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| Sam Robinson, 75, stands near the front end loader he used to combat a grassfire in Sutherlin [Oregon] on Friday, July 1. |
- http://www.nrtoday.com/news/local/north_county/sutherlin/mobile-home-park-fire-staved-by-heroics-of-nearby-storeowner/article_6df4f4eb-716f-5c9b-acc2-ec67e35e303d.html
- TROY BRYNELSON The News-Review Jul 9, 2016
SUTHERLIN — The front-end loader seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Dave Esper, 57, pointed a garden hose over the fence at the flames rapidly approaching his home at Soft Winds Mobile Home Park. The fire had sparked in the West Intermediate School field next door and had burned through tall, dry grass, brush and trees.
As firefighters arrived at the scene July 1 and hooked into the fire hydrants, the stream out of Esper’s hose went flat. That’s when he heard the 20-ton vehicle break through the gate and plow headlong toward the burning field. With Sam Robinson at the controls, the loader’s 8-foot-wide bucket scooped away burning debris, ginning up a cloud of dirt to dampen some of the fire.
“Those flames were coming up about six-to-eight feet tall,” Esper said, whose home was one of many at the northwestern edge of the mobile home park, defended only by the wooden fence. “He pushed it and saved both of those houses that were close to burning.”
Three mobile homes were lost that afternoon, after the fire engulfed a bramble of blackberry bushes and burned up a tree. It could have been much worse, however, if not for the loader and its even-handed operator whose actions were called “heroic” by neighbors and officials.
“What that man did as a volunteer — if that happened — is to be applauded,” said Sutherlin Police Chief Kirk Sanfilippo after the fire. “I’m not saying I can approve it or encourage it, but if it happened he is a hero.”
Robinson, a 75-year-old Sutherlin resident, shrugged off the hero label.
“I believe the Lord gave me the strength to hop on that machine and go there quick,” he said in an interview Thursday. “... I just felt bad I wasn’t two people, I could have done twice as much.”
For over 20 years, Robinson sold heavy machinery out of a store just one street over. He’s sturdy-built like his stock-in-trade, though sometimes subject to a cramping leg. He’s graying with a tan, thanks in part to humanitarian work in the South Pacific. He speaks decisively in a low, rolling tone; and he’s fixed to the store and his staff despite selling it to his son-in-law more than a decade ago.
“He’s the smartest man I know,” said Shelly Turl, an employee at the store. “And he’s very caring.”
Robinson and his wife, Gladys, spent about 15 years of their adult lives doing mission work in the South Pacific for the Seventh-day Adventists Church. His office in the back of the machine store, now named Haley’s Tractor & Equipment, features framed thank-yous for helping build up the communities there, such as building the Adventist University of the Philippines.
“He’s just a hard-worker. He wants to help and he’s really good to people,” Gladys Robinson said. “And we always trust in the Lord.”
His common sense, he said, helped safely navigate Indonesia with his wife and three young daughters, in the aftermath of its bloody coup in the 1960s. The family lived in Bandung, but routinely drove eight hours to the city of Jakarta to receive shipments of raw materials for building. The trip was often interrupted by armed militants forming roadblocks and requesting to be taken down the road.
Eventually, he said he refused to stop for them. Driving mountain roads at night, he decided to scare them off the road like deer back home — by switching off his headlights and laying on the horn.
“It was scary,” he said of the time. “... You have got to know ahead of time what you’re going to do. If there’s a fire, what do you do?”
Robinson was out of the office July 1, visiting a friend, when an employee called and said there was a fire in the field next to their property. He drove his truck back to the store and pulled up right alongside his Model 644 loader. He jumped in and fired up the machine. He then wheeled it down the street, took a left along the busy Central Avenue and turned left again up toward the fire.
“(Other cars) got out of my way. Many people said ‘we saw you come out, we knew where you were going,’” Robinson said.
Upon arriving at West Intermediate School, he said he used the loader to lift and move the gate out of the way. He then charged out onto the field, where the fire was headed south toward the mobile home park. In a single pass, he dropped the bucket to the ground and scraped away grass and burning vegetation from the fence line. Esper recalled seeing flames rising up and around the machine’s cabin, but Robinson said he wasn’t worried.
“I wasn’t worried about the machine because it was going so fast,” Robinson said.
He then skirted around the fire, scraping a fire trail. He was concerned a sudden change in wind direction might blow the fire toward a stand of trees. To Robinson, it wasn’t a Herculean effort by any means, but the witnesses disagree.
“That man knew what he was doing, and he cared about people,” Esper said.
Robinson, on the other hand, said he’s done it all before. He recalled a similar event in the 1990s when a fire threatened a stand of trees at the southwest end of Sutherlin. Just as he did July 1, Robinson jumped in a Model 644 loader and went to scraping away a fire line. He joked that hopefully someone will be around 20 years from now if it happened again.
Meanwhile, he and his wife plan to take another trip to the South Pacific, to the island of Pohnpei, to build gymnasiums.
“As long as my shoes are still pointing forward, I’m going to keep helping people,” he said.
Troy Brynelson covers Roseburg City Hall, South Douglas County and Natural Resources. He studied journalism at the University of Oregon. Follow him on Twitter @TroyWB.
Reporter Troy Brynelson can be reached at 541-957-4218 or troy@nrtoday.com. Follow him in Twitter @TroyWB.
