The Labor Day 2020 wildfires ripped the heart out of the Santiam Canyon and left individuals, families, communities, businesses and agencies reeling with how to pick up the pieces.
How bad has it been? Oregon State University worked with Marion County on an assessment of community health that looked at a wide range of impacts using a $47,000 grant from Oregon’s community development block grant program.
The study team, led by Professor Marc Braverman of OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences, analyzed five major health-related topics: environmental health, housing, mental health, food security and nutrition and personal health.
“Even though more than a year has passed since the wildfires, people and organizations that serve the wildfire survivors and the Canyon communities must not underestimate the very significant effects that still persist,” Braverman told Our Town.
The group gathered information by a) interviewing community leaders and experts; b) conducting an online anonymous survey of 80 residents; c) organizing three focus groups; and d) reviewing a summary of health-care utilization. The answers the team received were stark, brutally honest and, at times, heartbreaking.
Water: “And also I’m wondering how much contamination there’s going to be in water. Because where we live, in Niagara, our water source was the creek. And with what’s happened up there I wouldn’t drink the water coming from the creek.”
Physical health: “I think everybody’s lungs took a huge hit, too. I know my lungs are awful. I haven’t felt well since the fire. Our house didn’t burn. But I have air filters in there that I change every other week that are black. And I am breathing that.”
Climate: “Clearly, the microclimate in the canyon is going to be different for the rest of our lives, and adjusting to the expectations of heat, the lack of shade, what it means for the fish – there’s a lot of environmental change.”
Mental health: “I just look around where I’m staying now and I just feel like my whole life has been erased. Because I can’t go back and tell any stories about where this came from, and this belonged to your great-grandmother. So what happened to my life? It’s gone.”
Bureaucracy: “The stress is just horrific. You have to fill out one more application and you have a complete emotional breakdown and you feel like you’re crazy. Because you wouldn’t normally be like that. I’m highly educated and to do this stuff I was losing my cookies. Because it’s just one more and one more and try and pull these together, the stress and then in your marriage and your relationships it takes a hit because you just can’t deal with it.”
Fact: According to the Oregon Office of Rural Health in 2021 the Santiam Canyon area had no mental health providers.
Community impact: “Has anybody really talked about the loss of community? That actually was the hardest. … Well, they’re still our neighbors and they’re still our friends, but they’re not there. And it’s like you’re living in a different location right now and you’re not next door to them anymore.”
Food: “It’s not very plausible to make three or four trips to the grocery store on a weekend… The storage was the problem we had. We struggled with fruit flies too, when we had fruit in the camper. You end up eating much more processed [foods], because there’s just no way to store things very well. And there’s not really a grocery store super close.”
Hunting: “I think that due to the fires, the natural habitat’s gone. Some people relied on game, and that’s all they ate. Well, guess what’s not around anymore? The game… So now people who live way up in the Canyon, who maybe went to town once a year for supplies, are now forced to come in for food and get food that their budget wasn’t set up for.”
Housing: The challenge has remained a huge one.
The service integration team at Santiam Memorial Hospital found that just 13 percent of the displaced families it worked with had regained permanent housing.
The online survey showed some improvement, with the percentage of those displaced dropping from 86 percent in temporary housing to 56 percent.
Obtaining, preparing and storage of food have been consistent challenges. The good news with food is that the Canyon’s four food pantries still are operating and the rate of food insecurity is not markedly different in the Canyon than it is in Linn County and Marion County as a whole. The project team speculated that the reduced population in the Canyon helped keep the food situation relatively stable.
Road safety also was a major concern, with logging truck traffic, speed, visibility and a lack of guardrails on Highway 22 cited by those interviewed.
Mental health issues were cited most frequently in the study, Braverman said, noting that such concerns were “consistent across all of our major data collection formats: participant surveys, focus group interviews, and key informant interviews.
Key recommendations of the study team include addressing the shortage of providers, training first-responders and relief agencies and more efficient processes to reduce stress.
Bureaucracy was also a key issue in the housing sector, with the project team calling for the identification of steps to waive permit fees or appraisals and streamlining insurance and reimbursements.
Braverman also emphasized that there are pieces of the puzzle that still need to be better understood. “There are some potential health impacts due to air quality, water quality, soil contaminants and other factors that are not really known because they are very difficult to assess, but which are of concern to residents,” he said.
“Finally, I think it is important to recognize the interconnectedness of the different topics that we investigated, including mental health, housing, environmental health, and food security.”
