At the end of last July, Nancy Suiter’s neighborhood in the Eagle foothills looked like a giant ashtray — 5,000 acres of desert reduced to black ashes by the July 28 Highway 16 wildfire.
Suiter’s home, along with those of three of her neighbors, was demolished by the fast-moving flames.
Several outbuildings at other homes were gone — the occasional piece of blackened wood and metal sticking out of the ground the only proof those buildings were once there.
Drive out to that same neighborhood now and it’s hard to tell there was a devastating fire just a year ago. The hills are covered in yellow sun-cured cheatgrass. Some other grasses and desert plants are still a little green, thanks to the cool and wet spring.
You have to look close to see the legacy of the fire, at the clusters of sagebrush stripped to their skeletons.
The biggest losses are not immediately obvious. While two homes on Homer Road and Skyline Drive have been rebuilt and almost finished, the plots where two others once stood are now just empty fields. We caught up with three of the four owners.
4635 N. SKYLINE DRIVE
A bunch of quail have moved into the tall grasses, grapevines and trees where Nancy Suiter’s home used to be. All that remains is a fully intact in-ground swimming pool and the rock patio entrance.
Suiter figured out it would be too expensive to rebuild on her property, and that does make her a little bit sad.
“Building on the site just didn’t seem viable ... but it will always be home to me,” Suiter said. “I miss the open spaces and the friendliness of my neighbors. I miss those quail and the foxes, owls, hawks and coyotes.
“I guess I feel like I lost my history,” she said. “It’s hard to think about and even harder to define. What I do have in abundance is a loving family and many, many good friends who helped me through that terrible time a year ago and who continue to help me adjust to my new life today.”
3150 W. HOMER ROAD
Johnnie Edmundson, left, started last week rebuilding his home, which he first built himself three decades ago and lost completely in the Highway 16 Fire.
“It’s kind of sad. ... I raised my daughter here,” Edmundson said Wednesday as he watched a construction crew plan to lay the concrete foundation. “That’s life. Fires are part of life. It’s just something you have to adjust to.
“There was a little shock, but everything happens for a reason.”
Edmundson said the most difficult thing for him has been dealing with his insurance company — a concern shared by other victims of the blaze.
The new home will be about the same size as his old home, and pretty much the same — except this one won’t have stairs inside, he said.
2910 W. HOMER ROAD
Jim and Tammy Jackson and their kids are about a week away from moving into their rebuilt home on Homer Road, just east of Johnnie Edmundson’s house.
Their house — along with 14 years of memories, cherished family photos and other heirlooms — was totally wiped out by the Highway 16 Fire.
Jim Jackson said that at first, the family didn’t see any silver lining in what had happened but eventually realized “it taught some really important life lessons about what is important. Stuff can be replaced. Everyone got out OK. Everyone is fine.”
The Jacksons say they were blown away by the support of their fellow parishioners at the Eagle Christian Church in the days and months that followed. “It seems like every member of the church has been there and just really supported us,” Jim Jackson said. “I guess I didn’t know we had that many friends.”
It took a whole year to have the property cleaned up, get a house designed, deal with insurance companies and get the home rebuilt, Jim Jackson said.
“It’s going to be strange — we’ve lived there for 14 years, but everything will be new,” he said. “We have all kinds of mixed feelings about this. The important thing, though, is that everyone is OK.”
LIGHTNING + WIND = HIGHWAY 16 FIRE
The Highway 16 Fire ignited after a lightning storm passed through Eagle just before noon on a Wednesday, sparking a grass fire in the foothills just east of the highway. At first it burned north — away from approximately 50 homes nestled in the foothills north of Homer Road.
That changed when volatile and unpredictable winds pushed the fire both south and east for the rest of the afternoon. Planes dropped retardant, and helicopters dropped water on the fire while firefighters on the ground tried to protect what homes they could. Firefighters and Ada County sheriff’s deputies tried to notify and evacuate as many people as possible.
By the time the fire was contained by 7 p.m. that night, almost 5,000 acres had been consumed. Four homes were gone and several other homeowners lost outbuildings, vehicles, pets and lots of landscaping.
FIREWISE
Eagle fire officials said firewise landscaping — like removing “ladder fuels” such as trees next to homes, having efficient fire breaks like roads or driveways, having green and fire-resistant plants for landscaping, and removing debris next to homes — likely spared several homes from the blaze.
Three of the four homes lost to the fire had outbuildings that may have helped carry flames to those residences.
Both Suiter’s and Edmundson’s homes had traditional cedar shake roofing, which is now banned in new foothills construction in Ada County because it is such a fire hazard.
Both Suiter and Edmundson say shake roofs were the popular style when their homes were built in the 1970s — builders didn’t realize how they could be a liability in the wildland/urban interface.
Edmundson said neighbors told him the fire that destroyed his home had started on the roof.
The Jacksons’ home had asphalt shingles, and the rest of the home was brick, but neither factor kept that house from being demolished.
“It looks like the fire came up from three sides on our house,” Jim Jackson said.
Both Suiter and Edmundson said they are not sure why their homes were wiped out while some neighbors were spared.
Deputy Eagle Fire Chief Dan Rabdau said last year that sometimes it’s just bad luck — that the winds that whipped the fire around the foothills that day could push into one home and burn around another.
Edmundson said he doesn’t think trees near his home carried flames; they were not burned. He is pretty sure it was the wind.
Suiter said she didn’t really know what happened to her home. She tried to do a good job of keeping the landscaping in good shape, and she had a fire wall built along one side of her home.
“I just don’t think anything was going to stand in its way,” Suiter said.
Edmundson is not sure if he will put a metal roof on his new home or some other kind of fire-resistant material. One things he knows — it won’t be a shake roof.
Patrick Orr: 373-6619
