Hold Your Horses nonprofit says Camp Fire victim needs are still great

Dec. 20--The elderly couple refused to give up their farm animals after the Butte County Camp Fire destroyed their Paradise home, so they moved with them 20 minutes south to a remote spot in Oroville and set up shelter under makeshift tarps, exposed to the wind and rain.

But when the Knightsen-based Hold Your Horses Livestock Emergency Evacuation Response Team heard about their plight, it swung into action.

Jason Butterfield, the group's Oroville liaison, immediately trudged out to the remote field on a late rain-soaked night to offer help. A quickly organized campaign of the nonprofit's Facebook page yielded a couple of donated campers as well as offers of livestock feed, dog food and other items.

"Nobody should ever have to make that decision on feeding your family versus keeping your animals," Hold Your Horse founder Chantel Tieman of Knightsen said in a recent interview. "Your animals are your family, so you should never have to give them up because of a fire or any other disaster. We offer people feed, medicine, blankets, so they can keep them (the animals) for a while."

Within days, the group's trained strike team members brought two campers into the muddy field, one for 85-year-old Ray and his 64-year-old wife Chris, the other for his son Joel. Tieman said while the group sometimes takes photos of those its helps, it doesn't publicize their full names to protect their privacy.

It was the second time in a decade this family had lost a home to fire, Tieman said.

"Some of their livestock were really sick," she said. "But Jason went out there when there was that recent big storm and brought them supplies."

Tieman is organizing another caravan of supplies this weekend, hoping to bring livestock feed, pet and human food, water bottles, blankets and more to the fire-ravaged area. On recent trips she's made drop-offs to the Magalia Pines Baptist Church, which early on sheltered fire victims and now serves as a community gathering spot. The donations, distributed to those in need, have gone fast, she said.

"There are so many different stories out there, and there's not enough help out there," she said of the Camp Fire victims.

The group's main goal is to evacuate livestock and feed those in need, but sometimes it helps out humans as well, Tieman said. Another donated camper recently went to a single mom with an 8-year-old son who had moved to Paradise only weeks before the fire but had not yet updated her driver's license. Without ID proof, she was ineligible for help.

Tieman, a mother of six, has been helping with evacuations and delivering supplies since the first fire hit in Redding this past summer, followed by the Lake County and Paradise fires. She gets help from son Dennis Trammell, who makes deliveries, drives the forklift and is "anywhere and everywhere," and daughter Naydeene Koster, the communications manager who dispatches and prepares maps and more for volunteer drivers.

Tieman founded Hold Your Horses Livestock Emergency Evacuation Response Team five years ago when fires hit Mt. Diablo. The Knightsen rancher and other volunteers went to the site to evacuate animals, but what they found was chaos in the loosely organized effort.

"Compared to the first try, it is a lot more organized now," Koster said. "We have documentation on everything, who is going where, where the animals go (for shelter)."

Since 2013 the nonprofit has added about 400 support members across the state and has 22 trained strike team members that go behind fire lines to evacuate animals and deliver feed and supplies. Of all the fires they have been to, the Camp Fire has been the most devastating, Tieman said.

"You go from town to town, street to street, and it really looks like a planet was on fire and just rolled down and took everything with it," she said. "There's a lot of senior citizens, retirement homes, multiple mobile home parks where there is nothing left. Their home is gone, their cars have been burned up and they have no jobs to go to -- they are just stuck."

So Tieman and her crew keep collecting donations and delivering them to those in need and plan to do so for as long as they can, having agreed to support some ranch families with feed until spring. With so much effort volunteering, she has temporarily shut down her ranch to the public, while her husband often stays behind to take care of things, she said.

"We're trying really hard to do as much as we can -- it's up to our followers how much we can help," Tieman said. "The need up there is just so great. There are so many people, so many animals that need help."

Every little bit helps, Koster said.

"It's too much for any one group to do alone," she said. "I think a lot of people underestimate the devastation, but it you look at the map, it's a huge area."

Koster said her mother has a big heart and cannot stop helping even though she's missed recent birthdays and Thanksgiving.

"She doesn't know what rest is," she said, noting Tieman puts in 18- to 20-hour days. "She's definitely my hero -- it's inspiring to watch her."

On one trip, the Knightsen rancher and strike team members got a little too close to the flames that had flared back up while they trying to rescue some horses that had wandered down a ravine in Concow. Tieman's husband Ray had stayed on high ground and battled the flames with a shovel and water. Soon, firefighters told them to get moving and let the horses shelter in place.

"The horses were safe where they were, but we stumbled across some ducks and grabbed a box and took off with them," she said. "We try not to leave anything behind. Sometimes the animals get stressed, but most of the time they are pretty good."

Another time, the team heard about a pot-bellied pig that had given birth but was upset when a stillborn piglet was taken away, so she ran down a ravine squealing all the way trying to find her newborn. Tieman showed up with her team and some U.S. Army soldiers from base camp.

"I actually bring the Army with me when you call," she jokingly told the burned-out rancher when she arrived to rescue the pig. "They (the soldiers) were great. They went flying down the ravine and helped haul her back."

Tieman estimates her group has delivered about $38,000 in feed and supplies this fall. It's also evacuated dozens of horses, goats, dogs, cats and ducks during that time.

It's hoping to raise more through a fundraiser dinner Feb. 9 at the Cedar Creek Stables in Brentwood.

Koster said the group's next step is to do some fire prevention work, working with ranchers to plan fire escape routes and stock up on emergency supplies. But the main focus will always be evacuations and helping those in need.

Related Articles

*

Sierra Nevada's Camp Fire charity beer, Resilience IPA, starts flowing today

*

Cambrian middle-schoolers 'adopt' Camp Fire families

*

'I want my mom back': Camp Fire survivor recounts final moments with mother

*

Famed filmmaker Ron Howard filming documentary on Camp Fire

*

PG&E fires East Bay contractor from Camp Fire recovery after employees post mocking photos

"Last week Mom called me crying on her way out of town when she saw a man in his late 80s walking down the road in the rain and pulling his suitcase," Koster said. "He had lost everything, he had no car. It broke her heart."

Tieman arranged for the lonely veteran from Paradise to stay in a shelter. She continues to reach out to him, Koster said.

For Tieman, stopping her volunteer work isn't an option.

"They have no roofs, no home, no TV, no door to close, no bed to curl up in, and Christmas is around the corner," she said. "These people are in tents and cars and they have nothing and these animals have nothing."

------

To help the Hold Your Horses Livestock Emergency Evacuation Response Team, go to https://bit.ly/2PNzW9b

To help Ray and Chris, go to https://bit.ly/2EE8Osi

___

(c)2018 the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.)

Visit the Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.) at www.eastbaytimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.