By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
In the thirst for news and on-the-ground word in the aftermath of the fires burning in north Lincoln County, perhaps no better clearinghouse for information has been a spur-of-the-moment Facebook page created by a high-tech guy who happened to be visiting his mother in Otis.
“I just saw an opportunity with communication and coordination,” said Brian Bray, who grew up in Otis and was staying with his mother, Vivian Bynum on North Bank Road last week. “I could see the local organizations needed some help.”
The Facebook page is called Echo Mountain Fire Complex Information Sharing Rose Lodge Otis Lincoln City
Bray, 60, has worked in technology for three Oregon school districts, for a credit union and a printing company. He’s retired, was traveling the country looking for his next landing spot, and during the coronavirus pandemic thought it best to go look out for his 84-year-old mother.
“And then the fire came,” he says.
Bray evacuated with his mother early Wednesday, spent time in their car, had breakfast in Lincoln City, then after seeing the evacuation chaos headed north through Tillamook to a sister’s home in the Portland area.
He asked a friend to create the Facebook site and two others to help moderate it until he could get organized.
Bray returned to Otis, spending the next two days at a barrier at Northeast Three Rocks Road where it connects with U.S. Highway 101. He slept in his car two nights; sheriff’s deputies were at an official roadblock a half-mile to the east.
Using his cell phone to create a hotspot, Bray administered the Facebook site, and shared fire maps on his laptop with dozens of people as they came and went. Bray chatted with people, collected information, and directed folks to the Facebook page.
“People just needed to tell their stories,” he said. “I’d just stand there and listen.”
And the site has taken off since, growing to more than 700 members.
People who have managed to get into the burned areas have posted some videos of the aftermath. Others seek information about their homes, property or animals – sometimes getting good news, but often not-so-good news. Lincoln County, which has its own emergency services website, is now posting to the site, another way to get their more official information to people at the center of the disaster.
Others are sharing information on recovery resources, donations, road conditions, maps, and updates on the small water districts that supply the Otis and Rose Lodge communities.
The site is surprisingly free of the rumors and drama that have plagued similar Facebook pages that have sprung up in the Oregon communities devastated by wildfires.
Another much larger and more wide-ranging fire-related Facebook group for the entire Lincoln City area is called Lincoln City: Fires of 2020.
In a fractured media landscape where the local newspaper has one reporter, power outages had knocked internet sites and radio stations off the air, and thousands of people looked for immediate word of the fire, Bray said he wanted to help the best way he knew how.
“I just did it because there’s no one else doing it,” Bray said. “The whole thing is about crowd-sourcing information.”
And now as firefighters gain control of the blazes, he wants to use the Facebook page to help the community pool resources, organize itself, pass along information, and then recover. He’s temporarily using space at the Lincoln City campus of Oregon Coast Community College.
“There are heroes all around, but I just could not participate at that level,” he said of the firefighters, loggers, first-responders and others who went house-to-house to alert people and have battled the blaze for a week. “So I did what I can do — be a one-stop shop for information on this fire.”
