Stillwater Officials Evaluate Scope, Long-Term Impact of Wildfires on the City

More than 10 days after wildfires swept through Payne County, Stillwater officials are still working to assess the full extent of the destruction.

City leaders say the scale of damage is unlike anything they’ve seen before. Reports indicate that 180 homes were lost countywide, including 98 homes within the Stillwater city limits.

Authorities continue to survey affected areas and assist displaced residents as recovery efforts progress. Officials expect the final damage assessment to evolve in the coming weeks as more information becomes available.

City officials still don’t know where the fires started or what caused them. As they move into the recovery phase, the next big hurdle will be finding more permanent rentals for everyone who lost their home. 

PREVIOUS: 'We still have a job to do:' Stillwater fire chief says his crews remain focused

Q&A: Stillwater Emergency Manager Rob Hill Details Fire Response and Recovery Efforts

Q: So on Friday, at what point did your crew start to jump into action? When did that focus shift from monitoring to getting firefighters where they need to go and making sure people are safe?

Hill: So Friday afternoon, we had several calls come out at the same time. At that time, it seemed like 44th, the 44th Street fire was the biggest fire. And so I responded because I heard Chief Essary go there. And when I got there, I found Chief Essary, but I found him by himself. And so I stayed to help him to figure out, “Hey, can we get a handle on what's going on? Do we know what's happening? Is it one fire, and we're getting multiple calls? Or is it multiple fires?”

Q: So that’s after the first calls, but immediately there were more?

Hill: "We had something like 1,200 calls in that day, and I think there was 3-400 in that first hour.”

◼ During a city council meeting Monday night, Stillwater Fire Chief Terry Essary said that over eight years worth of structure fires occurred in a 12-hour time period.

Q: Can you take me through a timeline of how these fires started? Did some of the destruction start later?

Hill: So, the first few calls were in town, and they were a combination of active fires and people seeing smoke in various locations, calling those in...What got our attention was that they started an evacuation process for a retirement village.

And once they started that, I kind of looked at Chief Essary, and we kind of both looked at each other like, we're on the wrong fire. We need to be elsewhere. And so I told him, I said, go ahead…I will stay behind and find out who's coming and then tell them what you need done here. And then tell them when they're done here to come to Highway 51 and Range. And in the short ten minutes that that took, the southwest part of town was pretty much on fire.

Q: Do we know the extent of the fire?

Hill: So, using ArcGIS and Forestry mapping tools, we've outlined the fire of what areas burned. And we know from this data that just a little over 26,300 acres burned.

Q: Is this all one fire or is it multiple?

Hill: So that's a good question. And we're still trying to determine that. We believe that there were two separate fires that merged together. Because at the same time, we were fighting what we call the Cottonwood Fire. We know that Mulhall and Orlando were out west of Stillwater fighting that fire as well. And we believe that the two burned together.

Q: At what point do you think they merged?

Hill: Somewhere late in the night. On Friday night? Early Saturday morning. And throughout the day Saturday and Sunday. We know that there were a lot of properties in here where the vegetation was just so dense, the trees were so thick that, a person can barely walk through it, let alone drive a fire truck to it to put it out.

So on Sunday afternoon, in some of those areas we called forestry in, and they brought two dozers and to, we call them, brush trucks, but they call them, type six tankers and or trucks and brought them in. And, it helped us to build barriers around some of those because we knew Monday and Tuesday were going to be additional fire danger days.

Q: Are you able to confirm where the fires started?

Hill: We don't. We don't know where any of them started. We've heard rumors that they may have started around the 68th and Karsten Creek area, but we don't have anything to validate that. 

Q: You've been in emergency management for a long time. You've worked in the city for a long time, what's your big takeaway from that day? From that weekend?

Hill: Well, we knew when we got up that morning that it was going to be a high fire danger day... But we've also had multiple days like this before where they didn't materialize. I will tell you, in the short time that I've been the Emergency Manager, that, I've never seen anything like this. It was so overwhelming. It was so impactful. We just could not keep up no matter what we did. No matter what we tried, nothing worked. Everything failed. And the harder we worked, it seemed like the greater the failure. Now, I'm not saying that we did anything wrong. What I'm saying is that the odds were stacked against us. The humidity was 10%. The winds were blowing at close to 60 to 65mph. There was literally no moisture on the ground...

This is by far the worst disaster we've had in my time here. And, I thought floods were bad. Fires are just as bad, if not worse. And I'm so thankful that we have so many people that are dedicated to their jobs here and, our mutual aid partners that came to help when they could and for how long they could.