Posted by a resident of city of Detroit, Oregon that was burned down:
“Detroit is our Paradise….. These are our friends and neighbors who wrote this:” [
And I strongly believe that I have a reason to be. I’m currently homeless, and though fortunate enough to have loving parents that will take me, my husband, our animals, and our neighbor and her dog in during a crisis…I count myself as lucky.
…but none of this should have happened.
A place to stay for a week or two is a blessing, of course. But watching everything you own burn in real time is devastating.
The offers of aid makes you feel hope, but then looking at your bag of possessions and realizing that you have grabbed four shirts and no pants and 1 pair of underwear and no inhaler for your asthma…you just feel beat down.
Detroit authorities specifically told people not to worry about even a level 1 evac on Monday night. They said there wouldn’t be a worry in the next 48 hours.
And then we lost power. So most of us went to bed at 6-7pm. Because the area is so rural, most of us rely on WiFi for our phones to work since cell reception is so bad. No power = no cell service.
There were no warning texts (even once I got service again). There were no warning evacuation emails or calls. Just waking up at 1:30am to people screaming that we have to leave NOW. Then the effort was abandoned shortly after coming to our street.
We spent a few minutes saving our pets; but had no time to gather documents or valuables. (Which would have been ready if we had been on an even level 1 alert)
And then waking up to that chaos, and looking for guidance from the folks evacuating us (fire marshalls, police etc) and they can’t even tell you an escape route. All they said was that everything was burning. Don’t go west. Don’t go east. Don’t go north or south. Good luck.
Nobody in Detroit had time to think, or pack essentials, or save anything. There was no warning.
We weren’t told whether to go east or west, so we picked the most convenient direction, and drove through fire that melted cars. Some people ran out of gas along the way and died. Some people didn’t wake up to the notice and died. Some people’s tires melted from driving through flames and died.
During my insane drive for my life with a dog and cat in the car, I tried to turn on the radio for info, and even though I normally have 20 fm stations and 50 am ones, the radio was completely static and I couldn’t get anything in.
News reports are downplaying what the 1000 residents of my area went through that night. We honestly all thought we were going to burn to death as we drove over flaming debris and our cars were so hot from the flames that you assumed the gas tank would blow.
It will haunt me for the rest of my life.
It was known that this was going to get bad. It was known that we’d lose power. It was known that people were told not to even consider level 1 evac, even though it was inevitable.
I’m upset that my house is gone. But I’m more upset that we were so completely lied to and didn’t have a chance to save anything. And that’s not the responsibility of our fighting fire crews. It’s 100% our government that failed us.
Nobody should have died that night. Nobody should have been surprised by the evacuation.
The santiam canyon was let down in a horrific way that could have cost us all our lives. It’s incredibly maddening that when you try and search for updates on loss of life and property, you mostly just hear state officials congratulate themselves and say that the situation was “unexpected”.
It wasn’t. They knew. And efforts were made to tell the residents of Detroit that “everything’s fine”.
..it wasn’t. And people died because of it.
That’s the part I just can’t make peace with.
To anyone in Oregon or California right now that’s experiencing smoke or run-off heat from fires: make your own plan and make it now. You absolutely can’t do what we did, expecting the experts to tell you when you are in danger and what to do.
This is just getting worse. Put some of your shit in the car now, and do your own research.”
