‘Everything has a memory, and everything is gone’: McComb family one of eight trying to recover from 14,000-acre Colville-area wildfire

The McComb family spent the past four years cleaning, renovating and beautifying their “forever home” and property in the forests north of Colville.

But a 14,000-acre wildfire ripped through the family’s 20-acre piece of heaven earlier this month, leaving only the 45-year-old home’s foundation, a tall chimney and, miraculously, a wooden shed.

“Right now, I’m looking at devastation,” Maggie McComb said Tuesday at her property, which still had a burning smell.

She said she now laughs when she drives up to the home’s ashes and dilapidated metal knowing her husband, Matt McComb, always thought the chimney was an eyesore. Now, it’s basically the only feature of the home.

“I can’t believe that chimney survived,” Maggie McComb said. “It was obviously indestructible.”

The home was one of eight destroyed in the Crown Creek fire, according to Stevens County Emergency Management Director Adenea Sellars. Fifty-something structures, from chicken coops to sheds, were also lost in the blaze.

The fire started Aug. 29 from lightning and was 93% contained Wednesday as crews continue to work the fire, according to fire officials. Sellars said all evacuation levels were lifted Tuesday.

Five of the destroyed homes, including the McComb family’s, were in the same area of Onion Creek, and the other three houses were destroyed elsewhere, Sellars said. All were lost early on in the fire.

A GoFundMe account is set up for the McComb family. Maggie McComb said she wants to donate some of the money to help her neighbors recover. Almost $3,800 had been raised as of Wednesday night.

She said she and her neighbors always helped one another.

“It was really nice to have that togetherness,” she said.

Sellars said extremely dry vegetation and hot temperatures fueled the fire. It was also bad timing, she said, noting if the fire had started in June when fuels were damper, the fire would not have taken off like it did.

“Nothing was at our advantage,” Sellars said.

The 4,700-acre Katy Creek fire, which also started from lightning a day after the Crown Creek fire, is burning southwest of the Crown Creek fire and across the Columbia River from the small town of Marcus, according to fire officials. It was 62% contained Wednesday.

Nearby, the Tacoma Creek fire has burned nearly 4,000 acres, 15 miles northwest of Cusick. The lightning-caused fire is 86% contained.

Maggie McComb, who grew up in Texas, said she, her husband and their now 17-year-old daughter, Isabella, moved into the two-story home in October 2021 after living in Seattle for several years.

The McComb couple met working at an audio production company. She was a video editor, and Matt McComb, who is from the Seattle area, an audio engineer. He then started his own business, but the family stayed in the Emerald City.

Before deciding on the remote Colville home, Maggie McComb said they packed up their things in Seattle and traveled the Northwest and California looking for property outside the bustling city.

She said they dedicated thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to cleaning and renovating their newly purchased property.

“If we had just moved in and lost the house, it would just be bad timing, bad luck, but we really poured heart and soul into it,” she said. “We’ve spent so much time and so much money really trying to put a vision to it, to make it the best that it could be and even more than that, you know, because it was meant to be a forever home.”

She said they started cutting overgrown vegetation, removing trash and tearing out chicken coops and rabbit hutches left on the property when they moved there. They built a garden, leveled out the driveway and planted trees.

Inside the home, they modernized the electrical, improved plumbing, stripped out old appliances for new ones and put in a new tile floor.

Maggie McComb said they finally reached a point where she and her husband could enjoy the day, starting with drinking coffee in the garden, instead of knocking off to-do list items.

“It was really starting to come together,” she said. “We were really happy here, and we will be again at some point. It’s just different now.”

She said she was not very concerned about the growing fire in the early days because the blaze was not that close.

Eventually, their evacuation level increased from Level 1 to Level 2, and the power went out.

With no cell and internet service because of the power outage, the family did not know what was going on. Within a few hours, a neighbor drove up and said the evacuation moved to a Level 3, meaning they had to leave immediately. Maggie McComb said they loaded up their two vehicles in about 30 minutes and drove away.

She said they wanted to return to pile more belongings into their cars, but they were not allowed back into the evacuation zone.

Flames would consume the family home two days later, Sept. 4. They woke up the next day at a Colville hotel, where they have been staying since they left their home more than three weeks ago, and learned their house was gone.

It would be a week before they were allowed to return to their property.

“When we came and saw this where it’s, like, obliterated, like a bomb went off, I was shocked,” Maggie McComb said. “Yeah, I did not think it was gonna be absolutely, completely gone.”

The family lost multiple outbuildings in the fire as well.

The fire destroyed plenty of supplies but also “irreplaceable” items, like cookware from her deceased father and a giant mirror from her grandmother.

She found a blue and white striped bowl in the rubble Tuesday and said she remembered the day she bought it.

“Everything has a memory, and everything is gone,” she said.

Maggie McComb said the family is now trying to piece things together and rebuild.

After weeks of living in a hotel room eating ramen noodles and microwaveable food, the family will return to some normalcy when they move next week into a rental home in nearby Northport. The family will be there for the next several months as they clean up the property and work toward rebuilding.

Maggie McComb said she hopes their home insurance will cover much of the rebuild, but first they are trying to get someone to clear the ashes and debris from their property.

“I’m still dwelling on the destruction and the loss, but hopefully we can get that all cleaned up and underway before winter,” she said.

They also need to cut down and remove the numerous burned trees on the property and replant new ones in the next few years.

A trip to Spokane to buy clothes and other essentials, and searches on Facebook Marketplace to purchase secondhand items, may also be in store soon, she said.

“Everything has been a new learning curve for me,” Maggie McComb said.

She said the family is typically celebrating this time of year with a Spokane restaurant outing, as all three of their birthdays fall within about two weeks of each other in September and October. She and her husband just turned 45.

But they may not celebrate in Spokane this year.

“We’ll just have to celebrate double next year,” Maggie McComb said.

The whole recovery process has been extremely difficult, and she’s accepted it’s going to be slow.

“It’s a long to-do list,” she said. “It’s daunting when you think about 100 things on the list, but we’re just trying to do one thing every day. … We’ll make it all better. It’ll take time, but we’re gonna get there.”