No one was home at a house deep in the woods of Josephine County, Oregon. The people who live here had evacuated days ago along with hundreds of their neighbors. As flames from the Taylor Creek Fire got closer and closer, the firefighters showed up.
They came to prepare for the worst so that if the wind picked up, they’d be ready to dash down the driveway and save this house, even if the forest burned around it.
It’s become a familiar emergency in Southwest Oregon: Fires pick up intensity in wilderness, then move toward homes. But in this community, one of those most at-risk in the state, people say they don’t want to pay taxes for a local fire department. Instead, they rely on private enterprise and state interventions.