THESE TIMES

When wildfire approaches the front door

Kirk Ericson | Jul 13, 20230

Hecidora Temisqueño was washing dishes in the early afternoon of July 4 when she saw a boiling column of smoke out the window. It was rolling toward her home.

“It seemed like just seconds later, firefighters were at the door telling us to leave,” she said through her son, who interpreted for her. “I was scared.”

And it wasn’t much later on that Tuesday afternoon that residents around the county started seeing firefighting aircraft sucking water from area bodies of water, including Oakland Bay and Island Lake.

Temisqueño and her family live at the corner of East McEwan Prairie Road and East Mason Lake Road, not far from where the McEwan Fire got its start. Scorched earth and vegetation can be seen just 100 yards or so from their home down McEwan Road. A stretch of cleared ground snakes along the perimeter of several homes, separating the homes from the seared edge of the fire.

Those homes got lucky.

On the other side of the McEwan Road intersection, Kelly Warner was at home with his wife and a daughter. Around 2 p.m. on the Fourth, “firefighters came to the door and told us we had had to go.”

“My wife started grabbing clothes and my daughter was grabbing food,” Warner said. “Just what we might need for a couple of days.”

They left in two cars loaded with belongings and took shelter at the Super 8 in Shelton, where they met fellow evacuees.

“My wife and I, we have a lot of collectibles,” Warner said. “We’re kind of pack rats that way, but we didn’t take any of them. Mostly I was thinking that the house was insured, but what about the contents?”

He said he left behind his boat and truck, later realizing both were full of gas. He said he imagined what would happen to his property if vessel and vehicle caught fire.

By Saturday, four days after the fire started, the smoke, flames and odor of burned material were mostly gone. About 150 firefighters remained in the area, according to fire officials, mostly along McEwan Road, tending hot spots.

I drove around that Saturday to find sight or smell of the fire, so I’d have a better of idea of where people had been forced to evacuate. It appeared most of the action was down McEwan Road, but it was closed along its full length. I could neither smell nor see any evidence of conflagration.

I checked out neighborhoods to the south, including Oak Park and Hiawatha, hoping to talk to people but the streets and yards were empty. A sign on one property read, “No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again,” which made me wary of knocking on doors.

Gun humor might be the least funny humor.

I stopped at Bayshore Cannabis along state Route 3. After waiting behind a fellow who was looking for a very specific strain of marijuana, the budtender pulled out his phone to show me a video – full of smoke and orange, roiling and angry flames – taken soon after the fire erupted. It was taken at the corner of McEwan and Mason Lake roads, looking south.

I returned to that intersection, parked the car and walked about a quarter of a mile south along the shoulder of the closed road. From that vantage, you could see plenty of fire rigs and firefighters, and the sights and smells of former fire.

On Monday, the fire was 70% contained, according to Norma Brock, public information officer for the Western Washington Type 3 Incident Management Team and Central Fire-EMS. As of Wednesday morning, the fire is 85% contained.

“There are still a ton of resources out there,” she told me Monday. People from Central Mason Fire-EMS, the Department of Natural Resources, and districts from inside and outside the county, contributed to the firefighting effort.

The initial firefighting response was rapid, Brock said.

“A few months ago, crews were told to be ready to go with the gear required for wildfires,” she said. “They were ready.”