Vulnerable communities still recovering after Oregon wildfire

Almost a month after the Almeda Fire, Jocksana Corona stood atop the ashes of her home of 17 years in Talent, Oregon, a small shovel and tray in hand. She had just returned from the renter's office, having picked up a proof of loss document confirming that her family's home had been destroyed by the fire. She donned gloves to help her husband, Carlos, sift through what remained.

Corona moved across the space of ash that once was her bedroom. As she did, she recalled the location where her jewelry box, a treasure trove of memories, once sat. Carlos took her hand before she could begin sifting through the ashes and pulled her back, asking to talk for a minute.

After 17 years of marriage and a month away from their next anniversary, they had been through a lot together. They had evacuated not once, but twice from the Almeda Fire after it had followed them to Medford. It had been close enough for them to see the flames by the time they noticed it creeping up on them.

Carlos sank to one knee, taking her hand and slipping on her wedding band, which she had thought had been lost to the fire. It was the one thing she was hoping to salvage. 

"It was black, but it was my ring," Corona told AccuWeather, fighting tears.

The Corona family is one of the thousands still displaced by the many wildfires that ravaged parts of the western United States this season. Corona's home in Talent, Oregon, about a four-hour drive south of Portland, had been among the destroyed and one of the last of her neighborhood to burn from the Almeda Fire. The homes across the street were left unscathed by the flames.

Next to nothing seemed salvageable.

"That was probably the most interesting part to see that really, everything was ashes," Corona said. "I felt like there was going to be maybe remnants of our kitchen table, the stove," she continued. "Like everything was pulverized."

The Almeda Fire was first reported on Sept. 8 in the city of Ashland, Oregon, running through a strip of Jackson County, Oregon. While it only grew to a little more than 3,000 acres, the damage it caused was concentrated along Interstate 5 in the Rogue River Valley, as the fire moved from Ashland to Talent to Phoenix and reaching the outskirts of Medford.

The fire was 100% contained by Sept. 15, but the damage was already done. At least 2,357 residential structures were destroyed in the Almeda Drive Fire, and another 57 were damaged, according to the Jackson County Sheriff's Office. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, however, it is being investigated as arson. At least three people died in the fire.

"It's become a bidding war"

A blanket fort occupies one of the corners of the Medford Girl Scout Center, the sheltering sheet anchored by suitcases on one side, the opposing corners tucked into any available nook or cranny.

Shortly after the evacuation, the center took in the Corona family along with Carlos' mother and sister, who had also lost a home in the fire. Corona had volunteered with the organization before, and Abigail was a girl scout. They have the space to themselves, though overall space at the facility has been limited due to the pandemic.

"I've been here so many times," Corona told AccuWeather. "I never thought I'd be living here."

Originally, Corona thought two weeks would be enough to find a new place to move into. Nearly three months and counting after the fire, she and her family are among the many still looking for a home.

"I never thought that we would be here this long," Corona said. "I honestly thought that we could just find an apartment or house to rent, but it's just so expensive and many of the places that were available were snatched up right away."

Their difficulties are spurred on by a tightening real estate market. In recent years, median rent has increased more than 14% statewide and wages have not kept the pace, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The Corona family is on their third attempt at buying a house in nearly as many months. In their most recent offer, a poor inspection report stopped them short. The first time, their offer had been higher than the asking price, an attempt to beat out the other offers in a market flooded with people searching for a home after the fire. Due to the high gap between the asking price and offer, however, the bank refused the appraisal, Corona said. 

"It's become a bidding war," Corona said, describing what she felt the real estate market had become as the fire's fallout hit the market. The fire destroyed much of the affordable housing in the area, which had already become strained over the years.

Jason Enzy, the executive director of the Housing Authority of Jackson County, told Oregon Live that occupancy rates have exceeded 98% for the last decade. There's a two-year waitlist for the agency's newly constructed 50- to 60-unit apartment buildings.

“We already knew there was a housing shortage, particularly for the workforce families,” Enzy said after the fire. “Now we’re looking at a loss of 2,700 housing units in one fell swoop.”

Chuck Carpenter, the executive director of Manufactured Housing Communities of Oregon, an advocacy group for mobile home park owners, told the news outlet that many residents were originally able to get their homes for as little as $5,000. Rentals would range from $350 to $650, making them affordable for low-income residents and seniors on a fixed income. 

Today, he said, a new single-wide trailer might cost $25,000. A double-wide would cost closer to $40,000 to $50,000.

"It's like this fire went after the poorest and most vulnerable people in our community," Phoenix City Counselor Sarah Westover told The Los Angeles Times.

For some families, these hiked-up prices have barred them entirely from rebuilding in the community. As a Dreamer, Corona's legal status is considered unstable by banks, she told AccuWeather. As a result, they're considered a one-income household based on her husband's income despite the fact that she has a working permit and a job. In turn, this affects how much they can apply for a loan to invest into a new home.

A hit to vulnerable communities

The fire's path took it through large tracts of mobile home parks like Talent Mobile Estates -- where Corona's family lived -- and apartment buildings of a large community of immigrants building new lives for themselves and their families.

About 14% of Jackson County, which includes Ashland, Phoenix and Talent, is Hispanic, according to census figures, and about 50% of the students in the Phoenix-Talent school district are Latino. At Orchard Hills Elementary, one of the schools in the district, 80% of the students lost their homes. Megan Ridgeway, the school librarian who was coordinating a Home Depot donation center following the fires, told The Los Angeles Times.

Ridgeway added that teachers created the donation center to help families, including undocumented immigrants who were afraid to seek help at the local expo shelter staffed by National Guard soldiers.

While there are a handful of different places to donate to help with relief, Corona highlighted the Phoenix-Talent School District Families Fire Relief Fund as it's aimed at helping students and their families.

Corona added that families with what she called "mixed-status households," or households where at least one family member wasn't a native U.S. resident, had been wary about applying to FEMA for help.

"Too many people were afraid to apply for fear of deportation, legal status and all of that," Corona said, adding that her concerns over official numbers not matching how many people were affected.

Behind the scenes, the coronavirus pandemic contributed to tightening wallets as jobs were cut and families literally had to choose between paying for groceries and continuing with things like homeowners' insurance. To complicate the matter further, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for the stimulus check that was approved earlier during the coronavirus pandemic -- and so were their spouses, even if they were U.S. citizens.

A Hispanic or Latinx person is nearly twice as likely to contract COVID-19 compared to a white, non-Hispanic person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They are also more than four times as likely to be hospitalized from the virus -- higher than any other race or ethnicity.

Corona's household wasn't spared the impacts of the virus. Due a shift to online learning, she had gone from working 20 hours a week at her on-campus job at South Oregon University to just six. Her husband was able to continue working, but some of her neighbors at Talent Mobile Estates didn’t shared the same luck. 

“I spoke with two of my neighbors who also lost their house, and they told me that they had just stopped paying homeowners insurance because they had less working hours and they had to choose between feeding their kids and paying homeowner’s insurance,” Corona said. September was the first month the neighbors had been without homeowner’s insurance, she added.

Out of the 100 mobile homes at Talent Mobile Estates, only 10 came out of the fire untouched, Corona told AccuWeather, and there had been little time and little warning to evacuate from the wind-driven blaze.

"There was no warning."

The morning of the day they evacuated, Corona had woken up to a tree branch falling on her family's mobile home’s red roof. She had found it resting on the awning Carlos had put up while creating a comfortable outdoor space for the family to spend time outside during the pandemic, whether it was barbecuing or completing schoolwork. The awning was now a hammock, she joked.

Later that day, Corona received an emergency alert text from Southern Oregon University, the college she graduated from in June. She had forgotten to unsubscribe from the alerts. The text relayed the message of a fire in Ashland, the neighboring city, and to take precautions. Within two minutes, she said, a new alert came through with evacuation orders for parts of Ashland.

Talent Mobile Estates sits on the south side of Talent near the border of Ashland. Still, the distance didn’t ease Corona’s worry. She stepped outside, the fire department’s sirens blaring already drawing neighbors to step out on their porches to investigate what was happening. A column of smoke in the distance served as the telltale sign of a fire.

At first, Carlos thought Corona had been exaggerating about the fire. He couldn’t see much of the smoke in Medford. The traffic he hit on his way home to pick up his family, however, brought a different reality. Smoke thickened the sky closer to home.

Corona and her daughter Abigail moved from door to door, warning their neighbors who hadn’t gotten any alert about the fire. Some only spoke Spanish, adding a language barrier to any alerts that might have come through, which Corona said would have probably been in English. Some neighbors joined in evacuating while others chose to wait and see if the fire department could hold the line.

"I just had a bad feeling, especially with the wind," Corona told AccuWeather over a Zoom call. "The wind was still strong, and I told them, 'No, this wind is going to screw us over. It’s going to bring this fire toward us.'"

By noon on Sept. 8, the Corona family left their white mobile home with its red trim and roof. They left Carlos’ grill, Abigail’s garden, and in the rush, Corona left her wedding ring. Their 15-year-old son, Nathan, inadvertently left his new Chromebook from school. While they had corralled their dogs into the car, they had managed to catch only four of their eight cats, which spent their time roaming both in and outdoors. Abigail filled up the plastic kiddie pool in the back, hoping that if the fire got close, the missing cats could jump in the water.  

They retreated to a family member's home, where they waited for any news on their home, joining the rest of the county in the uncertainty of what would come next.

What the Almeda Fire revealed

It was uncertainty that drove Bow DeBey, 44, to return to Talent just before midnight on Sept. 8. He and his family had evacuated earlier in the day, but he couldn't sleep and needed to know if his home was okay.

He drove back to Talent, and while his home came out of the fire unscathed, he started biking around the fire and streaming over Facebook live to document what was happening.

"I started thinking about, like, all of the people back at home who couldn't sleep and who needed to know if their homes were OK," DeBey told AccuWeather in a Zoom interview.

There were some houses he had to keep riding past, uneasy about stopping near them. Every minute or so there would be the sound of an exploding tire or the shattering of glass, he recalled. There was the smell of burning tires and houses and trees that DeBey couldn't find a way to describe.

DeBey stayed in town until 4 a.m., documenting the fire as he rode his bike around the burning town and answering questions from people wondering about their homes.

"I used to be an automotive [worker], and so I used to have to give people bad news about their cars: 'You need a clutch or your transmission is junk,' or something like that," DeBey said. "But to tell people that their homes and their possessions and all that stuff have burned up, that's a really ... it was tough. I remember that quite clearly."

Nearly three months after the fire, clean up continues.

On Dec. 2, DeBey biked through downtown Talent. A "for lease" sign hung from a scorched building next to an empty lot where a small bookstore used to stand. While some of the lots have been cleaned up, debris still remains, including a few burned cars.

In hindsight, DeBey says that the fire highlighted problems with both infrastructure -- the firefighters ran out of water in some instances -- and with communication about what was happening around the fire.

"The only reason my video happened was because there was no good information coming out," DeBey said, adding that local officials needed a better system for informing the public on what was happening.

DeBey mentioned that there could also be improvements in spreading the word of a fire. He had learned about the fire through a message from his girlfriend, and one of his roommates mentioned to him that police had been through Talent with loudspeakers telling people to evacuate. His girlfriend had received a text alert, like Corona.

"For whatever reason, Talent didn't have that," DeBey said, speaking of the text alerts.

After his Facebook live videos were picked up by the public, he used the publicity to start a GoFundMe page and was able to raise up to about $10,500, including cash donations. DeBey has already written 15 checks to Almeda Fire victims who reached out to him, making an effort to meet with them all.

A few people he spoke with mentioned they only had minutes to get out before flames were at their heels or realized they needed to leave when the home next to them was on fire.

"I talked to several people who said they had, like, less than five minutes," DeBey said. "I don't know how much time my roommate had when you know he was here that day, but he said, you know, embers are coming out of the sky. Like, there's hot embers landing in the yard and then [police] came through with a loudspeaker on."

"When you look out your window to see what's going on and that's the only way to know that, maybe we have a problem," DeBey said.

Local help

In the three months following the Almeda Fire, others alongside DeBey have played a hand in contributing to recovery efforts. But one family in Jackson County turned their holiday tradition into what has become almost a relief effort.

For as long as she can remember, Katelyn Robertson, 15, and her family have had the tradition of "adopting" families who need a little help around Christmastime. Every Christmas Eve, they would leave presents on the family's porch, ring the doorbell and then run. The tradition inspired Robertson and her brother to help others after the fire.

Although their family business, Rogue Valley Electric, had been impacted by the fire and the camping trailer in Talent had been damaged, they saw the incredible loss that others had faced. Their own home was a safe distance from the blaze.

The two created the Almeda Fire Adopt A Family Facebook page, a local middleman effort to deliver requested supplies to the fire victim families from clothes to sports gear to pots and pans.

"It's just been kind of been a tradition, and so we just kind of thought, well, how can we incorporate that into a way to help fire victims, and this is what we came up with," Robertson told AccuWeather over a Zoom interview.

Originally, the requests coming in had been for clothes, including coats and boots as the weather grew colder. But as it has grown closer to the holidays and families are transitioning back into housing, Robertson said there have been requests mostly for pots and pans alongside the Christmas lists of kids affected by the fire.

Even though it's been nearly three months since the fire, Robertson says the number of people donating hasn't dwindled but has actually increased with the holiday season. After posting the wishlists of 37 families one night, all of them had been picked up by donors by the next morning.

"That just shows how crazy it is and people want to help, [it's] truly a blessing," Robertson said.

While the holidays may look a bit different for some families after the fire, the emphasis on the season of giving and hope have remained. As for the Corona family, they're holding out hope that their offer for the house goes through, which would allow them to move in on Dec. 18.

Tucked away in a storage unit in Phoenix, Oregon, untouched by the fire sits a box with the Corona family's Christmas ornaments. Among them are ornaments made by their kids from kindergarten through elementary school.

Corona has held off on decorating their living space in the shelter for the most part, including the tree that only holds a few lights. She's waiting to decorate it with her family should they secure the house, holding out hope on being home for the holiday.

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