For the second year in a row, a regional milestone has been overtaken in the record book by a new natural disaster.
The category? Catastrophic fires.
The 1902 Yacolt Burn now ranks No. 3 in terms of Washington acreage reduced to ash.
State officials announced Wednesday that the Okanogan Complex fire is the largest wildfire the state has ever seen. Last year’s Carlton Complex wildfire now ranks second.
This isn’t some cold-blooded exercise in rewriting a Top 10 list. It’s a reminder for people who see the devastation on their TV screens and breathe a sigh of relief: “Thank goodness that’s not us!”
Well, in 1902, that WAS us. As we noted in an “Off Beat” column just about a year ago, the Yacolt Burn consumed about 373 square miles in Clark, Cowlitz and Skamania counties. (That’s nearly 239,000 acres.)
According to our centennial coverage in 2002, the Yacolt Burn — which actually stopped just short of its namesake town — erupted in early September 1902 after 77 straight days without rain.
The flare-ups it spawned got as close to Vancouver as the Proebstal area, near Northeast Fourth Plain Road and 192nd Avenue.
People as far away from the blaze as Ridgefield lit lamps at noon after ash and smoke blocked the sun.
An estimated 12 billion board feet of timber went up in flames.
But the biggest toll was in human life, with at least 38 people killed. In some Columbian stories about northwoods fires, people have shared family accounts passed down by their grandparents … how they tried to bury family possessions before fleeing ahead of the flames.
One of those accounts was written by Joan and Gene Olson. As the flames closed in one farm, the Graves family ran for the safety of a nearby creek … everybody but Mrs. Graves, who said she’d join them in a bit.
When they returned to the ruins of their home, “They found her in the yard,” the Olsons wrote, “surrounded by the blackened remains of her prized possessions.
“She died for her Singer sewing machine, and several jars of fruit.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
