With danger at their doorstep, Eugene neighbors race against late-night brush fire

Staying up late after the holiday weekend, Sonya Cobb was in her living room Monday, July 6, in her Fox Hollow home when she heard a pop. Unsettled, she went upstairs to wake her husband.

Then came the big boom.

Out on the balcony, they watched a car speed off and saw flames two doors down at a neighbor’s property.

Her husband — who has a “red card” wildland firefighting certification for his work — wasn’t taking any chances. He grabbed a fire extinguisher as the flames climbed uphill toward a tree and the house, while neighbors nearby scrambled for hoses and called the fire department. 

Their young son watched from the doorway.

Cobb called her sister-in-law, Lauren Beane, who lives in another house across from hers in the cul du sac. But Beane had already seen the sapphire glow of a firework from the corner of her eye and was yelling out her window, “Are you f****** kidding me?”

She was trying to calm her dogs down when her phone rang. 

“I don’t know if she actually said it was the house on fire, or if that’s just what my brain heard,” said Beane, who was going into fight-or-flight mode. 

As Beane walked outside, she saw bushes on fire, and it was burning quickly uphill toward a house and a tall tree canopy.

She grabbed a hose, and together with a handful of neighbors, put out the fire.

But her mind was already in motion about what would happen if they couldn’t put it out.

“I was absolutely terrified,” Beane said. “I was thinking we have to make sure, one, these people are out of their house, if their house is on fire. Two, my son’s got to get evacuated, and, three, you know, obviously people have to make sure that 911 is called, because I know what the fire danger is right now.”

‘They definitely outgunned the fire’

The Fox Hollow neighborhood, in Eugene’s southwest hills, faces some of the greatest wildfire risk in the Eugene city limits, as identified in the new Eugene-Springfield Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Conifers and dense brush cover the forested slopes, and houses dot the hillsides. 

It provides a continuous fuel path that can easily carry fire between the natural landscape and built-up areas, especially if gusts are fanning the flames. 

And it was windy Monday night, Beane said. While the fire before her was small, she thought about deadly, fast-moving fires in recent years in other urban areas — like Altadena, California, and Lahaina, Hawaii — which, as she put it, “took out a whole community.” 

“When you have high winds and fire danger, it does not take much for it to spread,” Beane said. 

It’s why she and her neighbors rushed to put the fire out themselves even as Eugene Springfield Fire made its way to the scene. An engine arrived at 11:20 p.m., about 5 minutes after the emergency call came to dispatchers.

“They definitely outgunned the fire,” said Eugene Springfield Fire Chief Mike Caven. “Alert people catching fires when they’re super-small prevent a lot of bad things from happening, and so you know, in this case, is a great example of that.”

Caven added that even when residents do put out a small fire themselves, they should still call it in. That way professionals can check that it won’t reignite — something they saw happen last week off Stafford Road in the River Road area, where smoldering debris caught an arborvitae ablaze and put a house in jeopardy.

If it was a firework that ignited the blaze, that behavior would be not just reckless but also illegal, said Caven, noting that it’s against the law to use fireworks anywhere in the Eugene city limits. Fireworks have caused some of Oregon’s most notorious fires, like the Eagle Creek Fire, which torched nearly 50,000 acres in the Columbia River Gorge in 2017. 

To be fair, no one knows for sure exactly how the Fox Hollow fire started. Neighbors didn’t see the people who lit the apparent firework. But everyone can see what was left behind — a streak of gray ash in the center of the cul-de-sac and burned branches along the sidewalk.

A new fire reality 

Cobb grew up in the cul-de-sac, in the house her brother now lives in with Beane. She hasn’t seen fire like this before this decade.

First, while pregnant with her son during the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that brought thick smoke from the McKenzie River valley into Eugene, she tried to protect herself and her unborn child by putting towels at the bottom of doors. She could still smell it.

Then last year, a fire started on Spencer Butte, which towers above her home. The fire burned slowly, giving crews time to keep it from spreading toward neighborhoods.

This week, it’s at her doorstep. 

“I couldn’t sleep that night,” Cobb said. “I’ve calmed down a little bit, but I mean, yeah, I’ve never really seen a fire before, like, so close to my house.” 

All the neighbors in the cul-de-sac have kids, she said, and that’s what scared her most. Through it, she realized she didn’t have a go-bag for herself or her family.

That’s something she’s starting to put together now — along with getting a longer hose.