In Jackson County, residents prepare for future wildfires

In 2020, the Almeda Fire ripped through Jackson County, destroying homes and ecosystems. The “Think Out Loud” team traveled to Southern Oregon recently and talked to residents about how they’re thinking about fire in their communities now.

Mountain View Estates, a manufactured home park in Talent, was destroyed by the Almeda Fire. Now, it’s a nationally recognized Firewise Neighborhood. Steve Thorpe lives there.

Tucker Teutsch is the executive director of the Firebrand Resiliency Collective. It supports long-term natural disaster preparedness, recovery and resilience. Teutsch led us on a tour around Thorpe’s home, which is prepared to withstand ember attacks. Teutsch also took the team around his own property, which needs a lot more work to be prepared for wildfires.

About four miles north of Talent, the team also spoke to Glenn Hill in Phoenix. He’s lived in the Rogue Valley for decades. Hill has triad asthma and the condition is affected by smoke. He told us more about living with both.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller [narrating]: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to spend the hour today in Southern Oregon. We went to Jackson County this spring. That was a site of the devastating 2020 Almeda Fire. We were there to talk about a variety of efforts to make the region less susceptible to massive blazes going forward.

We’ll start in Talent. The manufactured home park Mountain View Estates was destroyed by the fire. But now it’s a nationally recognized Firewise Neighborhood. Steve Thorpe is a resident there. We met up with him, along with Tucker Teutsch, who is the executive director of the Firebrand Resiliency Collective. The nonprofit supports natural disaster preparedness and resilience.

Tucker told us about Mountain View Estates and the people who live there.

Tucker Teutsch: These guys, as I said, are really running circles around us at this point. Steve and his Firewise cohort really got a jump, not only on rebuilding after the fire because this was a heavily affected community, but also leading the charge as residents, to take wildfire risk in hand as a community. Steve and his co-coordinator, Mark, and the park management have really been amazing to watch along the journey.

At this point, we can’t keep up with them, but they were the first community within the Almeda Fire burn scar to receive Firewise designation and also the first manufactured home park in the state of Oregon to get the designation. Why that’s important is that we’re seeing these communities come back and rebuild to a higher level of wildfire resilience. But also, Talent, Phoenix and this part of the Rogue Valley are lower resourced than places like Ashland and Jacksonville. We see a lot of Firewise communities being established there, but none before the fire in central Talent, Phoenix and some of those places. So I just think that this is a really good example of community-led effort and I wanna call that out specifically

Miller: What did the fire mean to this particular community?

Steve Thorpe: This community suffered tremendously. And unfortunately, during the fire, it came very fast that day. The wind was blowing 45 miles an hour. The fire started about four miles south of us. The wind was blowing from the south, so it came very fast. And we had 165 units in the park; 21 survived. All the rest were burned to the ground.

Miller: Did you live here?

Thorpe: Yes, we lived in this exact space we’re standing by right here. And we built back. The fire was September 8, 2020, and we built back in October of 2021 with another manufactured home.

Miller: You lost everything?

Thorpe: We lost everything. I wore this hat out that day.

Miller: You’re wearing an SOU baseball hat right now?

Thorpe: Right, Southern Oregon University baseball. My wife and I both work for Southern Oregon University. So when we pulled the door to that day, we were very naive like everyone else but thought we would be back in about two or three hours. You could see the fire line over there and the fire departments were trying to keep … But that wind was blowing those embers, just rolling through. And there was nothing that could stop them.

So again, only 21 units out of 165 survived in this park. We decided to move back in here and build back.

Miller: Why?

Thorpe: For various reasons – family reasons, would be a big part of it. We felt it was important to come back and try to help this community revive and be resilient. So that’s what we had done. We were among the first four of the families to move back in, when we came back.

Miller [narrating]: Tucker then led a fire assessment of Steve’s home.

Teutsch: In this community, all the houses are really tight. And when we think about assessing a home, we assess essentially the structure itself. We look at the immediate zone, which is 0 to 5 [feet from the structure]. We look at the intermediate zone, which is 5 to 30 feet out. And then we look at the extended zone, which is 30 to 100 feet. So in a manufactured home park, what you have is really nothing to assess past the structure and the immediate zone. At that point you’re in the shared space.

So what’s also really important is to make sure that we’re not just assessing one home but we’re assessing their neighbors because they’re all gonna be working together. They share the same risk. It’s not just what you do, it’s also what your neighbors do. And so it’s helpful to cluster these sorts of things.

Miller: It also means that everybody has to have buy in because you’re as susceptible as the weakest link.

Teutsch: That’s true. That’s absolutely true, yes. So there’s both a pro, in that you have an engaged neighborhood very tightly knit, very tightly spaced, to some extent that they can all work together and see that collective effort. Then you have the con where yeah, everybody’s got to get involved. But sometimes, when you’re dealing with rural populations, you’re not always gonna have that 100% buy-in being as flexible as you want.

So we start with taking a picture of the house so that the resident knows that we’re assessing their home. They’re gonna get a nice homeowner report, multiple pages to talk about all the factors of all these different structures, zones and whatnot. So they can really tailor their efforts to their own home.

It’s a brand-new home. These manufactured homes are built to a standard that exceeds Oregon code, in a lot of ways. So when you’re buying a new manufactured home, it’s coming pretty well wildfire prepared. The siding is in good condition. Steve, is this a composite?

Thorpe: Yes, the codes talk about hardened siding and fire-resistant roof. And all the new units that are coming in have that kind of designation now. So yeah, there’s composite.

Teutsch: Is it like cement fiberboard?

Thorpe: Yes, it’s cement fiberboard

Teutsch: So we just say cement here, right? Foundation … Now, we go down the structure a little bit, look at the windows, we look at the vents openings. The mesh in your vents. What type of … those look like …

Miller: The thinking is that you have an ember that flies from a mile away or 50 feet away that goes inside and then there’s a fire inside the house because it found a way in?

Thorpe: Yeah, they’ll roll about two miles with a big wind. That 45-mile-an-hour wind rolled up those embers about two miles.

Miller: So that is designed in a way to make it less likely that an ember can get inside of it?

Thorpe: Correct, on the backside of the vent, it has mesh. And I’m gonna show you one other thing, underneath this porch. What they’re always trying to do is to keep any kind of leaves or any kind of debris going under there. So we’ve got a little bit of mesh on the sides underneath the steps over there.

Teutsch: There’s a lot of things that we can’t control when a wildfire strikes. You can’t control where the embers go, especially if it’s a wind-driven fire. You can’t control how the fuel or the forest is burning. But structures [are controllable]. The guru of all this stuff is a guy named Jack Cohen. He believes that you can turn structure ignition into a physics problem. And a physics problem, as Steve knows as an engineer, can be solved. So a lot of these factors all come into play during a wildfire event.

So the entrance of embers to ignite the structure is what we’re really trying to guard against. Because once embers are in your house and a fire is in the interior of your home, or on your home, 90% of the time it’s a total loss. Unlike wind events, rain events, wildfire generally – and we saw this in the Almeda Fire – results in absolute destruction where there’s nothing left but rubble.

[Noises of walking on rocks] For the most part, all around his house, he has done the work of not having anything flammable.

Miller: I mean, we can hear right now, you’re walking on river rocks as opposed to bark chips.

Teutsch: Yeah, and that’s one of the things we identified is asking the resident to imagine having to build a campfire with only materials they have within the first 5 feet of their home. And if you were to try to build a campfire here, with what Steve has, you couldn’t. It wouldn’t burn. There’s nothing like Amazon boxes on the front porch. There’s not a whole lot here that could catch fire.

Miller: It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to think about delivery boxes. But if people are piling it up, “Oh, I got some cardboard. I’ll deal with that later,” you would notice that, and you’d say that this is a fire risk, having this cardboard on your porch?

Teutsch: Yes, so we have a question here [on the assessment sheet being shown to Miller]: “Are there any combustible man-made materials next to the walls of a house?” And that’s exactly what we mean when we say man-made, it’s cardboard boxes, your wood pile.

Thorpe: And I’ll mention a couple of other things that are potentially combustible. We’ve got cushions on some wicker chairs here. And what we, as a Firewise leader group for the park, say to people is that if you know there is a red flag day then what we need to do is move all that out away from the house. Because right now, those two chairs with those cushions, are within a couple of feet of the house. So move those out on red flag days. Same thing with the little grill down here with propane. Move that out away from the house.

Miller: So it’s not so intense that you can’t have that wicker chair with that foam. But be aware of what’s happening, the season and the weather. And if things get dangerous, move away?

Thorpe: Be aware of the conditions. The other part of what we do with Firewise is to make sure that we have a good alert system. We have an internal alert system within the park. Then we also have the external alert systems that are on cell phones and for people who only have landlines. Because this is a 55+ community, not everybody is cell phone savvy. So we have an internal system to alert people. We’re trying to get people to pay attention to all the conditions and be aware ahead of time. But if an emergency happens, then we can use those multiple systems that we have to try to alert people to what needs to be done.

Teutsch: A lot of times the biggest fire danger we have, we don’t see. It’s the neglected stuff. It’s the leaves and the junk underneath your deck.

Thorpe: It’s very true and I’ll give you an example. On the day of the Almeda Fire itself … We lived in this spot before with a little bit smaller double-wide manufactured home. That day, the leaves were just blowing up on this patio and on the carport on the other side. So I got out early in the morning – this was before the fire ever started – and I swept the leaves from the carport and came over here to sweep the leaves from the patio. By the time I swept these leaves, it was already full of leaves on the other side again. The wind just blows those leaves right up against a solid structure, such as a manufactured home, and you’ve really got to be aware of that kind of thing. As Tucker said, that can be where those embers light something that really will burn fairly quickly.

Miller: Were there big trees around here?

Thorpe: Yeah, what you see now is much more open space because all the trees and fuel really got burned. There are, as I said, 21 homes that survived here. But their trees also got burned. So from here, you can see along the edge of the creek, and you can see some of those dead trees sticking up there. The county and the state both left some of those trees for wildlife, for birds in particular. But yeah, just about all the fuel was burned out.

Teutsch: That was the main fuel for the Almeda Fire, the Bear Creek Greenway. So you had the fire start along the Bear Creek Greenway in Ashland and move up eight miles to the south of what’s really North Phoenix, South Medford, along the Bear Creek Greenway. Then it would go into the community and start structure-to-structure ignition. It really provided more of an urban conflagration sort of scenario that was really hard to stop. Then it would go back in the Greenway and travel large distances between Talent and Phoenix just using those fuel loads.

So we’ve seen a lot of work in the Greenway. But also, a lot more needs to get done. Some of the communities like this one and others are really concerned about maintenance for those fuel loads.

Miller [narrating]: Tucker asked Steve more questions about emergency preparedness.

Teutsch: Do you have a go bag?

Thorpe: Yes, we always have a go bag.

Teutsch: Of course you do.

Miller: Did you have one before 2020?

Thorpe: No, we did not. Again, I admit we were naive thinking this will never happen to us. The day of the fire, we had just enough time to put our important papers into the cars. We have two cars, and we got both of those out. And we were naive thinking we didn’t have to put anything else like winter clothes as well as summer clothes. So we just left with a few summer clothes, thinking we’d be back in two or three hours. Now, we’re prepared. We really know what we need and how to get it. And we’ve got a plan for collecting all the important things we might need.

Miller: You mentioned your hat earlier. Why?

Thorpe: Because I wore it out today. I always wear a hat when I go outside.

Miller: Oh, that hat you put on when you evacuated? But you didn’t take much else?

Thorpe: That’s right. Inside the house, there were about three items that survived the fire, three little knickknack kind of things. And we still got those prominently displayed as memorabilia. This jacket that I have on was a donation from a friend of mine. I’m from Texas originally. He was back in Texas, and he heard about the fire, so he sent me this jacket. So I’m still using that, yeah. But everything else was burned.

Teutsch: I know you’re getting emergency notifications. And I’m pretty sure your smoke alarms are working.

Thorpe: Yes.

Teutsch: We can also refer folks to the Red Cross who can come in and do a smoke alarm installation as well. So these questions are meant to provide other resource pathways for folks. Just you and your wife, so two people living in the house. You do have homeowners insurance?

Thorpe: Yes.

Teutsch: And that’s what we want to know. So all these questions we ask, we have resources that will come out. And the homeowner report, if we answer “no” on any of these things, [the resources help the resident] navigate to get some of these things solved. What’s in the go bag? How do you sign up for Nixle or Everbridge or emergency alerts?

Miller: What if people can’t afford a smoke alarm? What if they can’t afford to swap out their bark mulch for river rocks? What if they’re barely getting by and then you come along and say, “Your home is not safe for the next fire?”

Teutsch: This is where we want to not just show up with a bunch of questions. We don’t want to just come up with requests. We want to come out with resources. So it’s really important to understand who’s offering what. So like I said, with the smoke alarm things, the Red Cross has a “Sound The Alarm” program that can come in and make sure the smoke alarms are working.

If they have bark mulch around their home, we can come in if, after the report, they do a little bit of work like cleaning out the gutters, we can come and replace three yards of bark mulch with river rock. Likewise, for low-income residents, if their vent screens are too big or would allow embers, we can come in and do a retrofit on the house to provide ember-resistant vent screens.

Miller: And that money you’re spending comes from grants?

Teutsch: It all comes from grants. So we have a fairly large grant from the Forest Service, a federal grant. And as you can imagine, we’re navigating some uncertainty around that. That’s a multi-year grant which allows us to do this type of work and do some of that bark mulch replacement. Then luckily, we have another state grant through the Oregon Health Authority that allows us to do bark mulch replacement and ember-resistant vent screen retrofits for low-income households here, some home hardening.

You can’t just come in and say, “Hey, you gotta have, you should have, did you know …” You have to come in with “Here’s a solution.” And it’s important to understand all the different partners work in this space, because we have solutions that not only can harden the structure here organizationally, but we can direct some partners like Oregon Department of Forestry or Northwest Youth Corps to come into a community that may be low resourced and actually cut down some of these bushes that are up against homes or remove some of the most dangerous fuels from the community.

So at that point we’re done assessing Steve’s house. And it’s, obviously, a pretty gold star example of how you actually do a wildfire-resilient structure in that immediate zone. He can’t really do an intermediate zone. Literally, we’re here between his structure and it’s probably about 4 feet between the neighbor’s fence. It’s a vinyl fence. That’s great.

So now we have to think about what the fuel load is on the other side of this fence. What’s the neighbor done?

Miller: What the neighbor’s done and what their neighbor’s done.

Teutsch: What’s their next neighbor done and what’s their neighbor done? Exactly. So that’s why we got into community organizing. This is a direct service we can do with residents. But it doesn’t really help just to do it with one resident.

Miller: That’s interesting. So in your mind, that’s what you do? Community organizing?

Teutsch: Yeah, in a lot of ways. It’s relational and it’s about identifying folks like Steve or other Firewise leaders here. And us not telling the whole community, “Hey, you should … ‚” but actually leveraging that kind of healthy neighborhood competition that you get in these tight knit communities so that Steve and Mark can be the liaisons going out and talking to their neighbors, saying, “Hey, we’re doing it and so can you. Did you know there’s this resource out here?”

Luckily, with Mountain View Estates, or unluckily, we didn’t have to do much convincing. They lost their community in the Almeda Fire, so it was a really natural progression from that recovery and rebuilding to making sure we’re not making the same mistakes again.

Thorpe: And I’ll follow up on that. In general, everybody here really believes in that. We experienced the fire before and the loss. And we don’t want that. Even new people who have moved in don’t want that loss. There’d been a little bit of a lag about attention to that until the Southern California fires. And then it caught everyone’s attention once again and people are really trying to endeavor to make sure that we’re as resilient and prepared as possible.

Miller: What percentage of residents who were here before September 8, 2020, have the desire and ability, like you, to rebuild here?

Thorpe: I’d say 25% to 30%.

Miller: That’s it? Wow, so when we hear from Tucker that the community was destroyed, that’s not really an exaggeration. Three out of four people who lived here don’t live here now?

Thorpe: That’s correct and there’s several reasons for that. One, people immediately had to find some kind of housing after the fire. So a lot of people moved away and never came back as a result of finding housing in some other community, perhaps pretty far away, either with relatives or friends.

Miller: They started rebuilding their life and then they just stayed where they started?

Thorpe: Right. Then others were elderly, and their health was not sufficient to be able to move back into a more independent lifestyle like this, in a park like this, so multiple reasons like that.

Cost was probably another factor, because of the insurance question. Before the fire, did everyone here have insurance? No, there’s some people who did not, so it was difficult for them to try to move back after the fire. Some of the government grants and local service grants helped them, but maybe not enough to be able to move back into this particular location. They moved somewhere else.

Some people were underinsured. They had taken out their insurance policies years and years ago and had never increased the value of what their insurance policy was. We’d only been here a couple of years at that point. So our insurance was relatively up to date and that helped us. But still, it cost more to move back in here than what the insurance provided.

Miller: Have you found that it’s easier to get the people who are the fire survivors, who chose to stay here, to get them on board with all this than the people who didn’t experience that, didn’t lose everything and moved in after?

Thorpe: I think it’s equal. I think people are just aware that this was a serious situation. And even if they weren’t here, they know about fires elsewhere. Some of them experienced fires in other places. So both categories of people who are residents here now really pay attention to it.

Teutsch: At that point, we’re done. I ask Steve some funny questions like, “Did you find this helpful and educational?”

Thorpe: Today? Yeah. Oh yeah.

Teutsch: I know you’re overeducated in a lot of ways. You can probably teach me some stuff. And then, “Would you like to recommend an assessment to your neighbor?”

Thorpe: Yes.

Teutsch: Of course you would.

Miller: When you go around, whether in the Rogue Valley or just travel somewhere else in the West now, can you turn off these eyes that are paying attention to fire risk? Or are you always thinking about it?

Thorpe: We went to visit a friend over in Ashland the other day. And across the street, I looked at this house and said to myself, “Oh, they need to do something right there.” So I actually told our friend and then she was gonna tell the neighbor there’s something you might think about.

Miller: You’re always thinking about this now, always paying attention to it?

Thorpe: Yeah.

Teutsch: And we’re starting to build out the volunteer side of our organization and I’m kind of designing it with Steve in mind because he’s an amazing community ambassador for this stuff. So when we have to dedicate organizational resources to go in and convince the community that they should maybe do Firewise or they should welcome a grant program to do fuels mitigation or whatever, what if I just sent Steve?

Because he’s gonna see some of the same things I am. He’s gonna have that lived experience as a fire survivor and he’s also gonna have the lived experience of a Firewise leader. He could probably do a better job than I can trying to get them to take some action. So I find it really inspiring that this is a bit of a pay it forward thing, where we can start doing some services or a small grant. Or maybe we feed people when we invite them to a community meeting to learn more. But from there, it really is on the community to go out and organize themselves.

One thing we’ve learned in these big mega fires is we do not have the fire suppression resources or the first responder resources. We have to have a new understanding, a new normal of no one’s coming to save you. The only way we can scale solutions to the problem that we’re facing is by scaling the community to be empowered, educated and engaged with themselves to come up with plans like this one has.

Miller: Well, Steve, thanks very much.

Thorpe: Thank you. Appreciate you being here.

Miller [narrating]: After assessing Steve’s home, which is down in the valley, we followed Tucker up some windy roads to a property that he owns, that’s completely surrounded by trees and compared to the manufactured home park, it needs a lot more work to be fire ready. I had Tucker describe the location.

Teutsch: Where we are now is right in the middle of the West Bear Project. I steward 99 acres of forest land and about 85% to 87% of it is forest. Then the other 3% is where the people live. So we live in an extreme, high wildfire risk area. We’ve had fires nearby and it’s kind of an overlaying of effort. I have spent the last 10 years working with a lot of partners, agencies and organizations doing more traditional fuels reduction – clearing out of some of the underbrush and understory fuels, the ladder fuels that get up into the trees and cause canopy fires; doing full one-acre clearings and trying to reestablish them as meadows; native plantings; and even a community-led prescribed fire on seven acres with the Rogue Valley Prescribed Burn Association.

So this is sort of your typical Southern Oregon wildland urban interface. Otherwise, what we like to say is the WUI, and there’s a lot of that around here. This is the predominant sort of environment and landscape we face here – really high risk, mostly dense fuels and a lot of communities spread out through all that. Because who doesn’t love to live on a little slice of heaven?

Miller: Tucker’s tenant, Natalie came by. And she has her own wildfire story.

Teutsch: When it comes to home, life safety and evacuation planning, the resident who lives there is responsible. It doesn’t matter if they’re renting or are a homeowner. They got to get in, they got to get out, they gotta have their act together.

Natalie: And I, as a resident, feel a responsibility to keep the immediate area around my house clear, just for our own safety and purposes because we know how fast fires spread.

Miller: Can you tell me your story, how you ended up here?

Natalie: Yes, my family and I are from Paradise, California. We went through the 2018 Camp Fire. We had four properties there, so we lost quite a bit, including all of our personal possessions and stuff like that. After that, we ended up buying a house over in the small, little town of Rogue River, and that’s kind of how we ended up here. Long story short, me and my kids now live here in these woods in this beautiful home that we love. We spent three months looking for something special and we found it.

Miller: When you were looking for a place to live after losing so much, I’m curious what this looked like given what you’d already experienced?

Natalie: Well, it’s kind of a struggle, honestly. The house we bought over in Rogue River was nestled in the woods as well. It’s something that we struggled with. But we’ve always raised our family in nature, and we had a really hard time. We looked at a bunch of different kinds of homes and different properties and our heart just led us to somewhere in the woods each time. So we just decided that, if we were gonna set up where there was a high risk for a wildfire, we would take all the precautions we could.

We had a bunch of trees cut down on our other property and made sure that we had a wide clearance around the home. Then we did some landscaping, just gravel, things like that. We were willing to sacrifice, but we really love being in the woods. We have five kids, and nature and gardens are a big part of our life. So that’s what drew me here as well – the big garden, the beautiful trees and the seclusion.

We have two totes that have all of our important stuff in it at all times and we’re ready to go, basically. We know what we need to keep since we lost everything in the first fire, so we each have a backpack ready and then our totes with our important stuff. So if anything does happen, we have what we need and don’t have to start from complete scratch again.

It’s just the little things. I think the wildfires are just a regular part of life now, the wildfires, so a lot of people have to live this way if they still want to be in an area that they want to live in, other than urban areas or the desert. So it’s just about being prepared.

Miller: Tucker described the work his property needs.

Teutsch: Obviously, I have a pretty big attachment to this place, having been born here and my son was born here. So as I mentioned, it’s really hard to take an older structure that exists in a high-risk environment, or just an older structure, and try to retrofit it to be fire hardened.

Miller: It’s a wooden house. That’s the first thing that stands out after the manufactured home we just looked at, which was covered in vinyl.

Teutsch: It’s a wooden house. It’s got single pane windows. It does have a new roof and parts of it are metal. So I start with the good – just try to make myself feel a bit better about this – the good is that I have a pretty high stem wall here and a pretty clear immediate zone, really no big issues. As much as possible, I’ve tried to use ceramic or what’s called Trex, a composite wood for my steps, my front porch and whatnot. But part of the aesthetic beauty of this place is the old, milled lumber that is quite old at this point, and batten and board siding.

That’s not ideal, but it’s also not impossible. The main things that I should be doing for my siding are to enclose gaps, where embers might spread, land or take roots. For instance, right here on the corner of the house, I have this gap with some cobwebs, some pine needles and stuff like that, right up underneath my siding. That’s an issue. If ember lands there, it’s got a good fuel bed to start to ignite the structure.

Miller: It’s such a small thing. There’s a gap there and there’s tiny bits of leafy debris. And I guess now that you pointed it out, I feel like that’s a nice place to start a small fire, which could get bigger.

Teutsch: We’re back to that question of, I’m a homeowner, I’m a resident. I’m only allowed to move 5 feet outside of my house and I’ve got to build a campfire. What would I use? We’ve got pines, we’ve got cedars, we’ve got this plum tree, all within the range of stuff landing in the gutters. And every year, it gets overflowing with fuel. So I should just take off the gutters entirely.

Natalie: Yes, they are perfect little fuel holders.

Teutsch: Exactly. And then I’ve got an outbuilding here, which is actually a whole separate cabin. If you think about it, say the fire doesn’t come from outside and there’s a cooking stove fire. Then all of a sudden, this outbuilding has endangered two other households. So now you’re working that community aspect of no matter where the fire starts, if it spreads, many people are endangered all at once.

But luckily, I do have a cinder block thing. I need to take this lattice down, nothing ever worked growing there. I do have cinder block foundations similarly over here. I’ve got a crawl space and there are vent screens. But against the crawlspace vents, there’s a lot of forest debris jammed up in there. So one of the first things to do would be to blow those things out and make sure that if embers landed there, they really couldn’t light up the fuels that are there, spread to the siding and get up inside the house.

Miller [narrating]: As we finished up the assessment of Tucker’s home, he explained why it’s important for an assessment to evolve.

Teutsch: We don’t want a static assessment of a home. We want a dynamic one that shows change over time and what the homeowner or the resident invests in. That’s also something we can report to not only grant funders but also … Hey, we have come out here with the U.S. Forest Service grant, provided a no cost home risk assessment to this resident. It costs us $200 in organizational labor and volunteers. But the landowner has just invested $10,000 in mitigation because we gave them a plan to do it. Well, that’s a hell of an ROI.

So we need to be tracking how much the community is investing, post-assessment, to show that doing this kind of educational outreach, this one-on-one relational work, actually results in massive community investments for people who are protecting the largest asset they’ll probably ever own in their lives.

Miller [narrating]: While we were there, we met up with Glenn Hill in his home in Phoenix. He’s lived in the Rogue Valley for decades. I asked him where he was when the Almeda Fire started.

Glenn Hill: We were home, fortunately. We were seeing the smoke. A neighbor across the street had a scanner, and he was giving this kind of report. The neighbors were checking each other, and I started grabbing important things. We never actually had an evacuation order. We loaded up and got out here before we got an order. It was headed our way, and we had about half an hour to load up two cars with the pets and the important things.

One of the crucial things was when a friend of my wife called from Colver Road, halfway between Talent and Phoenix. She said, “Get out, get out, get out!” The fire was moving right toward the road, and everybody was jumping out of their cars and running. But a retardant bomber came over and hit that tongue of fire right then, kept it from going. It followed 10 days of over 100 degrees weather, so everything was very hot and dry, and it was just whipping everything around.

Some other friends got a hold of us from Rogue River and said, “Come, come.” They had just sheltered a family for three weeks from the Paradise fire and they had a half basement apartment that we could [use.] So we made a COVID bubble with them for nine days and immediately ordered a couple more of these air cleaners. We already had three. I think we have five now, plus a couple of other different ones. The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see anything. It was so toxic, just super, super toxic from all the trailers and mobile homes that burned. And some places here in Phoenix ... Our fire station burned down partially. It got up to 3,000 degrees from what I understand.

Miller: When you were sheltering in place with your friends in Rogue River, did you know what had happened to your house?

Hill: No, we didn’t know at that point. We had no idea if it was still here. There was no communication because everything was down. But we did have a couple of neighbors that stayed on the street. And even though they had no power, they camped out basically in their houses. Everybody was told to evacuate, but they stayed. At the end of the street there’s a big field, so I think they felt pretty safe that they could get out.

Since then, we figured out that our little Toyotas could get by the barricade at the end of the street and get across the field to get out. And if it ever happens again, we’re gonna have one of the neighbors with a big truck take out part of the barricade so that everybody can go across that field and get out of here, because traffic was just crazy, really, really quickly.

Miller: So you’ve talked with neighbors about if there’s another wildfire here, how we evacuate. And you have a plan to go off road?

Hill: Yes, there’s a road through the middle of the field that used to be two orchards. And now it’s just two oat fields.

Miller: So what was it like when you did get back to this house? What did you find?

Hill: Well, the weirdest thing is I have a plum tree out there. It’s an Italian plum and it had a ripe crop on it the day the fire hit. All of the plums, the sides facing toward Highway 99 to the east, were bronzed from radiant – not charred but just bronzed. And that was astonishing. Plus, there was all kinds of debris that had blown around. We had a bit of charcoal in the yard and some of the neighbors had big, huge chunks of charcoal that landed in their yards. So I think we came very close to everything just spontaneously going up in flames.

We have a lot of conifers around here and around the houses as well. As it was, our roof faces the wind. Our insurance agents said to get up on the roof and check it. So I’m walking and it’s thumping … thump, thump, thump, thump. So the wind went under the eaves and lifted the plywood sheathing all the way along. So he cut us a check for a brand-new roof and we got a very good roofer. I’m not sure how many thousands of dollars were left over. But that, plus a state subsidy and some money I had, we got a whole solar electric system.

So we have solar panels that make 78% of our power. But we don’t have a battery backup. Now I just got the Pacific Power backup $4,000 credit to buy a solar-type battery backup system. So I’m gonna buy a [product] called EcoFlow. You do a little sub panel and tap off important circuits like the air conditioner, the lighting in this room, in the kitchen, so we’d have communications, we have air cleaners we can run, we have air conditioning. So if the power went out for any more than just a short time, and with high heat especially, click that panel on and the batteries would run for many, many hours. They charge directly off the grid.

I’ll have that in case Pacific Power may start doing rolling blackouts this summer. They did it to Talent last year. They kept cutting the power, which was scary for people because of this type of thing. I mean, I don’t need life support, but I need to have air cleaners running when it’s really smoky and also be able to use a nebulizer and various things like that.

Miller: This is one of the reasons we wanted to talk with you, not just because you’re a longtime resident of Phoenix, but because you have asthma. Can you give us a sense for how serious it is?

Hill: Well, it killed me for five minutes in 1999 from the forest fire smoke. I didn’t know I had it at that point and was having various symptoms. It was apparently triggered by a head-on car wreck in 1990. It’s a weird asthma called Aspirin-Exacerbated asthma, triad asthma, Samter’s Triad or Aspirin-sensitive asthma. I’m deadly allergic to any drug in the aspirin family and this condition, once it turned on, I acquired it. I was taking ibuprofen for the sinusitis caused by the condition. Then we were in really thick fire smoke doing some shopping. I tried to use my pocket inhaler and told my wife, “I can’t get it in, and I need my EpiPen.” She said, “Well, that’s at home.” So fortunately, she got me to the ER and that was the last thing I was able to say for two days.

We pulled up to the ER and nobody was right there, so I opened the car door and walked in. My wife just said, “asthma” and they came running since I was whiter than the whitest sheet apparently. Couldn’t really do anything but get up and walk in. They checked my blood oxygen level, and it was 0.05, which is absolutely impossible that I was able to walk in with that. And about 15-20 minutes later, after they had shot me full of ephedrine and multiple everythings, I coded. I was gone for five minutes and then on full intubated life support for 16 hours.

Miller: And that was about 20 years ago?

Hill: Yeah, it was September 21, 1999, when I coded.

Miller: What has it been like since then to live in a place where wildfire smoke is increasingly a part of your life?

Hill: We’ve looked at where we could move where it might be better … maybe the coast or the Willamette Valley, but everywhere has smoke. I even thought about moving to Canada. We qualify to get a landed entry there back in 2017. I set it up, but [my] wife didn’t want to leave her friends. Then they started having incredible wildfires in British Columbia, so there’s no escape from it.

I got diagnosed with the condition in 2003 and got on treatment. It’s under control, but it still makes me very, very sensitive to the smoke. Prior to that, I was on massive steroids, prednisone, just to keep alive. This condition is usually misdiagnosed as just sinusitis, allergies, asthma, environmental. Twice as many women as men have it apparently. We know we have smoke season. Winter, spring, fall, summer, we have smoke. The smoke can start very early prior to getting PurpleAir set up. I have a sensor out back and am still getting that recalibrated, set up. I have to get the Wi-Fi.

Miller: These are little sensors that you can buy and then you’re one of the people, one of the little nodes, that tells people locally what their air quality is, if they look on the website?

Hill: Yes, they work exactly the same way as the very expensive government ones that are very big in installations. They have a laser that actually measures 2.5 mg per whatever amount of time, per second. And they’re all over the world. The company that makes them says you can look at a map of the world and just go to PurpleAir, click on the map, put in your zip code or just zoom in, and you can see what the air quality is.

And anything up to 50 is actually really good. It’s the same exact readings as you get from AirNow or any of the official air quality sites. Weather Underground actually uses the PurpleAir ones as well. So you can see the official sensors and the smaller ones. And the thing with these guys is they’re Wi-Fi, internet, satellite connected. So they’re recording, responding very quickly. You can see as the smoke moves in and out, which it does here in the Rogue Valley. You can see where the east side might be over 100, or even 200 or 300, and down here it might be 65 or 75. You can see the chart that they use. And for me, I try to stay where it’s under 50.

Miller: And then what happens if it gets high? I mean what happens if there’s smoke in the area that’s bad? What do you do?

Hill: If we have power, we run the air cleaners in the house and watch … I have an internal sensor here. It’s battery powered. It charges up and will run for six hours. You can actually take this with you. So we’ve taken this with us in the car. We can check the air quality in the car with recirculating air conditioning and see what’s going on.

Miller: How many air filters do you have in the house right now?

Hill: I think we have six true HEPA filters.

Miller: All running, all the time?

Hill: Not all the time. Like right now, the air is very clear, but if it’s really, really bad and we’re getting cabin fever, we’ll load up and go somewhere, take a break. We’ve gone down to Clear Lake and stayed down there when it was really bad up here. It can be bad all up and down I-5. We’ve gone to Roseburg and it’s been nice there; gone to the coast and it can be smoky right up to the edge of the fog.

I have a pocket rescue inhaler. I have a nebulizer, which is levalbuterol combined with saline.

I also have little packets I can put in there that are a longer lasting steroid based. So I have a steroid inhaler. Every day I use a steroid powder inhaler in the morning. [I] spray in my nose, both sides, twice a day. I do the lung inhaler once a day. If I notice I have a peak flow I can check. If the peak flow is up in the green, you’re good and if it drops down in the red, you know you’re in trouble.

Miller: What does the phrase “living with fire” mean to you?

Hill: Well, this is definitely fire country. We know the Native people would burn off the oak groves and a lot of the area. Plus, there were natural lightning fires all the time. But one thing we’re having now is definitely a longer growing season. It’s getting hotter and drier, and there’s die off in some of the forest. So basically, our entire country is fire country now. Even though some people don’t want us to say “climate change” or “global warming,” denial doesn’t get you anywhere because it’s happening.

I planted types of grapes here in 1990 that never ripened and now they ripen every year, no problem. That’s our fact of life now. We’re in permanent fire season, pretty much. We’ve had lots of rain and snow this year, so we’re in good shape. But it could have been a dry year and some other places in Oregon, I think Portland, have been very dry.

I could see that a fire like we had here could start on the east edge of Portland. With the winds coming through the Gorge like they can, a firestorm could sweep into urban Portland which would totally shock and surprise people. [The Almeda Fire] totally caught the entire Valley off guard. I mean, the only reason it did not burn Medford down was the wind dropped and blew back on itself.

Miller: It was just nature luck, as opposed to anything humans did that prevented Medford from burning?

Hill: I mean, they were doing everything they could, but Talent lost all water, the water tank drained. In Phoenix, we lost all water and water pipes were melted under the streets in places. It started into the edge of the Medford-Phoenix interface. I always wondered how they stopped it and the firefighters said, “We didn’t stop it, the wind stopped it.” It would have gone right along the creek and would have hopscotched all into Medford. It’s a miracle it didn’t sweep up in the hills.

Somebody who stayed at the base of First Street, has a historic house. He stayed all night and protected his house. He said there were balls of fire rolling down the streets, and one of them bounced off his coat and scorched it. He was using what he could to protect the house. Then another place over by our fire station melted enamel off a cast iron sink. The guy who lived there said he looked up what temperature that takes and said it was 2,000-3,000 degrees. That’s incredible for an urban firestorm to be that hot.

Miller: Glenn Hill, thanks very much.

Hill: You’re very welcome.

Miller [narrating]: That was Glenn Hill, who lives in Phoenix, not far from Ashland.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.