"Everything around us was on fire" Eyewitness Describes Community Coming Together to Fight The Dalles Marina Fire
An image taken by The Dalles community member from the shore looking out at The Dalles Marina fire.
Early Fourth of July morning, sometime after midnight the ‘fourth finger’ of The Dalles Marina caught fire and burned, taking eight boathouses with it. Greg and Katie Cummings, who just finished building a boathouse on the third finger in April, said they had just climbed into bed when the fire started only thirty feet from their houseboat.
“We, my wife and I had actually just gotten into bed,” said Greg “And we heard a knocking at our door. It was the Sheriff and they yelled that there was a fire on the fourth finger.”
They got up and went into their living room and saw “a big huge glow from the fourth finger.”
They immediately jumped into action.
A photo of the fire taken by Diedre Baumgarten of the SSS Freedom Sea Scouts Troop #399
“My wife and I were grabbing our boat to get it moved when we heard some screaming coming from the fourth finger,” Greg said. “They were more or less trapped.”
With the help of some Sheriff’s they were able to use their pontoon to help get four people off the fourth finger that were in danger because of the fire.
At least two sets of boathouse owners had been staying at the boathouses that night when the fire happened. One account from a family member said that their relatives had awoken in the middle of the night and had to literally jump out of bed and into the water to escape the flames.
Greg and Katie brought the four people back to the main dock and reloaded the boat with Sheriff’s Deputies.
They then rushed back with deputies to the fourth finger so that they could start untying boats and push them off the dock towards the safety of the third finger.
“Everything around us was on fire,” said Greg. “I remember running by one boat that was already on fire. There was no chance of saving it. And then going past it to the Sea Scout and you know untying it, shoving it, pushing it towards the third finger.”
“We were able to save a couple of sailboats, and the Sea Scout boat, one other powerboat, and my brother’s boat, which was right across from where we think the fire sort of originated,” said Greg. “My brother’s boat was on fire, and when I first looked over there and I thought we weren't going to be able to save it. But after I got back to my boathouse I looked over towards my brother’s boat again. I noticed the fire had spread towards the north side of the dock, and his boat wasn’t on fire anymore… Kind of weird, I know.”
Greg ran around the dock from his boathouse to his brother’s boat and untied it and pushed it away from the still burning fourth finger.
“I couldn’t get it started, so I just jumped in the water and pulled it towards my boathouse. And then a friend of mine, Mike Hasinger, showed up and saw what I was doing, and he jumped in the water and helped me out as well. So we were able to get the boat pulled to the first finger and to safety,” said Greg.
Greg said he thought his brother Bill’s boat would probably be totaled due to the severe fire damage it endured during the fire.
Greg said he didn’t think of himself as a hero. “I just did what I needed to do. I was just kind of in the right place at the right time, and I just happened to have a boat there that was convenient. A lot of people were there, and a lot of people were helping, sheriffs, firefighters, neighbors. And my wife Katie was with me the entire time, and she was equally as important in everything.”
“We tied one of the boats to my neighbor's boathouse and so he was outside all night long spraying this guy’s boat down to protect it from the embers that were flying,” said Greg.
“Angie and Eric MacNab (The Dalles Marina boathouse managers) were there all night long, helping boathouse owners keep water on their boathouses to keep a second fire from starting on the third finger,” Greg said. “Jeff and Kim Renard were down there helping too, making sure that boathouses on the third finger were safe.”
Greg said that he felt anyone else in The Dalles community would have done the same thing he had if they were there, and he just happened to be one of the people that were there during this particular situation.
“I feel like The Dalles community and the surrounding areas around our community, when there’s a fire, when there’s a neighbor in need, it seems like people just drop what they’re doing and help where they can,” Greg said. “I have friends that are farmers, and they deal with fires every summer, and they go help out their fellow neighbors. And for me, that’s kind of The Dalles in a nutshell. We come together and we help each other out.”
“There were boats that were on fire and one was floating towards our boathouse and Eric MacNab, thank God, found a long stick and shoved it away from our boathouse. It was really a community effort to make sure the fire didn’t spread. Because the reality was that if that fire had spread to the third finger, my guess is, the entire Marina would have gone up,” Greg said.
The third, second, and first fingers of the dock sit closely together, meaning that if the fire had spread to the third finger, it likely would have also jumped to the second and first fingers of the marina. However, the longer distance between the fourth finger and the third finger likely helped save the entire Marina from burning.
It’s not far between the two docks, kind of far, but not very far when it comes to fire.
A google maps aerial view of the Marina shows that it’s not far between the four docks.
“The size of the embers that were flying, I mean, they were huge,” said Greg, “There’s a couple of burn marks on my deck from embers flying down, and it got so hot that my back window cracked. So that’s how hot it was. It was extremely hot. You could hear booms and crashes from windows breaking and propane tanks blowing up on people’s barbecues. It was eerie.”
Some firefighters fought the fire on the fourth finger from the deck of Greg’s boathouse on the third finger.
“They were trying to get another angle of water on different boats that were over there, and my friend Mike was helping the firefighters hold onto the hose so they wouldn’t fall in cause they were trying to get to the edge of the deck. It was so hot that I had a hose going on, and I was just dumping it over our heads because it was so bloody hot,” said Greg.
“We were up all night long, trying to keep water on everything. How do you sleep? You just don’t. My wife and I finally sat down on the couch at 5 AM and finally fell asleep for a couple of hours,” Greg said. “I didn’t sleep for a couple of nights after that. I felt kind of guilty that I wasn’t able to do even more to help.”
“It is still pretty surreal looking out my back deck and seeing nothing there, really surreal,” Greg said.
A firefighter sprays water over the still smoking remains of the fourth finger of The Dalles Marina.
Eight boathouses were destroyed in the fire. Some of the boathouses were built as early as the ’40s, and most of the houses had wood siding. According to The Dalles marina policy, no houseboats or full-time residents are allowed at the marina, and all houseboats at the marina must be insured. What is the difference between a houseboat and a boathouse? A houseboat has a motor and can move places, a boathouse is a stationary house that floats. People can stay in The Dalles Marina houseboats for a weekend or even a week or two at a time but cannot live there full time.
Greg described The Dalles Marina as a peaceful getaway for The Dalles residents and said the destruction of the fourth finger was a devastating blow to the community.
“The marina is kind of a sacred place. Everybody in town for a long time, either have owned a boathouse down there, currently owns a boathouse, or knows someone who owns one, or has been in one of these boathouses before one way or the other,” Greg said. “And those people know and can feel the warmth and sense of community and peacefulness that being at the marina kind of gives. I personally know three of the boathouse owners that lost their boathouses down there and it’s just- well - sad doesn’t really fully describe it. I’m not a poet of words but sad doesn’t really describe it like it should. Everybody feels terrible for those boathouse owners that lost everything. Some of them have kids and we’d see their children jumping in the water and spending the night down there was something so cool and special for those kids.”
Greg said he felt awful for those that had lost their boathouses as he knows exactly how much time, money and care goes into building and maintaining a boathouse.
“We just finished building our boathouse over the winter. We started building in December and finished it in April. This will be the third boathouse we’ve owned down there. We’ve owned two others, but it’s been ten years since we owned one. We wanted to buy again down there but the prices had gone up so high that we couldn’t really afford to buy one. And I just kind of lucked out and was able to buy some logs and beams from a friend of mine that had started building a few years ago and ran out of time.”
“We like it because it’s five minutes from our house, and yet you feel like you’re on vacation and you don’t have to DO anything down there. You go down there and you relax and you hang out with your friends. We invite friends down to barbeque with us or have dinner. And we’ve got our boat that we park there as well, so we’ll go out and play on the boat and go swimming. It’s a community, and it’s a lifestyle, and it’s fun to just be there,” Greg said.
Greg grew up on boats. He was especially happy to have been able to save the Sea Scout’s flagship from the fire as it holds a special place in his memory.
“I grew up on that boat and was able to have lots and lots of good times on that boat with my Dad (Randy Cummings) because he was the leader of the local Sea Scouts back then,” he said.
“Diedre Baumgartnen has fired up the local Sea Scouts program again, and it’s just cool to see that boat is still being used, and so when we were able to push it off the dock it made me feel really good that we were able to preserve that boat and those memories that so many kids including myself have made on that boat,” Greg said.
The Sea Scouts publicly thanked Greg for helping to save their boat.
The salvage of The Dalles Marina following the fire is still underway, with potential losses being in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ecological clean-up has also taken place in part and as of yet no actual spills of oil or fuel are reported to have occurred.
Investigators are still investigating the cause of the fire. The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, although several people said they thought the origin was an electrical fire, and that no fireworks were heard or seen near the marina on the Fourth of July. Thanks to the hard work of firefighters, law enforcement, and neighbors, the fire damage appears to have been limited almost entirely to the fourth finger and the rest of The Dalles Marina is still in use and fully operational.
