head home to try to save her house.
“We're coming down the road and we're seeing burn, burn, burn, burn,” Cathy explained. “We finally got to the house here, and that's when I cried because I almost didn't believe it until I got here, but it was so hard because I'm relieved my house is here, but my neighbors' homes are all gone. I literally could stand in my front yard and not see another house that was intact.”
When she got to her house, Cathy found the fire had come within three inches of her deck. She and her friends and family spent a very smoky day digging through roots and wetting things down. Those efforts continued for several days.
She said she attributes her house surviving the fire to three things.
“We had cut three very large fir trees on the south side of our home the fall before. Those were gone. Had those been there, it's very possible that the fire that burned very hotly next door would have gone up into the trees and that may have taken our house, “ she explained. “We also have a metal roof, and we also had just put in in-ground irrigation in the lawn, so the grass was very green. And in most cases when it was smoldering through the bark dust, it stopped right at the green lawn.”
Cathy says she was grateful that her house was still standing, but that also came with some guilt.
“Survivor guilt is a real thing,” she said. “It was very hard to rejoice that my house was here when I'm looking around at the pile of rubble where my neighbors were, and all of the friends on my notebook page that I'd written down. All of them had lost so much and so it was hard. I just really looked for ways to help everybody that in any way I could because I just felt like why me? I'm thankful, but it’s also hard.”
Standing here today, signs that a devastating fire blew through this area five years ago remain in the charred bark of the Douglas fir trees that surround Cathy's home - in fewer numbers now - and of course in the rebuilt homes of her friends and neighbors.
All told, the Beachie Creek Fire, combined with other fires in the Santiam Canyon that week, consumed more than 400,000 acres and destroyed 1,500 structures. Five people lost their lives.
