Sierra Drye sat in the driver's seat of her Subaru Outback trying to leave with her partner, four dogs, two cats, and a flock of chickens. Thick smoke blocked the sky as sagebrush burned alongside the one road leading in and out of the neighborhood.
“I was calling my grandmas, like, I don’t know if I’m gonna get out or not,” Drye said. “I'm from Northern California, and so the Paradise Fire really came to mind, and what it was like for people trying to leave and having flames enveloping their cars. That’s all I could think of: that my car was going to catch on fire.”
Drye, a nurse, said she has a knack for staying calm. Her friend rode a motorcycle right next to her.
“He was ready to have me hop on the back if I needed to abandon my car,” Drye said. “I had a chicken in my car too that was getting trampled in the crate with the other ones and wasn’t doing well, and so I was holding her, and so I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to stuff this chicken in my shirt, and hop on a motorcycle and hope my dogs can run behind us.’”
When they left their home, her partner Matt was driving his own truck, but eventually he had to ditch it and hop in with her. It took 30 minutes to reach North Virginia Street. Drye said she could feel the heat inside her car, which is still covered in ash and reeks of smoke.
Before they left, Drye said their home was still in the yellow-get-ready-to-evacuate zone on the Watch Duty app — one of the only places people can get information about the wildfire, evacuations, and road closures. She said it didn’t update to a mandatory evacuation zone until Saturday evening, after they had left.
“I believe we’d been out of the neighborhood for at least an hour when it finally updated to get-out-now,” Drye said.
That afternoon before they left, friends helped them water down the house and rip shrubs out from the dirt in the backyard to create a defensible space.
“We had friends going through the house, trying to pull anything that maybe looked important and putting it in their vehicles to bring into town. My parents are both dead. So I was grabbing anything that came from them, which I don't have very much of. I have some Goosebumps books from my papa that still say “To Sierra, Love Papa” in them,” Drye said.
They had been couch surfing the last four nights and are back home now, but were still without power Wednesday afternoon. The hills behind their home are scorched, along with many of their neighbors’ homes.
Drye and other residents on the north side of Peavine are questioning the firefighting response here versus the wealthier Somersett neighborhood. She said there were no firefighting personnel in the neighborhood as the blaze burned toward them. They didn’t see them until they were in gridlocked traffic trying to flee.
“Why would they want to save these houses here for blue-collar workers when they have multi-million-dollar homes on the other side? Even though the wind was blowing directly towards us and pushing the fire this way,” Drye said.
While the residents are assessing the fire’s destruction, they’re dealing with another challenge. Next month, planning commissioners are potentially discussing rezoning some of the area behind Drye’s home for more warehouses. She said their one road in and out can’t handle it and wants to see the agenda postponed.
The couple spent Wednesday afternoon unloading stuff back into the house and caring for the animals.
But there is one bright spot. The day the fire started, one of her chickens hatched six chicks, and by the time they returned, one of the chickens she had to leave had two more.
“Whoever can come up with the six best fire names gets to name the baby chickens. We have two for sure names: Hawk, of course, and Defensible Space,” Drye said.
