By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
TENMILE – With the scent of charred timbers in the air a single firefighter from Yachats hosed down a smoking hotspot Friday inside the iconic Ziggurat House overlooking the ocean just north of Tenmile Creek.
An investigator from the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s office donned a hazmat suit before going inside to try to determine the cause – while homeowner Pamela Staton and her husband, Russell Baldwin, wore masks as they retrieved belongings unscathed by the fire.
More than 60 firefighters from 10 agencies battled the blaze, which started near the roof of the three-story house Thursday afternoon. Crews had the flames doused and contained from spreading into nearby forestland shortly after 11 p.m.
“We’re taking artwork out mostly and photos, one-of-a-kind things,” Staton said Friday. “Every floor was different. The downstairs, which is my bed and breakfast is pristine and clean but the furniture is wet. My meditation area is mostly untouched and Russ’s suits and everything are all intact.”
The house’s basement/garage along with the main floor of the house were untouched by fire while second floor and third floor were all but destroyed.
While neighbors stop by with packing boxes, Baldwin brought out a large frame containing photos of a young woman.
“That makes me smile,” Staton said. “That’s my daughter. She passed away right before I moved in here. And I felt like she guided me here. That picture didn’t get touched.”
“We have a lot to be thankful for,” Baldwin said. “We got away with our lives.”
“I know,” Staton says. “We were trying to fight the fire from the fourth-floor deck and then we saw all the windows just crack and blow out so then we had to run through the smoke and the flames to get down the stairs. And then that kind of disoriented me and I said I don’t need to get anything out, I just need to get out. And then I thought, I’m not going back in there.”
Baldwin, who was barefoot when the fire broke out, burned the bottoms of his feet during the couples’ escape from the house. The couple’s three dogs and flock of chickens were OK.
“All my stuff is gone,” Staton said. “My closet was up on the third floor, all my jewelry, my clothes and my office equipment. I work with a really rare technology and it’s not replaceable. I work with clients through saliva-DNA testing.”
The couple plans to salvage all they can and store it in a neighbor’s garage for the time being. They are not sure what they will do after that. Staton purchased a small RV six month ago so the plan for now is to stay in their yard. But for now, electricity and water have been shut off to the property.
No insurance
As if losing their home and many of their belongings wasn’t bad enough – the couple will have to endure the additional rub of not having insurance. The 6,400-square-foot pyramid house, built in 1985 and featured in architectural magazines, was valued at $2.5 million in 2022, according Lane County property tax records.
“People are going to go ‘Foolish woman, she lives in a big ole’ house, why didn’t she have insurance?’ ” Staton said. “But nope, nothing. All I’m going to get is whatever I can pull out of there today.”
Baldwin, who has been a lawyer in Lincoln County for decades, put his practice on hold recently.
Susan Hanson, a friend who lives in Yachats and owns Dancing Coyote Gallery & Art Studio in Seal Rock, told Staton that the GoFundMe started for the couple Friday morning has already netted $3,000.
“I look like I have money, but I don’t,” Staton said.
“The house was your income,” Hanson said, referring to its use as a bed and breakfast.
“I’ve lost my living and kind of lost my purpose right now,” Staton said.
Hanson is also planning an art auction to raise money for the couple at her gallery at the end of July or the first week of August.
Compounding the cost
Compounding the couple’s uninsured woes is that the property is outside all fire district boundaries, which means the agencies that responded to the fire can and most likely will bill the couple for costs fighting the blaze.
“When you live outside a fire district you don’t contribute to any (fire district) tax base and therefore the fire services that respond to your emergencies are eligible to bill for their services,” said Central Coast Fire Chief Jamie Mason, who served as incident commander at the Ziggurat fire.
It is very likely the agencies that responded will bill for services, except for the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry.
“But as for the independent jurisdictions like Western Lane, Yachats, Seal Rock, Central Coast, Newport, Depoe Bay, all those agencies are eligible to send a bill for the services they provide and the equipment that they provided,” Mason told YachatsNews.
“And those bills can get pretty big pretty quick. I don’t have an estimate of what the cost is going to be yet, but it’s going to be multiple thousands of dollars just for
Central Coast alone because of the amount of equipment and people we had on scene.”
People living outside fire district boundaries usually have higher insurance rates because they know it’s going to cost more to protect the property.
“Homeowners who aren’t in a fire district should be communicating with the (nearest) fire district to see how they can get in the fire district,” Mason says. “People living outside fire districts often think, ‘Well I don’t ever call 9-1-1 so I’m not worried about it.’ But the second you do need to call 9-1-1 it can get really expensive really quick.”
Individual fire districts decide who they include, but single outlying properties as well as entire zones can be annexed into a district, Mason says. Because the Ziggurat House is in Lane County, Staton would likely have had to annex into Western Lane Fire and Rescue had they sought coverage.
Mutual aid agreements, for example, also ensure that a fire in Yachats that Central Coast assists with would not result in a bill to the homeowner.
First agency on the scene
The call for the Ziggurat fire came in at 5:05 p.m. Thursday. First on the scene was Central Coast’s brush rig which came from south of Waldport, followed a minute later by Mason in his command vehicle and then the main engine from Central Coast from downtown Waldport. Yachats’ two firefighters/paramedics were at the hospital in Newport doing a patient transport for South Lincoln Ambulance so didn’t have any personnel at its main station. An engine from its Yachats River station responded with a single volunteer and it was next to arrive.
They began attacking the fire from two different directions as Mason began requesting help from other agencies, first the Forest Service and ODF because eight- to 10-mile-an-hour winds threatened the adjacent forestland on the south side of the property.
“As I started to realize we’re going to need a lot of water because of the size of the house I started ordering more tenders and more engines,” Mason said.
Agencies responded to the fire came from Yachats, Western Lane Fire in Florence, Central Coast Fire & Rescue, Seal Rock, Depoe Bay, Toledo, Siletz and Newport, Pacific West Ambulance, the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry.
When all was said and done, there were nine tenders carrying 18,000 gallons of water. Initially the tenders had to go to Yachats to access a hydrant, but once enough crew were on scene a draft site was established at Mill Creek, a few hundreds yards south of the fire.
“Unfortunately, we just needed to get enough people to set up a draft site because it takes people, it takes time,” Mason says. “And early on we just didn’t have that. The biggest battle I had to fight was just having water to keep the fire from spreading beyond the structure.”
Crews ran out of water early on because they had to wait for the tenders to return from Yachats. But once enough tenders arrived a sustained water supply was established.
“There was a lot of fire on the fourth floor that was requiring a lot of water,” Mason says. “And we were just doing our best to conserve our water to keep the fire contained within the structure and out of the vegetation to make sure it didn’t spread and turn into a big wildland fire.”
Thursday night fight
Staton, who has owned the Ziggurat House for 20 years and operated it as an occasional bed and breakfast, said she had just arrived home when she smelled something.
“I walked in the front door, my husband was on the second floor, and I said ‘I smell something burning’ and he didn’t know,” she said. “And then I looked out the kitchen window and I saw flames on the roof and yelled to my husband ‘The house is on fire!’”
At about the same time, Staton’s neighbor to the north came out to water her plants and heard a crackling. Then she spotted smoke. After calling 9-1-1, Staton, Baldwin and a neighbor began trying to extinguish the flames with garden hoses.
“But they wouldn’t reach that high so we were up on ladders trying to stop it and then the fire department arrived about 25 minutes after we called,” Staton said. “But when they got here, they only had 500 gallons of water so then we had to wait for more trucks.”
During the course of the next several hours at least 10 engines and nine water tenders arrived as firefighters poured streams of water on the roof, but to no avail as the fire worked its way through the house.
Firefighters entered the house with hoses for a time but eventually had to retreat for safety.
“Our biggest challenge is that there is no domestic water supply here, so we’re bringing water in from Yachats on tender trucks,” firefighter/paramedic Joe Schwab of the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District said Thursday evening. “The other big challenges are the big square footage of the house, which has an unusual floor plan, and the wind. It’s a big house so it’s going to take a lot to put it out,” Schwab said.
Staton and Baldwin were brave-faced as the house burned Thursday night and they talked with neighbors and firefighters.
“It’s just stuff,” Baldwin said. “We don’t know what’s next.”
“Maybe a GoFundMe,” Staton added. “We still have our cars so we may stay in those.”
- Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
To see a video of the fire taken by a neighbor, go here
I live on a very fixed income and make it a priority to keep my property insured because you never know what can happen. Boggles the mind that this property was not insured at all, especially with occasional renters there. May others learn from this costly mistake.
Now is not the time to criticize these folks for not having insurance. No one knows what the circumstances are.
Endangering your guests by not having the protection of insurance for them is irresponsible and unprofessional. Obviously the smoke alarms didn’t work either as she said she smelled the smoke. Smoke alarms weren’t mentioned. Thank goodness there were no guests in the B & B. Wasn’t that lucky.
Sometimes there are circumstances beyond our control. They had fallen on hard times financially. They have lost everything …they are loved by the community we are all in shock at their loss. Now its time to help our fellow neighbors. We are grateful for all the donations so far, please help by donating or share on your social media. Thank you. https://gofund.me/68cb09a8
I hope they were able to get everything out of the house that was not destroyed on the bottom floors, and still in “pristine” condition (according to owner, in article) … before they left for their vacation in Maui on Saturday morning.