Smoke from the largest wildfire in Washington history heighten the reds and yellows of the sunset in the Methow Valley, July 18.Elaine Thompson / AP
And here she was, driving straight into the belly of it, begging reluctant firefighters to let her get one last visual on her parents’ home in Twisp. She thought she was seeing it for the last time.
What she didn’t know was that the chaos swelling around her, the Carlton Complex fire, would become the largest in Washington history — an inferno that started from a crack of lightning on July 14 and destroyed 340 homes, from the shacks of immigrant farmworkers to the home of a town’s mayor .
Last week, with scattered fires smoldering in Okanogan County — the state’s largest county, a plot of land bigger than Delaware — assessor Scott Thurman estimated that the Carlton blaze alone claimed close to $28 million in assessed value. Several fires still burn in the region.
Damage like this would leave scars anywhere. But Okanogan is one of Washington’s poorest counties. It’s a place with almost no rental units, a place where folks eke out livings in apple orchards, where 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, compared with the state’s 12.9 percent.
Some worry that the fires might have done damage so severe, these places might not come back from it. That whatever the fires didn’t destroy, the aftermath of the disaster might.
“People who lost their homes are not only displaced out of their property, but they’ve really lost their community,” said Beth Stipe, executive director of the Community Foundation of North Central Washington. “They are in many ways scattered to the wind. There’s no place to go in a place that already struggled with affordable rental housing.”
And so government officials and community organizations are left scratching their heads over what to do next, wondering how exactly to make so many broken lives whole again.