After the fire comes rebirth

Sept. 20--K AMIAH -- Jake brakes rumble as dump trucks haul debris down the winding grades from the burned forests northeast of Kamiah, while fill for new construction travels in the opposite direction.

Cement trucks churn up steep hills through areas scorched and blackened as they head toward the sites of future homes. If you listen, the pounding of framing hammers bark in the breeze.

In the aftermath of the 70,000-plus-acre Clearwater Complex fires that burned across north central Idaho, destroying 50 homes and countless outbuildings, the once bristling forests, crackling with sparks and flame, are again becoming a hot spot -- this time, however, for the construction trades.

"Insurance-wise, I have 12 months to put a building up," Tai Renata said. "As long as you can find a builder. Everyone is taken."

Five weeks ago, Renata watched his 3,000-square-foot home sprout into glowing plumes as two fires traveling in opposite directions engulfed it. He has been busy cleaning up the remains, sorting through ash, making piles of computer parts, copper wire and piping, and metal from burned appliances and roofing.

He plans to wait to haul off the metal he piled with his excavator because of the glut with which buyers are inundated.

"It's not worth anything right now," he said.

Like many property owners in the burned-over region, Renata is taking advantage of the opportunity to rebuild -- and this time get it right. He will raze the former home's foundation -- a concrete basin filled with ash -- and broaden its footprint to face the river valley two miles away.

"Towards the view," he said. And he plans to bury a tank in the ground for surplus water.

"If you have water, you can fight it," said Renata, who spent hours leading up to his home's destruction spitting water from a gravity-fed system into the flames until the water quit.

Afterward, Renata, a diesel mechanic and equipment operator, spent three weeks at the home of friends before his insurance company allowed him to start the cleanup. He and his family live next door now in a house that was on the real-estate market and did not succumb to the fire. Less than 300 feet away, his place is a heap of cracked concrete, curled metal and calf-deep ash. Construction on the new house should begin next month, he said.

Below Renata's building site the quickly sloping land is a hodgepodge of browns and blacks. Tree trunks charred on one side or grilled like asparagus are interspersed with patches of green uncorrupted by intense heat. A bird flying southeast would cross the shadows of still-standing structures and the gray, lifeless maw of others. It would after a mile fly over Dave and Amanda Robnett, who last week watched a construction crew prepare a foundation on their land.

When the fires threatened, the Robnetts had their two children stuff belongings into bags tossed into a recreational vehicle they drove to safety. Dave Robnett loaded all-terrain vehicles and his wife and daughter prepared to lead their horses to safety. That's when the fire swept over their place.

"Everyone was flying out of here," Dave Robnett recalled. "I saw flames higher than that tree."

The couple doesn't mince words when they describe their exodus.

"We got out by the skin of our teeth," Dave Robnett said. "We came up next morning and everything was gone."

A grandmother's cedar chest, inherited quilts, high school albums, family portraits, diplomas, show ribbons, and "pretty much all of our clothes" had vanished into a thin layer of smoldering ash.

In the aftermath, they purchased a manufactured home and moved into rental property in Stites, 20 miles away. The Kamiah School District sends a bus to fetch their children for school.

Their new home, when it is steadfastly secured to its foundation, will make better use of the view below them and an oil stove will replace the wood heat they had before.

"We're starting all over," Dave Robnett said. "It's going to be nicer than it was."

Draw a line between their place and Renata's and somewhere in between on a hogback ridge the cream-colored, freshly framed skeleton of new construction beams brightly in the late-summer sun.

Dawn-Marie Johnson stands behind the new building, sprouting almost flower-like in a warm breeze, with her back to a pile of debris. The heat-warped metal and gnarled pile is what is left of the home where she and her family lived. Two dogs trounce around her.

The fire that destroyed the place blew up the valley and climbed the hill to the Johnson's property so quickly there was little chance of saving anything, she said. No one was home that day, Aug. 14 -- her daughter's birthday -- when a friend called her cellphone to say her place was on fire.

"It crested that hill, and came down that ridge in 10 seconds," she said.

The intense heat left the surrounding pines sheared and blackened.

The family was already in the process of securing a loan for a new house at the lip of the hogback when they were burned out. The new house will be twice as big, with cathedral ceilings and "the best view of the valley," Johnson said. Some of her belongings were irreplaceable, like her father's oil paintings and inherited antiques.

"There's been a couple of those days when you think about all that stuff and you start crying," she said. "Then you just say, forget it."

She's noticed new grass growing in areas burned through.

"It's already starting to get pretty again," Johnson said. "When we get rid of the dead trees, it will look just as pretty as it did."

Bartholdt can be contacted at rbartholdt@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2275.

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