Residents return after Upriver fire destroys 12 homes
After a hasty evacuation on Monday and Tuesday, residents are beginning to trickle back from hotel rooms to their homes. A dozen homes were destroyed in the Upriver fire, which spread from a forested area of Beacon Hill into subdivisions near Camp Sekani.
Some homes are unscathed, with only flecks of ash scattered across lawns and speckles of reddish -pink flame retardant spread across the neighborhood to protect it from the fast-moving fire.
On Thursday afternoon, Jordan Walsdorf scrubbed the flame retardant from his car. The retardant is dropped on unburned vegetation to create a chemical firebreak to slow down the spread of flames.
"Everybody said the further south that you go the worse that it gets," he said. "There's some homes that look like they got straight painted red."
Walsdorf, who lives on North Vista Court, evacuated with his wife, twin kids, and their pet dog and cat around 2 p.m. Monday .
Polly Lunt's home on East Columbia Drive is also untouched.
Ultimately, Lunt and Walsdorf are the lucky ones. While the cause of the fire is still unknown, 12 homes burned down in a blaze that burned around 230 acres of land.
"How blessed are we?" Lunt said.
Lunt lives right outside the cul-de-sac where two homes burned down. She personally knew the man who died in the fire.
"We didn't talk to him a lot, but they always walked by, or waved by," Lunt said.
The neighborhood is a close one that's come even closer together since the fire, she said. Lunt has lived in her house for 12 years. She's moving from her home in two weeks into a gated community called Park Place.
Lunt evacuated on Tuesday afternoon and caught a glimpse of the fire, climbing up the gully. Watching it was like looking into a tunnel of flames, Lunt said.
When she left, there was no view. It was all smoke.
"We got out of here, and the traffic was just thick," she said.
When evacuating, Lunt remembers to bring five things.
"People, pets, prescriptions, pictures and paperwork, we call it the five Ps," Lunt said. "That's what we took. We were out of our house within 10 minutes."
On Monday, before they evacuated, Walsdorf's kids were out in the backyard swimming around noon. They left two hours later. A lot of the neighborhood is still evacuated.
"It happened real quick," Wasldorf said.
It was scary, but Walsdorf said all the things he cared about were evacuating with him - his kids, his wife and their pets.
"They handled it like pros, so I'm very proud of them," he said. "We get so many alerts from Beacon every single year, and the divider for the evacuations is always this road right here. So we're usually good to sit and get ready."
This time, it was their turn. It's the first time Walsdorf and his family have had to evacuate their home. They've lived there since 1998.
At first, they used their Ring camera to monitor their home, but when Avista cut the power and internet, all the cameras in the neighborhood shut down. Before the power went out, Walsdorf watched as smoke grew thicker and thicker in his backyard.
The Walsdorfs stayed at his parents' cabin in Priest Lake, about an hour and a half from their home. Shortly after they left, a deputy came to their home to make sure everyone evacuated.
Walsdorf said he got informed through a neighborhood Facebook group.
"By that point all of us were on the outside of the situation looking in," Walsdorf said. "We were getting little insider tips from people who had family members that might have been a part of the fire crew or something like that. Just relying on any little snippet we can get of any kind of information regarding the house."
Their home is still in a Level 2 evacuation zone, Walsdorf said, so the car was still loaded with suitcases Thursday afternoon, just in case.
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