How ‘Hillbilly Brigade’ saved one US town from wildfire
MOLALLA RESIDENTS PULL OFF MIRACLE WITH NO HELP FROM FIRE DEPARTMENT
Around 1,200 men and women fought Oregon’s biggest fire in a century to save a mountain hamlet whose 9,000 residents were forced to evacuate
They [Hillbilly Brigade] turned their pickups into fire engines on the fly. They put stock tanks in the beds and used pumps to put out hot spots.”
Mike Penunuri
| Fire marshal, Molalla
Nicole West steered her bulldozer through the smouldering forest, pushing logs into the underbrush and away from the wildfires ripping through Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Her border collie, Oink, rode shotgun as West and a volunteer crew raced to clear a fire line.
Behind West, on the front lines of the 136,000-acre (55,000-hectare) Riverside fire, two young men pulled a water tank behind their pickup truck, struggling to douse the flames.
These are the men and women of the “Hillbilly Brigade” — about 1,200 in all who came together this past week to fight the state’s biggest fire in a century. They are credited with saving the mountain hamlet of Molalla, an hour’s drive south of Portland, after its 9,000 residents were forced to evacuate.
Left on their own
In a year when ferocious wildfires have killed at least 34 people and burnt millions of acres in Oregon, Washington and California, the brigade has pulled off a miracle in the thick forests around Molalla, residents and fire officials say. They organised and deployed themselves with little or no help from a small and overwhelmed local fire department — which focused on protecting the town centre — or from state and federal agencies that were deployed elsewhere.
“We were left on our own to stop this,” said West, a 36-yearold ranch hand.
“There wasn’t anybody coming from the state to save us. So we had to save ourselves.”
‘Amazing effort’
Mike Penunuri, fire marshal for the Molalla fire district, which has just 13 firefighters and 33 volunteers, called the massive effort “amazing.” Penunuri’s crews spent the past week hosing down flames that lapped at the town’s edge and battling back fires around farm houses.
“They [Hillbilly Brigade] improvised and turned their pickups into fire engines on the fly. They put stock tanks in the beds and used pumps to put out hot spots. These are just regular guys from the area. They are not trained,” he said.
In the early morning hours of September 8, it looked like Molalla would be engulfed in flames, just as towns in southern Oregon had been.
The brigade formed quickly, amassing people who knew one another well and knew the terrain. They were lumberjacks and dairy farmers, friends and neighbours, cobbling together rudimentary equipment. The result was a victory — for now — over what had seemed like an overwhelming threat.