Figure 11.14 Social Network – It takes all of us Gordon Johnson Pixabay License

Throughout these stories of survivors and survival, you have seen a huge cast of characters, from individual people, to local nonprofits, to community organizations, to statewide government and national relief organizations (figure 11.14). But who actually came together, and what did they do?

Our survivors tell uncomon stories. Many of those who worked hardest to remove the debris from their neighbors’ lots on the burned hillside of Echo Mountain had lost everything to the fire, as well. They chose to help their neighbor first, even as smoke still curled from the debris of their own home. As the recovery progressed, community members who had been limited by a lifetime of addictions and history of trauma, suddenly found themselves leading the people around them.

It was more than that, however. For even as the residents of Otis chose to do it themselves, other local groups and businesses were taking action, too. Some of them were century-old institutions, while others formed in the wake of the fire. All of them were fighting for Otis, usually before state and federal organizations could take action. In this section, we’ll look at how a community is being woven together. In some cases, this community is stronger than before. In others, persistent structural inequality and differences in beliefs limit how far recovery can go.

11.4.1 We weave community resilience with government support

Local businesses and nonprofits, governments small and large, some on the ground in minutes, others arriving as others moved on or a new need was discovered. When we made a list, we saw that over 50 governmental, non-profit, community and religious organizations took part in our recovery, in addition to all the people who showed up to help. . Any community ravaged by a disaster has the same kind of list. What’s different about Oregon however, is that when those large government organizations arrived they worked with those local groups to keep things going. They weren’t in Otis to replace those local groups. They were there to help them. All of them attacking the complex problem of recovery, with interdependent solutions using both individual agency and collective action.

In the end, it was this unique combination of individuals and groups, public and private, large and small, profit and non-profit, that came together according to their strengths to protect and serve those who were suffering most from the fire. Their combined efforts are a living example of even a poor community’s remarkable social capital. All of them used the social networks and connections that each one had, creating a group that was far greater than the sum of its parts.

11.4.2 The Volunteer Clean-up

Officials from the county planning department had heard about the local pastor working with equipment on loan from work to start a volunteer clean-up of his neighbors’ properties. They were not happy. Regulations and laws, they said, prevented such activity. Only authorized contractors – the kind that were still months away – were allowed to do such work. The pastor needed to stop.

The pastor said he had no intention of stopping. He knew the law: a property owner has the full legal right to clean-up their own property. More: if he was doing it strictly as a volunteer, he was allowed to help his neighbors, too. So he kept right on going. By the end of the week, it was clear the volunteer clean-up had started to become something more.

When contractors overseen by the Oregon Department of Transportation arrived six months after the fire to continue what the volunteers had started, they worked with the leaders of the group to learn what properties remained to be cleaned and how they could work together to make the process better for everyone. Even some of the county people who were opposed to the effort eventually came to work with them. What may have been most important, however, was the need it filled in the community of Otis. Not for housing – but for healing. The Volunteer Clean-up became a place where those who had lost everything could now do something. Even if they could not start the process of rebuilding their own lives, at least they could help someone else start.

This volunteer cleanup was sustained by COADs, Community Organizations Active In Disaster. These organizations are part of the community impacted by the disaster, focusing on providing and sustaining relief efforts. For example, the Cascade Relief Team (CRT) was first involved in fire response when they moved farm animals away from the flames. Their work expanded quickly. They were able to hire people to coordinate clean up efforts on survivor properties. Within a year, however, they would be operating in three fire-impacted communities beyond Otis. In the summer of 2022, they continued their work in Otis, managing teams that removed burned logs and brush from survivor properties. They are so committed to weaving community in Otis that they moved their headquarters there, even though they respond to disasters nationwide.

11.4.3 A Nation of Donations

In the immediate days and weeks after the fire, donations poured in for the people of Otis. What was of greater magnitude, however, were the material goods people gave. Every kind of household good was given, from appliances to clocks to dish towels. Non-perishable foods of all kinds, from cans of soup to sacks of potatoes. And clothes: every imaginable thing, to fit every imaginable person.

Lincoln County Emergency Services worked with the Lincoln City Outlet mall to donate an empty retail space for a location. The county then connected with New Life Foursquare Church and Lincoln City Young Life to both set up and staff the location. As goods from all over the county and state came in, they were directed to the Lincoln County Fairgrounds in Newport where they were identified, sorted, and sent to the mall as needed. The county, New Life Foursquare Church, and Young Life would maintain both this process and the mall location for the next six weeks.

Other area businesses and nonprofits became the end-point for more specific types of donations. Beach Babies & Children’s Resale let people know that any goods donated for fire survivors, like toys, diapers, and baby food, would be kept separate from their second-hand goods and given to fire survivors with children. Salty Dog Pet Lounge and the Central Coast Humane Society took in donations for pets. Salty Dog also let pets stay with them until their owners could return, while CCHS increased its efforts to feed, trap and fix feral cats in Otis, most of whom had lost any shelter they once had.

At the south end of town, the owners of a vacant space in the process of selling, knew it would take months before the deal closed. They offered it as a storage space for donated furniture. By December, volunteers from the church had set up a furniture donation hotline, one where people made arrangements to have their quality used furniture donated and stored until a fire survivor needed it. The first donation was $20,000 worth of living room and bedroom furniture from a million dollar home on the beach in Roads End. It would not be the last such donation, as every group in town knew the phone number to call when there was furniture to be donated or needed.

Figure 11.15 The Salmon River Grange, the distribution center for survivor supplies and hugs. Now, the Grange is part of the Cascade Relief Team.

The sustained response to coordinating donations and ensuring that they got to survivors became The Salmon River Grange (“The Grange”). Before the fire, this 104 year old building was home to weekly bingo nights. Now, they are known as the survivor mini – Walmart. As soon as it was safe to return to this site, adjacent to the fire, the Grange was the place to go for food, water, clothes, and other household stuff, as shown in the images in figure 11.15. More than that, it was a place that wove community, providing people who would listen and solve problems with survivors.

This massive community response is not unusual in the days and weeks after a disaster. What happened in north Lincoln County was different from many communities, however, in how coordinated these efforts were. This is not to say they all walked lockstep, each adhering to part of a master plan. They did not. Just as in regular times, there were sometimes people leading one effort that didn’t care too much for someone leading another.

What they did do, however, was stay in touch with one another. When a fire survivor needed something one donation site didn’t have, they knew who might. When the donations threatened to overwhelm one location, they knew they could make arrangements to send it to another. Clothing, small appliances, baby food and diapers, furniture, pet food, even human food: it got to the people who needed it quickly, because both survivors and their advocates knew who was usually going to have it.

11.4.4 Communication for Everyone – Echo Mountain Fire Relief

Government working with the churches, nonprofits coordinating with small businesses: this was how the people of Otis got the help they needed starting even before the fires were out. Researchers call this type of interaction between groups of similar size and levels horizontal communication. It sustained the people of Otis in the very first days of fire relief. Just as critical, however, to the continued recovery was vertical communication: those communications which cross up and down between organizational levels and groups of different sizes and authority (Serra et al 2011: page 6)

The organization that became the communication hub was Echo Mountain Fire Relief (EMFR) . EMFR was founded by a local business owner and volunteer firefighter who knew that people would want a local organization to donate to. Over the next year, the organization would move into social services, even signing a contract with the State of Oregon to provide social services in the affected area. However, communication is what EMFR specialized in.

One of our most consequential connections was between The Grange,CRT, and Northwest Oregon Works (NOW). A local nonprofit, NOW had donated thousands of dollars to pay for groceries and other immediate needs for fire survivors. What they could offer now, however, was something far better: access to hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds. Called “Dislocated Worker Grants,” they were allocated by the U.S. Department of Labor. It was NOW’s job to see that these funds got into the hands of Lincoln County residents impacted by disaster.

Very quickly CRT connected up to NOW, who connected up to the Department of Labor, and the funds started to flow. By the end of 2020, CRT hired these Grange volunteers, with NOW either paying employees directly, or reimbursing CRT for their wages. Each person made $20 an hour, more than some of them had ever been paid in their lives. Some of them worked directly for The Grange, while others helped CRT expand its operations. This ensured not only the success of The Grange, but the Volunteer Clean-up, Landscaping with Love, and other north Lincoln County relief efforts.

11.4.5 The Lincoln County Long-Term Recovery Group

EMFR’s commitment to serving the relief effort as a key point in both horizontal and vertical communications was far more than aspirational or even philosophical. Truly, the main reason for our existence was because Lincoln County was going to need a long-term recovery group (LTRG), s a unification of area groups brought together to oversee the recovery of an area after a disaster to ensure seamless communication and coordination of all the parties involved in recovery.

Creating an LTRG would take until the fall of 2021. The Lincoln County LTRG would eventually consist of government partners, non-profits, faith-based organizations, community-rooted organizations, and other volunteers. In the end, that was really all organizations. As the LTRG grew, EMFR could fade away.

11.4.6 Latino Outreach

Formal disaster relief efforts have a long history of leaving out communities of color. Structural inequality, language barriers, unfamiliarity with government processes, and fear of the people working for the government all interfere with people of color getting the help they need. In Otis, the predominant community of color is the Latino community. What that discussion of demographics and data does not include, however, is how one man improved fire recovery for his entire community. Yes, Latino fire recovery in Otis is like all the others: it involves numerous groups, in this case local nonprofits, a few state and national nonprofits, and multiple levels of government agencies.

But in the end it is still one story: Fernando’s. As noted earlier, he took it upon himself to explain the multitudes of informal and formal efforts going on in the county, and how to access the help they provided.

In the beginning, no one, not even Fernando, fully knew the size or scope of how much Latinos in Otis had been impacted from the fire. Census numbers showed that approximately 30 Latino families were likely without homes. But even this scant knowledge was enough to get him started. Indeed, I only watched Fernando in action for a few hours before I called him up and asked him to lead EMFR’s Latino Outreach Program. Better, when I told the Ford Family Foundation what Fernando had been doing, they granted us the money to pay his salary.

In the weeks and months ahead, Fernando would personally contact every Latino fire survivor he could find. What started as a small list of people became numerous families, and dozens more Latino individuals that had been impacted by the fire.

Eventually he assembled a team of people that created events that were culturally relevant to the Latino community. Survivors gathered for dinner on the lawn. They created art which depicted the disaster and their hope for recovery. The Latino Outreach group hosted an afternoon with mental health counselors specially brought in from Portland’s Latino community, one created in cooperation with the state’s Disaster Case Manager program. There were events beyond disaster relief, which taught people how to prepare for the next disaster. Called Listos training, it’s a disaster preparedness program specially tailored to meet the individual needs of Spanish-speaking communities. Done in conjunction with Oregon State University’s Extension Service, every family in attendance got a first-aid backpack, as well as solar powered radio and flashlight.

Their efforts got them attention far beyond Otis – and even more funding – as one of those watching was the Oregon Community Foundation. Another of Oregon’s three largest philanthropic organizations, they reached out to EMFR asking what they could do to support the effort. Hearing more about what Latino Outreach had done in just the last few months, they had no problem giving them nearly $20,000, both to continue their programming, as well as hire another person.

Eventually, Fernando’s advocacy efforts went beyond the Latino community. When the Disaster Case Management process broke down, impacting Latino and White survivors alike, it was Fernando who wrote the first letter to the state. The second letter, too, was from a family he worked with. With another two letters from The Grange and another from CRT, the five of them worked together with leaders to make changes in the program that benefited the entire community.

Their work continues Today. .Sitting in the lobby of Oregon Coast Community College one day waiting for Fernando, I had a chance to talk to one of the department heads. When I went to find someone in the Latino Outreach office, I discovered they were all meeting with a small business client. “You know what’s happening in there?” the department head asked me, thrusting his thumb backwards over his shoulder towards the meeting room. “That’s the culmination of 10 years of me trying to connect with the Latino community finally happening.”

If there is anything that better symbolizes what is possible when everyone comes together after a disaster, I do not know what it is. The Grange, yes, is an amazing story. A century-old institution brought back from the brink of insolvency by volunteers, nonprofits, and government to become the leading service center for fire survivors is incredible. Latino Outreach, however, created something from nothing. They did it against a backdrop of a racially charged political climate, navigating a system that confuses nearly everyone that needs it. And in doing so, they not only helped people survive, they are now helping them thrive.

From time to time I still get to have dinner with Fernando and his family. My favorite evenings are when we sit out on the porch of Fernando’s beautiful new home, the one near the top of a small hill on the side of Echo Mountain. He and his family built it together. The grill smells of carne asada and other delicious food. . Sometimes, some old friends from the Volunteer Clean-up even stop by. The smells from Fernando’s grill carry quite a ways down the hill. Smiling and laughing, I can’t help but think one thing: “I’m really glad I called Fernando.”