Five years on, fire chief who was lauded in the headlines doesn’t feel like a hero

Editor’s note: Five years ago this month, the Holiday Farm Fire ripped through the McKenzie Valley, destroying hundreds of homes and leaving enduring scars — physical, psychological and on the land itself. This is the second in a series of Lookout Eugene-Springfield stories examining the fire and its aftermath.

Five years on, the nightmares have mostly stopped for Christiana Rainbow Plews. The flashbacks haven’t. 

She’ll drive along Highway 126, the same highway she crisscrossed in the hours before she made the decision to evacuate the McKenzie River valley, and she’ll be back to the night the Holiday Farm Fire began.

Flames on either side of the road. Embers floating in the air. A roaring wind pushing sparks to start even more gluttonous fires, consuming trees everywhere she looked. 

In 2020 interviews, Plews — then fire chief of the Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Protection District — recounted how she told her husband, Eric, as she walked out the door that this could be her “worst nightmare.”

Now, without the pressure of being both an inspirational hero and a stressed-out woman helming an unprecedented disaster response, Plews, 55, shared what she actually said to him: “S—’s going to hit the fan.”

It did. What started as a brush fire from downed electrical lines swelled into the largest wildfire in Lane County’s history, thanks to the same rapid wind conditions that sparked fires throughout the state that same night.

As she helped lead the response, including the decisive call to evacuate the entire region from Springfield to Hoodoo, both the home she shared with her husband and her son’s home on their property in Vida were lost to the fire.

Plews became a national hero for a moment, praised for her leadership and sympathized with for her losses. She became the de facto spokesperson for an unfolding disaster and the recipient of $10,000 from the actress Drew Barrymore.

Donations and sympathy streamed in. But they stopped soon after, right as the real work of building the devastated McKenzie River region began.

“I just knew this crazy, adrenaline-fueled honeymoon stage where everybody’s coming together and helping was going to end,” Plews said of those chaotic days. “That there were going to be dark days ahead. There are going to be times when there’s no one supporting anybody. I really wish I had warned people of that.”

How she started fighting fires

Plews has a number of tattoos as keepsakes from different parts of her career as a firefighter: a helicopter, a helmet, the chemical structure of adrenaline, which she calls her “drug of choice.”

But it wasn’t a career that she pursued. Born to a hippie mom and a surfer dad on the Oregon Coast (hence the middle name Rainbow), Plews doesn’t fit the expected mold of a firefighter.

She married Eric shortly after graduating from high school in Coos Bay and living in Portland for a few years. Then, they moved to Brownsville to start a family. The fire department was across the street from their house, and loudly announced itself with the leftover World War II air raid sirens that had become the town’s emergency warning system.

Plews, then a stay-at-home mother to two boys, chatted with another parent in a play group who she knew was a volunteer firefighter at the department. He invited her to training. She was hooked. She joined as a volunteer in the early 1990s, either the second or third woman to ever sign up, and stayed for about a decade, getting her EMT training along the way, before applying for full-time jobs fighting fires.

That brought her to Lane County. She worked as a firefighter for McKenzie Fire and Rescue for six years, before leaving to complete her bachelor’s degree in literature at the University of Oregon in 2005. (A love of Shakespeare, Chaucer and classical Nordic sagas has not been very useful in emergency response, she said.)

After not being accepted into programs to become a physician’s assistant, she took a job as an emergency room technician for PeaceHealth for more than 12 years, first at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, and then briefly at Florence’s Peace Harbor Medical Center, before the chief job at the Upper McKenzie fire district opened in 2018. (It’s a volunteer department, but the chief job is paid at around ¾-time.)

As chief, the days were like any other remote fire department in an outdoor recreation destination: Drownings, backcountry search and rescues, the occasional fire, all with Plews personally responding. Quiet days were common and Plews, a jack of all trades, also did building, yard and truck maintenance. 

But then, on the dry hot windy evening of Sept. 7, 2020, a powerline near the Holiday Farm RV Resort went down. “My whole world turned upside down,” she said.

Making the call to evacuate

In conversation, Plews is funny, and her narration of the harrowing hours as the fire swelled is peppered with laughter and choice language, recounting the high-pressure absurdity of an emergency situation.

Like when, as she got onto the scene, the winds were blowing so hard they slammed shut the door to her truck, locking her out with the keys inside. (She hitched a ride to the station from another responding firefighter to grab a spare key.)

Or, less than two hours after that, when she drove over debris from a rockslide that blew out the front tire of her truck.

Or her mantra during early hours on scene, a constant refrain as muscle memory and training kicked in: “This is so f—ed up. This is so super f—ed up.”

She had experience with big fires. She was on the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Blue Team, part of the cavalry that responded to big wildland blazes throughout Oregon. She had never evacuated anything before, but started placing calls for evacuation orders as she was driving to the initial brush fire.

Within three minutes on scene, she said, she knew the fire wasn’t going to be put out that night. Plews and her crew stood and watched the wind, blowing 85 mph at the fire watch towers, push the fire across the road and up into the mountains.

It kept going, consuming the Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Department, the majority of the town of Blue River, and Plews’ own plot of land in Vida. The incident command post was at Takoda’s Restaurant in Rainbow, a family restaurant east of where the fire had started. Fire crews from Eugene and Springfield and Junction City streamed into help, finding their duties had switched from trying to put the massive fire out to getting people evacuated.

Her evacuation orders kept shifting as the fire grew, and it became clear all of Blue River was under threat. There was doubt, she said, as she expanded the call from Hoodoo to Springfield.

Later, when radio communications went down a little after 1 a.m., other fire chiefs who came in to help were giving her a hard time over her estimate of how far the fire had spread.

“I had fought that my whole career. You know, I’m a girl, I’m a hippie, I’m whatever adjective you want to stick in there.” 

But if the comms were out, she knew the fire must have moved west far enough to take down the radio tower at Mount Hagan. Decades of experience solidified her conviction that night, she said.

“I knew I was doing the right thing,” she said.

Becoming national news 

When Plews woke up the next morning, she expected the state support she had requested to come streaming in. Instead, as the other Labor Day fires broke out throughout the state, resources were split between the blazes. No cavalry arrived.

Instead came the cameras. Plews had the bizarre experience of becoming national news while captaining a response to the extended blaze. She was featured on NBC News, mentioned on the TODAY show, and written about in People magazine. Off-camera, she sobbed and threw up during the worst of it. On camera, she cried with gratitude on Drew Barrymore’s talk show. She ping-ponged between weekends with her displaced husband and son at a hotel, and an RV in a church parking lot near the river.

Despite the fawning national coverage of her work, she said, nothing about any of this felt heroic. She’s proud of making the wider call to evacuate, pointing to the recent wildfire near Goshen, which triggered evacuation orders, as evidence that people are more comfortable evacuating sooner, since the 2020 fires.

But she has regrets from that time. She wishes she had spent more time with her family, whom she was able to only briefly call and warn on the night the fire started. Someone else, she said, could have been perfectly capable of taking the reins for at least a time as the fire burned until late October.

“I could have done some things differently. Like said, ‘Guess what, you’re in charge. For the next six days, I’m going to go be with my family,’” She said. “They needed me, and I needed them, and I didn’t do that. I tried to be everywhere for everyone, and it didn’t work well.”

Five years later

In February 2021, five months after the fire began, Plews took a three-week leave of absence to do some intensive therapy, rest and not listen to the radio. She kept working for years afterward, but she never felt the same.

She retired as chief of the Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Protection District last year. Her medical issues — ongoing back problems, gastrointestinal issues, rheumatoid arthritis and a diabetes diagnosis — mounted after the fire, making it easier to step away so she wouldn’t be a liability on the front line. 

But helping rebuild a community was a draining prospect. She said she wished someone had warned her that things would get bitter, especially as a lengthy rebuilding process revealed gaps in insurance coverage and resources. 

“I wish I could tell chiefs: Get your support now and form those networks and friendships now,” she said. “In six months when your community is at each other’s throats, or in two years, or whenever it happens, because everybody kind of grieves and recovers at different times, putting a community back together after something like that is insane. It’s hard, and it’s no fun.”

Plews said it’s been vital for her to let go of bitterness around the blaze and lingering recovery, something she’s learned in therapy in the years since. But the fire stays with her. 

The burn scar does more than linger across the McKenzie River. It commands the skyline, with burned trees stretching into the air and blackened limbs outlining the steep terrain cradling the river, visible from the plot of land in Vida that Plews and her husband rebuilt their house on. She hates looking at it.

On hot, dry summer days, it’s hard to not anticipate the worst. Smoke from the Flat Fire this summer blocked scenic views of the Three Sisters mountains from Tokatee Golf Club in Rainbow, down the road from Takoda’s, as Plews talked.

Walking away, she pointed out a dead lizard on the pavement, before noting one of the worst parts of the fire was walking through people’s property afterwards, when burned livestock made the whole valley smell of death.

Soon, the fire will stay with Plews in a different way. She’s planning to get another tattoo: the perimeter that the Holiday Farm Fire grew to span and, within it, the home she lost.