Evacuees Return Home-- or to Where Homes Were

More than a week after they were evacuated under the umber haze of the largest forest fire in Arizona history, residents in this and several neighboring communities were allowed back to their homes Saturday.

Most returned to find things almost exactly as they had left them when they fled: a paper on the front porch, the garage door open and the lawn half-mowed.

Others returned to find that almost everything had changed.

“Well, here’s part of Jean’s recliner,” said Floyd Stapley, 71, as he pointed into the smoldering maw that was his and wife Jean’s two-story log home in Pinedale. “That there, that’s the soundboard for our piano.”

The couple had gotten out with some photos, clothes, a camping trailer and Jean Stapley’s wedding dress, last worn 53 years ago. The couple lost pretty much everything else, from the custom leather coat he bought when they were Mormon missionaries in Belize to the carved hardwood figures she had acquired when they were missionaries in Tonga.

With an optimism forged by time, tribulation and nine now-grown children, the Stapleys--unlike some of their kids--sifted through the ashes without crying Saturday. And when Floyd managed to fire up his 1953 Massey-Ferguson farm tractor, which was charred and twisted with four melted tires, he let out a ringing “Wheehaw!”

While about 25,000 of the 30,000 residents who were evacuated from Show Low and other towns on the east side of the blaze began returning Saturday, thousands of others were kept away, mostly those from the north and west sides of the 437,000-acre Rodeo-Chediski fire, which continued to rage in places.

Residents of Heber-Overgaard, where more than 200 homes have been destroyed, were told they would have to wait at least another day, and probably longer.

More than 4,500 firefighters, several hundred tanker trucks and other vehicles, and nearly two dozen aircraft continued to battle the fire Saturday. The most precarious site now is Forest Lakes, a town 40 miles west of here.

More than 600 homes in Forest Lakes were considered threatened, though firefighters successfully protected the hilltop community for the third night in a row and by Saturday evening had gained considerable confidence in their ever-widening fire lines.

Although just 10% of the fire was contained by Saturday night, officials were hopeful that figure could grow considerably today and Monday. Some fire lines have been dug around the majority of the 200-mile perimeter of the fire and needed only to be expanded.

Relatively calm winds and slightly cooler temperatures, in the mid-80s to mid-90s, aided firefighters Saturday, and U.S. Forest Service officials were talking as much about forest rehabilitation as firefighting.

For the first time since the fire began, though, Saturday was primarily a day of homecoming, whether the homes were still there or not.

Word began leaking out overnight that the numerous police barricades outside the city would come down, and by early morning evacuees began trickling into town, some having to tell uninformed guards that the town was indeed open. By afternoon, cars streamed from evacuee centers in the east into town.

Some vehicles were packed to the rails or windows with belongings. Most, though, returned with just a few changes of clothes and some photo albums, the telltale signs of a hasty exit.

As the lucky settled in to their still-standing homes, the evacuation and ensuing lock-down of the town emerged as a topic of considerable concern.

For more than a week, Show Low and surrounding communities had been under what Navajo County Sheriff Gary Butler, in an interview, agreed was “martial law, if you want to call it that.”

Anyone other than firefighters or law enforcement personnel seen driving around, even if this was their own town, was considered a burglary suspect and taken into custody.

More than 30 people were arrested, Butler said. The sheriff, who drives an unmarked sedan, was himself pulled over twice, he said, chuckling.

Others were arrested for failing to evacuate, some charged with endangering the lives of the officers trying to get them to go. Butler and three deputies took one man into custody as the flames approached.

“He says, ‘I have the right to stay here and die,’ ” Butler said. “I said, ‘Not in my county you don’t.’ ”

Outside Pinedale, two members of the Cheney family hunkered down to ride out the fire after evacuating the rest of the family. The Cheneys own a company that provides water to several municipalities and also helps fire departments tap into water supplies. The patriarch, Jon, 45, and son Ben, 20, stayed and were working hard.

With their home protected on the south side by a meadow of short grass rather than tall pines, the father-son duo were assembling a part that would allow Pinedale tanker trucks to siphon water from a well.

Several hundred elk had gathered in the meadow for protection as the Cheneys--carrying Pinedale Fire Department credentials--toiled away, Ben Cheney said.

Just as flames passed within 30 yards of the house, four sheriff’s deputies appeared through a wall of fire, ordering the two to evacuate. When Jon Cheney declined, they arrested him. His son then agreed to come along.

“The firefighters, we had great cooperation with them,” the younger Cheney said. “The sheriff’s department was out of control. It’s almost like they were a law unto themselves.”

Show Low Police Officer Jason Spear, 25, defended the policy. Married five years, with a 7-month-old baby, he and his wife lost their home last week. Ever since, he has worked 12 to 16 hours a day, taking time only once to see what was left of their home: piles of ashes and a red gas can, still full.

“It wouldn’t have been fair to take time off. I still had a job to do,” Spear said tearfully. “What happened had already happened. I can’t change that. But maybe I can save someone else’s place in the future.”

Like everyone else, the media also have been heavily restricted. Last week, the Forest Service issued a six-page “protocol” that said reporters could travel from the fire base at Show Low High School to their motels and to the Kmart. And that was about it. “You are not immune from prosecution,” the final page warned.

The primary reason for the strict regulations was to ward off looters--an effort everyone seemed to find worthy. A secondary reason, authorities said, was to prevent evacuated families from learning on the 5 o’clock news that their homes had burned down.

The problem was that evacuees, having lived in shelters and tents and other people’s homes for more than a week, wanted only one thing more than to return: news, be it good or bad.

When a local television station last week ran a story reporting widespread looting here, panic swept through the evacuee communities in Eager and Springerville, both about 40 miles east. Law enforcement officials denied the report. But no one really knew.

“That’s been the hardest part, for us and everyone else: not knowing,” said Gary Dinger, 54, who, along with his wife, Carolyn, has been living at Eager High School. “We heard we’d been robbed. Then we heard we hadn’t. We heard our house was OK. Then we heard it wasn’t. We don’t know.”

The Dingers’ neighborhood in nearby Linden still was closed off Saturday.

The Stapleys learned Thursday, via a photograph on a maverick Internet site, that they had lost their home. They didn’t learn until Saturday that they’d also lost several cabins belonging to their extended family.

But, Floyd Stapley said, knowing their home was gone was better than wondering if it was.

If the glitches, hard feelings and most notably, considerable loss, were topics of the day, so was overwhelming joy and relief.

At a home on the south side of Show Low, a car drove slowly toward a yellow-and-white home Saturday afternoon. Fire had burned the ponderosa pines all around, part of a nearby fence and most of an adjacent field.

A man and woman got out of the green car and slowly approached the house. There was not a fire scar on it. They hugged and kissed, and then went inside.