Sean Davis for Astoria

When Disaster Comes, Leadership Matters

Six years ago today. There are some nights you’ll never forget. When the Holiday Farm Fire exploded through the McKenzie River Valley on September 7th, 2020, the world around us changed in a matter of hours. The sky turned red. Smoke swallowed the valley. Fire moved faster than most of us believed possible. Then we hit Level 3 evacuation: GO NOW.

A small group of us started knocking on doors, going from neighbor to neighbor making sure people knew the evacuation order had changed, and that it was time to leave. I told them all to meet us at the McKenzie Ranger Station. My daughter Jackie was twelve years old. She was right there with me, clutching her pocket knife in her little hand, with a whistle hanging around her neck, helping her dad. When everyone was accounted for, we organized a caravan and headed out of the danger area together.

About a day later, I put on the Nomex green pants and yellow shirt I had worn during my years fighting wildland fire and went back. I wasn’t alone. Combat veterans, firefighters, Forest Service personnel, neighbors, business owners, and volunteers formed a group. There wasn’t some grand organizational chart telling us what to do. Our town was unincorporated. This was just neighbors helping neighbors. Community. We saw problems and started solving them. We cleared roads with our chainsaws. We checked properties. We fed livestock that had been left behind during the evacuation. We fought fire. We found generators for elderly and disabled residents who needed electricity.

Every week, we drove over the mountains to Sisters and hauled back hundreds of gallons of fuel to keep generators, equipment, and vehicles running. My wife and the staff of the local rural clinic needed somewhere to treat people, so we helped turn a quilt shop into a makeshift medical facility. And we kept going.

What began as neighbors helping neighbors grew into an organized relief effort that lasted for months. Because of advocacy work I had done before the fire, including the fight to keep the Leaburg Fish Hatchery open, I already knew some of our elected leaders and their staffs. Those relationships mattered. I worked with Congressman Peter DeFazio, State Representative Cedric Hayden, Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch, and others to get attention and resources into our community.

We worked alongside and helped guide relief and recovery organizations coming into an area many of them did not know. Groups including the American Red Cross, Team Rubicon, the Green Cross, and eventually FEMA brought resources and expertise, while local residents brought something just as important: knowledge of the people, the roads, the communities, and what was actually happening on the ground.

Over the following months, we established a series of aid centers where families could find food, water, clothing, household supplies, and whatever else people were donating. Some days the work was dramatic. Most days it wasn’t. It was just work. It was moving boxes, finding fuel, answering phones, solving somebody’s problem of the day, talking to government agencies, figuring out where a family could get what they needed, and then getting up the next morning and doing it again. That is what disaster recovery actually looks like.

Eventually, the work changed. We weren’t just responding to the emergency anymore. We were trying to rebuild a community. We wrote grants. We worked with lawmakers. We pushed for infrastructure, including a new sewer system that could support rebuilding and make the community stronger than it had been before the fire.

I was one person among many who played important roles during those months. I will never pretend otherwise. Some extraordinary people stepped forward during the Holiday Farm Fire. They worked until they were exhausted, went home for a few hours, and came back the next morning. Some lost their own homes and still helped their neighbors. What that community accomplished together remains one of the most remarkable things I have ever witnessed. The experience taught me something important about leadership.

Preparation matters. Experience matters. Relationships matter. And when a crisis arrives, leadership has to take action and make decisions very quickly.

Astoria faces different hazards than the McKenzie River Valley, but we are not immune from disaster. We live along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. A major earthquake and tsunami will happen again someday. We cannot predict whether that means tomorrow, decades from now, or beyond our lifetimes. What we can control is how seriously we prepare.

We can strengthen emergency plans. We can make sure neighborhoods know evacuation routes. We can train volunteers. We can identify vulnerable residents before an emergency happens. We can build relationships between the city, county, first responders, hospitals, nonprofits, businesses, veterans, churches, and community organizations now, rather than exchanging business cards while something is burning, and we can invest in infrastructure strong enough to recover when something goes wrong.

Emergency preparedness isn’t about frightening people. It is about respecting them enough to prepare. This is why I always stress the importance of neighborhood associations and community groups. 

I hope Astoria never experiences anything like what I saw during the Holiday Farm Fire. I hope no parent here ever has to look over and see their twelve-year-old child standing in an evacuation zone with a pocket knife and whistle, wondering what comes next.

But hope isn’t an emergency plan. One of the reasons I’m running for mayor is because I know what it looks like when the plans, infrastructure, communication systems, and ordinary routines of a community are suddenly overwhelmed. I also know what happens next. People step forward. Neighbors help neighbors, and good leadership helps turn all of that courage, generosity, and energy into organized action.

That’s the kind of leadership I want Astoria to have before we ever need it. If you believe experience, preparation, and active leadership belong in the Mayor’s office, please consider supporting this campaign. Every contribution helps us reach more Astorians and continue building a campaign centered on service and the future of this community.

Contribute at seandavisforastoria.com/donate

Let’s get to work.