Months into wildfire recovery, Oregonians share harrowing stories with lawmakers

It’s been five months since wildfires destroyed thousands of homes across Oregon, including 2,500 in Jackson County. State lawmakers with the Oregon House Wildfire Recovery Committee held a public hearing Wednesday night for people to share their stories.

Many people who testified were frustrated. They wanted to know why most of the debris from destroyed homes hasn’t been cleared yet, and why it was so hard to find affordable housing.

One testimony came from Beatrice Gomez of Medford. In Spanish, she said when the Almeda Fire hit her neighborhood on Sept. 8, she and her family were celebrating her birthday. She didn’t get any alerts that the fire was coming, so she didn’t have time to grab important belongings before her mobile home was destroyed.

Now Gomez and her family are struggling to find housing. Through a translator, she said rents have skyrocketed and she can’t afford a place to live.

“I want to know if by the end of this, we’ll have somewhere to live,” she said, through a translator. “Maybe it won’t be a dream home. But, is there going to be somewhere where we could live? I know where we used to live, it wasn’t a dream home; but for us, it was a beautiful castle.”