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TALENT, Oregon: Tracy Koa, a high school teacher in Oregon, was in her classroom last Tuesday getting ready for the first day of school – that she would be online due to COVID-19 – when her 13-year-old daughter called in alarm: A fire was brewing and they had to evacuate now.
Koa ran home. From the driveway to her home in Talent, Oregon, she watched the cloud of smoke from the nearby wildfire turn black to gray, a sign she knew meant houses were on fire. Within minutes, Koa, his partner David Tanksley and their daughter Seneca packed their car with camping gear and their cat and joined a line of crawling traffic to evacuate.
They never saw their house standing again.
It was one of hundreds in Jackson County, Oregon, which has a population of about 220,000, that was reduced to rubble this week by the Alameda fire. At least 10 people have died in Oregon, and the death toll is expected to rise as conflagrations spread across the western United States.
READ: Search teams scour the charred Oregon landscape, residents return to rubble as wildfires burn
READ: Smog blankets the west coast of the US as deadly wildfires rage
Koa and Tanksley returned to Talent on Saturday in awe.
“We knew he was gone,” Koa said in a telephone interview Sunday. “But then you stop, and the devastation of every home, you think of every family and every situation and every burned-out car, and there are just no words for that.”
Tracy Koa reacts with gratitude when partner David Tanksley finds a Buddha statue belonging to his daughter after their home was destroyed by the Almeda Fire in Talent, Oregon, USA, September 12, 2020. REUTERS / Adrees Latif
Thick smoke hung in the air over the blackened trees and the ground was strewn with pieces of roof tiles and house foundations. In the pile of rubble that was once her home, Tanksley excavated a small, surprisingly intact Buddha statue that had belonged to Koa’s daughter since she was a baby. Koa clasped his hands in thanks.
Some items had weathered, albeit charred; the metal planter in the living room, the neighbors’ red Adirondack chairs, a pile of blackened coins that had survived a glass jar. Other precious possessions appeared to have evaporated, such as the glass milk jug that belonged to Koa’s grandparents, where she had placed roses the other day, and the photos of her mother, who died of bone cancer in June.
Tracy Koa and her partner David Tanksley examine the remains of their home destroyed by the Almeda Fire in Talent, Oregon, USA, on September 12, 2020. REUTERS / Adrees Latif
For Koa’s family, like many others, the year had already been hell due to the COVID-19 pandemic before hell came.
Koa and Tanksley had recently decided to give up their Talent home lease because Tanksley, a consultant, lost his job due to the implosion of the economy and they could no longer afford it. They had been planning to move into a new mobile home in Medford Estates, a few miles north, this weekend.
“We felt we were finally going to be okay with all of this,” Koa said.
But the fire also destroyed his home in Medford Estates. Many of her future neighbors at the mobile home park were elderly and did not have cars, which made Koa fear they had not left.
“There was absolutely no warning,” he said.
On Sunday, Koa and Tanksley planned to buy a trailer and then come up with a plan. Koa said she was eager to find ways to support her students, many of whom she hoped had lost their homes and school laptops, thus complicating an already challenging start to the school year.
“We are going to be fine. We are together, we are happy, we have the support of family and friends,” Koa said. “Now let’s locate ourselves so we can start helping other people.”
