Sockeye Fire victims remember 2015 disaster, plan for the future

WILLOW — Amidst the rehashing of the 20 years since the Miller’s Reach Fire this month, a smaller community of people gathered to discuss the wildfire that ravaged Susitna Valley homes just last year.

About 75 Willow-area residents and friends spent Saturday afternoon at the Willow Community Center to talk about the Sockeye Fire that started on June 14 of last year, and its effect on the Valley.

“We’re not gathering today because we’re done and everything’s finished — we’re gathering because we have gotten through the last year,” said Willow Recovery Team chairman Dan Wilcox, who also pastors the Methodist church in Willow.

With a slideshow of photos from the fire playing in the background, event attendees and speakers spent some time just reflecting on the damage done.

“I think this is an opportunity and a responsibility to speak out to those who are still suffering in one way or another,” said Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Randall Kowalke, who represents District 7, which includes Willow.

Kowalke said his own personal loss was the “comfort and security” he’d expected to have at his cabin in the woods, which was threatened during the roughly week-long fire last summer.

“The idea that this fire could strike this close to us brought a new sense of reality,” he said.

Kowalke’s home did not ultimately burn, but at one point during the fire became a refuge for 11 people who had been displaced, some of whom returned to rubble.

“The 55 who lost their homes and others who lost … a lifetime of memories were the ones who paid the real price of the irresponsibility of those who started the fire,” he said.

The case against Anchorage residents Greg Imig and Amy Dewitt — who pleaded not guilty to a total of eight charges related to starting the fire — is still open. A sixth pre-trial conference is scheduled for July 13 at 10:30 a.m. at the Palmer Courthouse, exactly a year after initial charging documents were filed.

Though justice in the traditional, concrete sense of the word may not yet have been served, additional safety measures are now being developed by the Mat-Su Borough to prevent future forest fires from consuming homes.

A new fire station, for example, is already under construction near Nancy Lake, and another station will hopefully begin construction at Four-Mile Road on the Willow side of Hatcher Pass in the coming months, Kowalke said.

Borough Emergency Manager Casey Cook said departments have increased firewise training to educate the public on things like “defensible space,” as well as general mitigation efforts. Cook said he had also sent in a grant request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on Friday for financial assistance to clear those spaces and allow residents to deposit felled trees and wood chips at nearby transfer sites for free, among other things.

Should the grant be approved, Cook said such mitigation could begin as early as this summer. He said residents would be notified of grant-approved opportunities at a community meeting to be announced, with signs detailing any changes posted at transfer sites.

Mat-Su Firefighter Recruitment and Retention Coordinator Lindsey Shelley said she is also doubling her efforts, actively seeking more paid, part-time firefighters for the borough.

“We need people, definitely, especially here in Willow (and) Caswell,” Shelley said.

The Willow Rebuild Project started by Krista Fee last year is also seeking volunteers to help finish building homes for families who lost theirs in the fire, three of which are not yet livable.

Borough Emergency Management Specialist Heather Ridge has taken the reins for the project from Fee, and anyone wanting to volunteer for clean up or rebuild efforts can contact her at heather.ridge@matsugov.us.

‘Neighbors helping neighbors’

In Wilcox’s introduction on Saturday, he credited Willow’s survival in the wake of the fire to “neighbors helping neighbors,” in addition to firefighters’ efforts. Willow residents BJ and Steve Eldred said they could speak to that.

When the fire started, Steve Eldred was in Nebraska and his wife BJ was home alone on Ringler Circle. BJ said she was eating lunch after church when she thought she heard fireworks popping. She went to check on her dog who, like many other animals, is “deathly afraid” of fireworks, then returned to her lunch.

A few minutes later, a woman from down the road knocked on the Eldreds’ door and told BJ there was a fire between their houses. Sure enough, when BJ popped out the back door she saw flames climbing the trees.

BJ made a quick call to her husband and was on the phone with her daughter in Wasilla when she heard another knock at the door.

“The forest service came by and said, ‘you need to evacuate, and you need to evacuate now,’” she remembered.

So she grabbed her purse, loaded the dog and her two cats into the car and drove to the Sockeye Avenue extension on the east side of the Parks Highway, about a mile away. BJ and six or seven other people had been told to wait there by the Division of Forestry until the fire was contained.

“It sounded like they were gonna knock this down and we were gonna go back home,” she said.

But by the time they realized they weren’t going back home, the fire had jumped the highway and necessitated the road’s closure, meaning the evacuees had to go north to seek refuge. Thankfully, BJ’s daughter was able to arrange for her to stay in Talkeetna for a couple days.

Meanwhile, Ken Pray, who lives right next door to the Eldreds, was doing everything he could to fight the fire encroaching on their properties with garden hoses, shovels and rakes. Ashy embers rained down on him for hours, burning holes in his shirt and blistering his skin, he said, but he fought on.

Every morning and every night BJ would call home for an update.

“Ken was her lifeline,” Steve said.

Pray nodded humbly, adding that their firewise preparedness had paid off. The fire went all around their homes, but left almost everything intact. Their properties soon became home base for five or six fire trucks, 22 firemen and two tankers, battling the nearby blazes from there, Pray said.

Though there’s still brush and burnt trees to be cleared away, the Eldreds counted themselves fortunate, grateful to both Pray and the professionals.

“I just can’t imagine how all the firefighters worked such long hours, they had to be totally exhausted and probably scared … but they never hesitated, they just stayed and worked,” Steve said.