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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2022
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APPEAL TRIBUNE
Gift
Continued from Page 1A
205 prior to the wildfires, but it grew to
well over 500 on some summer days.
When the Lionshead Fire swept
through the city in the early morning
hours of Sept. 9, 2020, it wiped out most
of the city indiscriminately. Entire streets
of homes were burned to the ground, in-
cluding Detroit Avenue, where the former
city hall was.
“I was just utterly speechless. Just ut-
terly speechless,” city councilor Eric Page
said. “It just takes your breath away. The
smoke was still so dense two weeks later
when we went to get the boat, that we
could not get a full visual of the devasta-
tion.”
of Duncan and Siegmund.
Figuring out how to use everything that
was donated was difficult at times.
“So we kind of have to figure out how to
work with the county or work with the ju-
risdiction and say, ‘This is a gift. How can
we get this to work?' Because we don’t
have another option,” Duncan said.
“There isn’t somebody to pay the bill.
So it’s been great, again, everybody lean-
ing in and having that understanding that
this is about the spirit of building a build-
ing for the community. It’s not about
building a city hall.”
All of the gifts added up to something
remarkable.
“This is a launching pad for that com-
munity to recover,” said Kyle Freres, VP of
Freres Lumber. “I think the other good sto-
ry here is the base of that building is an
abandoned school and they turned it into
something.”
A community center like Detroit has
never had
Former Detroit school buildings
Workers have been tireless in their goal
of finishing the new community center in
time for the June 4 grand opening.
The project combines the community
center – made up of the old high school
gym and adjacent rehabilitated buildings
on the south side of it – and the civic cen-
ter.
On the civic center is side is where of-
fices for the city and Marion County Sher-
iff’s Office will be. Idanha-Detroit Rural
Fire District has two bays on that side for
fire engines.
The 16,300-square foot structure is es-
timated to have cost $2.5 million. But it’s
not costing anyone a penny. The building
is being donated to the Detroit Lake Foun-
dation, which is selling it to the city for the
$250,000 the foundation paid the land-
owner. The foundation, a non-profit, will
lease the community center side of the
building for $1 a year.
The structure is modern in every way,
but still carries the story of Detroit with it.
The historic signs that will be hung in
the hallways serve as a tribute to the city’s
history, as do the wood signs of athletic
success of the high school that hang from
the walls of the former gym.
In Detroit style, the doors are made of
wood, as are things like the tables and
much of the decorations.
Companies such as Freres Lumber do-
nated wood for the building, and it was
wood processed from wildfire salvaged
logs.
The furniture is being made by Oregon
Corrections Enterprises, including a table
in the conference room.
“This has a story,” Detroit Mayor Jim
Trett said. “Corrections Enterprises got
some timber after the fire, took it out back,
had it milled and they built tables like this
for each of the cities.”
So many companies and individuals
made donations that it’s hard to remem-
ber which ones did what.
Fred Eichler framed the building. New-
man Paving & Curbing paved the parking
lot. Detroit Lake Foundation president
Davis Evenson and his company, David-
son’s Masonry, donated the masonry on
the entry wall. Someone else paid for the
fireplace.
Most of the builders had some connec-
tion to the city, similar to the connections
When the city was moved prior to the
completion of Detroit Dam in the 1950s,
new elementary and middle/high school
buildings were constructed on Patton
Road and Santiam Avenue.
As the city and neighboring Idanha
grew and thrived in conjunction with the
logging industry, the schools thrived
along with them.
Detroit’s football team reached the
state championship game in 1971. Its boys
basketball teams won Casco League
championships in 1978 and 1979 and its
volleyball teams won league champion-
ships in 1984, 1985 and 1986. Those league
championships were memorialized with
intricate wood signs on the walls of the
gym befitting a logging town.
The gym was occasionally used as a
community gathering space for things like
meetings and bazaars.
But with the decline of the logging in-
dustry in the area in the 1990s, the
school’s population shrunk. The district
was combined with the Santiam Canyon
School District. In the late 1990s, the
schools closed and the students bussed to
its Mill City campus.
Detroit Lake Charter School operated
from 2000 until 2003 on the campus until
it had so few students it couldn’t continue.
The city purchased the former elemen-
tary school in 2004 from the Santiam
Canyon School District, according to rec-
ords from the Marion County Tax Asses-
sor’s office.
The former high school was sold to a
property developer.
“That’s a touchy point up here,” Trett
said.
About 25 years ago, a committee
looked at converting the school into a city
hall.
Between problems like asbestos-lined
pipes and an old boiler heater, it wasn’t
practical.
“Yeah, we tried real hard to make that
project work,” Eric Page said. “It was just
too expensive to fix that building.”
Eventually the school building was
torn down. But the gym remained.
The elementary school also was torn
down and became the city park. The for-
mer football field became a street and over
a dozen homes.
Meanwhile, the gym stood unused for
Wildfires
dent commander know what’s happen-
ing around them — all the stuff they
might not be able to see.”
Continued from Page 1A
when we go weeks without an incident
and then all of a sudden there’s five or
six in one day. That’s when the adrena-
line gets pumping.”
The camera-based ForestWatch sys-
tem, which began in 2006, has become
an increasingly common tool for the
Oregon Department of Forestry. With
additional funding from the passage of
Senate Bill 762 in 2021, the camera pro-
gram will be expanded from 74 cameras
at 58 sites now, to 110 cameras at 94 sites
by the end of 2023 — mainly in rural
areas of central, eastern and southern
Oregon.
Ten new sites will be added for the
upcoming fire season.
Those cameras are watched by digi-
tal fire lookouts, like Beavers, at four de-
tection centers in Central Point, Rose-
burg, Redmond and Lakeview. A fifth
center will be built in La Grande.
Last year, the cameras and digital
lookouts spotted 167 fires statewide and
confirmed the location of another 384
fires that came from a different source,
such as a 911 call. And they confirmed
that 95 possible fires were false alarms.
“The efficiency and number of fires
spotted in this system has increased
each year — but it’s more than just iden-
tifying the fire,” said Jamie Paul, who
helps oversee the camera program for
ODF.
The digital lookouts can watch how a
fire evolves in real time and help deter-
mine how many firefighters, helicopters
or engines are required — along with
any possible danger to fire crews.
“Last year we had firefighters on
scene and the camera picked up two
new starts that jumped the line,” Bea-
vers said. “We were able to get that com-
municated so two aircraft could dump
water on it before they could merge or
spread into the original fire.
“We can also tell them where the new
starts were — downslope or upslope of
fire crews — in case it was a safety haz-
ard,” Beavers added. “It helps the inci-
From classic fire lookouts to
digital lookouts
The job of watching the forest for
wildfire has been a classic job in the
American West dating back to the late
1800s. Oregon, at its height, had around
800 to 900 staffed fire lookouts across
the state during the golden age of look-
outs from roughly 1930 to 1950.
Classic lookouts started to decline by
the 1950s with the rise of aerial detec-
tion — which was considered more effi-
cient — and that trend has continued.
There remain around 100 active fire
lookout towers across the state, al-
though that number changes every year,
said Cheryl Hill, author of "Fire Look-
outs of Oregon." Overall, she said, there
are roughly 155 standing lookouts re-
maining, including some that campers
can rent overnight.
Increasingly, remote cameras are do-
ing the work of spotting the fires.
“It is harder to recruit people to work
in classic fire lookouts, although that’s
not the only reason we’re expanding the
camera system,” Paul said. “The cam-
eras provide 24-7 eyes in the sky and
they can pinpoint fires faster. People
from the detection centers can spot it,
make a call and have resources going
out to suppress that fire really quickly.
That’s what we’re all about — keeping
the fires as small as possible.”
(ODF protects state, county and pri-
vate land from wildfire — which often
means areas closer to towns and homes,
unlike fire on federal land which is
sometimes allowed more latitude to
burn for forest health.)
At first, the cameras were mostly
placed on decommissioned fire look-
outs or communications towers, which
typically cost around $60,000 to set up.
But they’ve started creating new and
more complex sites that can require us-
ing a helicopter to bring in equipment
and generally cost $150,000.
“We put them where the viewshed is
as wide as possible and where fire dan-
a decade.
“That building was built for the test of
time,” Duncan said. “And there was a rea-
son it was never torn down.
“I could just see rehabbing that build-
ing and getting it back to its original intent
was.
... that was kind of the anchor for the
project.”
Coalition of builders come together
on job
Though the group had been doing pro-
jects before that, the world discovered the
coalition of builders in 2010 when a group
assembled by Rich Duncan undertook its
largest and most notable project.
Over 1,000 people came together to re-
do the Nightmare Factory at Oregon
School for the Deaf – including musician
and filmmaker Rob Zombie – and con-
structed a new boys dormitory.
People worked around the clock for 43
days on the project on the Salem campus
for the television show Extreme Make-
over: Home Edition.
Since then, the alliance has continued
to work on projects.
It has come together to build the Mt.
Angel Community Festhalle, the Discov-
ery Pavilion at The Oregon Garden in Sil-
verton, homes for Habitat for Humanity
and projects with Liberty House and the
Boys & Girls Club.
“Those are some bigger projects that
are lasting for the communities,” Duncan
said.
After the wildfires in Detroit, the need
was apparent.
The closest there had been to a gather-
ing place in Detroit was The Cedars Res-
taurant or Mountain High Grocery.
Building a house or two in the city
would only do so much – a community
space would mean much more.
“And so we just decided that we need-
ed to go up there and get some kind of
building put together for whatever use,
but just to give an anchor of a building be-
cause everything was pretty much burned
and gone,” Duncan said.
The builders from the SEDCOR Coali-
tion of Builders formed the Santiam Re-
build Coalition and got to work.
Old city hall leveled in the wildfire
The former city hall, located on Detroit
Avenue, was about what you’d expect in a
small, former logging town.
It was small, made mostly of wood and
was combined with a couple bays for the
fire department. Walking down hallways
required navigating your way around box-
es of papers. It was out of space.
“I kept saying if the state fire marshal
comes in, we’ll be closed immediately,”
Trett said.
City council meetings were held in the
bays that normally contained fire engines.
A big city council meeting would require
the street in front to be shut down and it
be held outside.
A new city hall had only been discuss-
ed in vague terms.
“That hadn’t crossed the radar,” Trett
said. “I think the reality was we knew we
couldn’t afford it.”
The building was leveled in the wild-
fires.
ger is high,” Paul said.
In addition to digital fire lookouts
watching the screen, Paul said, the pro-
grams have some level of artificial in-
telligence.
“The cameras are programmed to
recognize every point on the horizon —
so it knows what it’s looking at from
frame to frame — and if the frame shows
up different, it knows something is
wrong and will flag it,” Paul said. “A hu-
man will take a close look and confirm
everything — and often they see it first
— but it’s another tool that’s part of this
program.”
Where are new cameras going?
The majority of new cameras are be-
ing placed in Central Oregon and north-
eastern Oregon, in areas that get the
most lightning strikes and have the
highest wildfire danger, but also are on
the more remote side, where people are
less likely to call them in.
“When it comes to camera place-
ment, we have a lot more in rural places
where we don’t expect people to be,”
said Natalie Weber, public information
officer for ODF in Southern Oregon,
where the most cameras are placed. “If
there’s a fire in more populated areas
like Medford or Ashland, a lot of people
will report that to 911. So these cameras
focus on the areas a fire would be more
difficult to find.”
Northwest Oregon, near the state’s
most populated areas, doesn’t have a
ton of cameras because it’s already fair-
ly well covered, Paul said.
“We’re looking at the places where
they’ll do the most good,” she said. "But
that doesn't mean we won't build out in
those areas in the future."
Some of the new sites for cameras do
include places in Western Oregon, in-
cluding southeast of Eugene at Fairview
Peak and Werner Mountain, along with
Scott Mountain, near Cougar Reservoir.
But most will be placed right down the
center of the state.
Who can spot the most fires?
Inside the Central Point detection
With no city offices, Sweet Home of-
fered to give the city a trailer to use as tem-
porary office. With much of the infra-
structure damaged in the wildfires and it
being unsure when it would be repaired,
the city offices were moved to a temporary
location in Stayton. The owner of that lo-
cation has a new tenant for that space
coming on June 1. So the city needs to
move fast.
An old building given a new purpose
Kim Fowler owned the school property.
After the alliance was formed, he donated
the two acres where the school formerly
sat and the gym to the Detroit Lake Foun-
dation.
The Detroit Lake Foundation came into
being in the early 2000s when the water
level of Detroit Lake was too low in one
year for boating. It came back to life after
the wildfires with the goal of helping to re-
build the city.
“Our goal is you can’t build a town
without a city hall,” said Candy Page, who
is on the foundations’ fundraising com-
mittee.
The Santiam Rebuild Coalition broke
ground on the project in March 2021. The
goal was to have the building completed in
six months.
It wasn’t always straightforward.
Things like water, power, phone ser-
vice and internet were impacted by the
wildfires.
“So that all kind of happened concur-
rently because a lot of their infrastructure
burned up,” Siegmund said. “A lot of the
services that we all take for granted every
day were non-existent for a time for this
project.”
Other things didn’t go smoothly, either.
The gym had some moisture problems
impacting the wood floor and roof issues,
which required addressing. And there are
the supply chain shortages the rest of the
world is experiencing.
It slowed the progress.
“I didn’t have any movie stars. I
couldn’t pull something with getting an
autograph for somebody to get them to do
anything,” Duncan said. “At the end it was
a little tricky.”
To get the building done in time, people
have been volunteering on weekends and
any free time. Some are working nearly
around the clock to have it finished for the
grand opening.
The hope is that the community center
becomes more than just a building for De-
troit. The dozens of people and companies
hope that it becomes a focal point in the
rebirth of a city.
“I think as more people see that com-
munity center functioning, it will breathe
life and people that have hesitated to re-
build up there, maybe not sure the town
was going to come back, they will see that
and realize that this canyon community is
coming back,” Eric Page said.
Bill Poehler covers Marion County for
the Statesman Journal. Contact him at
bpoehler@crosbyc
Detroit Community Center grand
opening
When: 2 p.m. June 4
Where: 345 Santiam Avenue, Detroit
center, there are four stations where
digital fire lookouts sit. Each station has
seven screens — six computer monitors
and one larger TV screen.
“We’re looking for anything that
catches our eye — that might be a small
amount of smoke rising up,” Beavers
said. “If we see something, we can go
live, zoom in on that point and confirm
what it is.”
Beavers said the digital lookouts have
contests to see who can spot the most
fire starts. The winner gets free lunch at
the end of the season and just as impor-
tantly, bragging rights.
Beavers said he held the title for three
years, but last year, lookout Gene Vine
took the title by spotting some 30 to 40
ignitions. They only count if it’s a con-
firmed fire that fire crews jump on.
Sometimes, those smoke sightings
come rapidly, during a major lightning
burst — like the one that took place in
July 2018.
“Those lightning busts are hectic
times,” Beavers said. “We’d be looking at
just one screen and wouldn’t see just
one incident popping up — we’d see five
or even 10. Then we’d cycle to the next
camera and see the same thing. It’s not
stressful, but it does get the adrenaline
pumping as you try to get all the infor-
mation out to dispatch so they can go
and get it.”
Beavers, who was a wildland fire-
fighter before transitioning into fire de-
tection, said it feels good to be part of
the modern incarnation of the classic
American lookout.
“I would have loved to have this back
when I was a firefighter, just because
you know what’s happening around
you,” he said. “It’s a really important
job.”
Zach Urness has been an outdoors re-
porter in Oregon for 15 years and is the
host of the Explore Oregon Podcast. To
support his work, subscribe to the
Statesman Journal. Urness is the author
of “Best Hikes with Kids: Oregon” and
“Hiking Southern Oregon.” He can be
reached
at
zurness@StatesmanJournal.com
or
(503) 399-6801. Find him on Twitter at
@ZachsORoutdoors.