Wildfire Rekindles Painful Memories Firestorm ‘91 Survivors Offer Support To Recent West Plains Victims

High winds sweep in memories for the Tuter family.

Like flames flipping over the hood of their truck, winds snapping trees like pretzels, baby pictures turning to ash and smoke.

The Tuters’ home in Nine Mile Falls was one of 114 reduced to rubble by Firestorm ‘91. One neighbor died. Another lost all his horses. Mick Tuter and his son, then 9, drove away as flames licked at their home.

“When the wind picks up or the power goes out, he goes bananas, just like his mother. It’s pretty scary for him,” said Tuter, a 47-year-old truck driver, construction worker and sometimes volunteer firefighter.

“Being a man, and being macho, I try to let on like it doesn’t bother me. But it does.”

The nightmares flooded back Sunday. The wind-driven West Plains fire churned up fear for people far away from its path, which snaked from north of Airway Heights to the edge of Riverside State Park.

In Coeur d’Alene for the afternoon, Jim O’Connell felt his fire radar go off. He didn’t like it.

In Nine Mile Falls, Mick Tuter’s wife stayed up late packing memories.

In Chattaroy, Joy Couey remembered Firestorm ‘91 winds blew twice as hard.

Driving home from camping, Kathy Olsufka felt a knot in her stomach when she smelled the smoke on Sunday.

They all lost their homes to Firestorm ‘91 and rebuilt right on top of the rubble. They rebuilt with fire in mind, adding green, defensible space and sprinkler systems. And they learned other, unsolicited lessons.

Rely on friends, family and faith. Form support groups with other people whose possessions were destroyed. Believe life will get better. Remember things are only things, that what’s precious survived.

“Your whole life is chaos,” Olsufka said of life after a destructive wildfire. “You’re not getting sleep. I just had faith in God, that he would help us through. You just have to know you are going to get through it.”

Watching TV reports and reading about the eight homes lost Sunday, Firestorm ‘91 veterans remembered their grief and felt for the families.

“Boy, we sure look at these people and see them crying on TV and go, deja vu,” said Couey, 42, an educational assistant for the Riverside School District. “I know exactly what they’re going through. You feel like part of yourself has been ripped away, all your memories from this house.”

She remembers the feelings of shock, of anger, of “Why us?” As a Christian, she had to come to grips with the idea that God allowed the fire to burn down her home.

She had to find good out of bad.

“Even though it was an awful thing, there was really a lot of sadness and anger and grief; the Lord helped us work through all this,” Couey said. “And the people - you really see the goodness of people.”

A neighbor sifted through the Couey home’s dirty ashes, collected all the copper piping, redeemed it and brought the family money.

Couey’s daughter had just had a birthday party, and one of her friend’s mothers brought a set of clothes for each of Couey’s three kids. The woman brought Couey’s daughter the same birthday gift, lost in the fire - a Cinderella Barbie on a horse. “It was just a lot of those things,” Couey said. “It was really special.”

O’Connell drove away from his Ponderosa home as it burned to the ground in 1991. He doesn’t like to talk much about the fire. He will talk about the community, and how it came together.

The neighborhood has gathered in past years beneath a charred hillside to visit, eat and help each other close wounds from the windy afternoon of Oct. 16, 1991.

“Looking back, and this may sound a little bit fickle, cavalier maybe, but probably the majority of things we own are not necessary,” said O’Connell, a dentist.

O’Connell lives across the street from Olsufka. After losing her home, Olsufka said she needed to hold onto something normal.

She ate dinner with her family. She kept a positive outlook for her children. She ran.

“I am a runner,” said Olsufka, a 38-year-old homemaker. “That was something normal for me, to go run every day. Right away, I got some running shoes and started running every day. That was one thing (that stayed) the same.”

The families who lost their homes five years ago have no magic words for the newly homeless. They hold onto cliches containing nuggets of truth: Time heals all wounds. Take one day at a time. This, too, shall pass.

Tuter bought cutting torches on Monday night, another step toward replacing tools melted by Firestorm ‘91. He escaped that blaze with his son, grabbing a cowboy hat and a coat on his way out the door. He forgot his wallet, pictures of his two sons, and more than $200 worth of silver coins.

When the winds swept fire through the West Plains on Sunday, Tuter’s wife was ready, even though the blaze was more than five miles away. He fell asleep about 9 p.m. She stayed up working.

“I got up at 3 a.m. for work and thought there was something weird,” he said. “Monday night, I realized she had stripped the walls. She had put all the family pictures in the back of her car.”

, DataTimes