Dowdy Road Neighbors Fight Off Wildfire Using Hand Tools, Garden Hoses, Backhoe, Residents Defend Their Homes

A Miller High Life in his hand and a pith helmet on his head, Bob Young steered a yellow backhoe into a wall of fire.

His target - a flaming pine tree - snapped like dry spaghetti as the former construction worker rammed it once, twice, three times with the front bucket.

Then Young turned the machine toward another burning tree and charged again as his Dowdy Road neighbors cheered.

“He’s a crazy guy, and I love him,” said Mike Gruber, a neighbor. “If it wasn’t for him, we’d be toast.”

Young was one of a dozen Dowdy Road residents who ignored an evacuation order Thursday and defended their homes from the 1,000-acre Newkirk Road fire, which raced through the woods and rimrock of western Spokane County.

Armed with shovels, chain saws and garden hoses, they kept the roaring flames from reaching any houses at the end of the remote road.

It was a tough battle. Winds whipped flames through the treetops, and eye-searing smoke turned everything hazy.

“You need a hose?” Liza Lies yelled as her brother-in-law, Jim Sharrington, chopped at a burning stump with a shovel.

She and her sister, Laura Sharrington, helped keep the flames away from their parents’ home at 4407 N. Dowdy.

Lies closed down her furniture shop in Spokane and sped west about 2 p.m. after her mother called with word of the fire. Twenty minutes later, she was scooping dirt onto crackling grass and smoldering pine needles behind the house where her parents, Vincent and Donna Lies, have lived since 1973.

“We used to play back here all the time,” Lies said.

She was joined by “neighbors, friends, people I don’t know.” One acquaintance drove a Ryder moving truck to the neighborhood, in case residents wanted to evacuate.

No one did, even after a sheriff’s deputy told them they were in extreme danger.

Fire licked within a dozen feet of Reid Gardner’s house on Dowdy.

“We were actually lucky it came when it did,” said Gardner, smoke swirling around him. “We still had a little green in the grass and brush. It comes a month later, we would have lost it.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo