Flood threatens dream home

Pine Creek still raged Tuesday morning past the home of Frank and Colleen Edwards near Oxbow. The couple lost approximately 60 feet of frontage during the weekend, which has made their house now unsafe to occupy. (Baker City Herald/S. John Collins)

About 60 feet of the couple’s waterfront property has tumbled into the creek since Friday, when a flash flood sent water careening through the canyon, carrying rocks, trees and other debris downstream.

The couple’s home, a manufactured house that they added to and remodeled in 2004, complete with a wraparound covered porch, has been deemed unsafe to live in. The swollen creek has undercut the shelf of land the house sits on, and the edge of the precipice is just several feet from the west end of the porch.

Baker County Sheriff’s deputy Scott Immoos, and Gary Timm of the county’s Emergency Management department, were among the first to respond to the Edwards home Sunday. The couple said 20 Idaho Power Company employees helped move their refrigerator, freezer and food from their house to the nearby barn, where they’re sleeping on a futon in the loft.

They are getting by with plastic chairs and a picnic table rather than taking any risks to move more furniture from the house.

They did move the rocking chair that Colleen’s dad built for her when she was 10.

“They were one of the first things I took out of the house and I have no idea where I put them,” Colleen said during an interview at the couple’s home Tuesday.

The Edwardses praised the workers who were willing to enter their home, even though it had been proclaimed unsafe, in order to help them.

“The support has been wonderful from everyone,” Colleen said. “You can’t ask for better than that. That’s why we wanted to come out here.”

The answers they were getting Tuesday were not hopeful as the Edwardses watched the ground giving way around the vacation home they had planned to move into permanently this summer.

“One day felt like a whole week while we were awaiting calls and awaiting answers,” Colleen said.

Mark Bennett, the county’s emergency manager, said today that he doesn’t expect the county or the Federal Emergency Management Agency will provide financial assistance for the couple.

The county will offer any assistance needed to help them prepare to stabilize the streambank.

“We’ll help them get the permitting and things,” Bennett said. “It’s a tragedy, but we just really don’t have the funds. And if we start down that road ... we can’t protect everyone.”

By Tuesday evening, Colleen said they were told that their insurance would not cover the cost of stabilizing the bank to protect their home.

“We’ve been told there’s not a thing we can do unless the building actually slides in,” she said.

A strong faith has helped the couple focus on their good fortune and the friendships they’ve formed along Pine Creek as they plan their next move.

“It’s been a tough year,” Frank said. “We’re pretty much at bottom. Things have got to look up from here.”

Colleen, 50, who is disabled after three back surgeries that she says “didn’t go well,” formerly worked as a neurosurgical nurse at Oregon Health & Sciences University.

Rheumatoid arthritis forced the 53-year-old Frank to give up a career as a physician’s assistant in neurosurgery at Kaiser Hospital in January. The drier climate of Northeastern Oregon helps ease his symptoms, and so the couple had decided to sell their West Linn home and move to Pine Creek.

And they’ve begun planning ways to remain in the community they’ve come to love since they bought the narrow 5-acre forested stretch of creekside land in 2002.

“When I top that ridge, it takes my breath away,” Frank says about each return trip over the Halfway grade and on to Pine Creek. “Come hell or high water, I’m fighting to stay here.”

The couple have four grown sons.

“This was an investment for them for later,” Colleen said, adding that they had hoped the boys could share the property together in the future.

While waiting for news from insurance adjustors and county officials, Frank carried in his pocket a small pencil drawing of the couple’s plans for expanding the barn into permanent living quarters — a plan that would require Oregon Department of Environmental Quality approval.

“I’m doing everything I can — Number 1 to keep from going absolutely nuts,” he said.

Frank also has been calling real estate agents in the hope of finding other property in the area if necessary.

“It’s a community we want to stay in,” Frank said. “People drop everything to help. There’s nothing like it.”

The couple thought they had their West Linn home sold and had planned to move to Pine Creek this month, Colleen said.

Those plans were disrupted when the house sale fell through just one day before the deal was due to close.

The couple said they breathed a sigh of relief over the failed sale when they learned that their Pine Creek home was in jeopardy.

And, again, they counted their blessings.

“Not everyone has a second house. Not everybody has a barn,” Colleen said.

And Frank adds that having Colleen with him has helped him endure the possibility of losing their Pine Creek home.

“She is the only thing that makes this bearable,” he said. “If she wasn’t by my side, I couldn’t take it.”

The Edwardses were notified of the flood in a Friday phone call from their friends, Susan and Ivan McKim, who said everything looked fine at that time. By Saturday, when another friend, Diana Jensen, drove down from her Pine Creek store to check on the place, things had changed.

Fifty feet of frontage was eroded from their property as Pine Creek filled with heavy rain and runoff on its way from the mountains through Pine Valley and into Hells Canyon Reservoir.

The gauge at the mouth of Pine Creek, about a mile downstream from the Edwards property, measured a flow of 2,520 cubic feet per second (cfs) on June 2.

The flood peaked on Saturday at 13,800 cfs, then receded to 7,020 cfs on Tuesday.

The Edwardses arrived at their Baker County home on Saturday and surveyed the damage in the dark, Colleen said. Sunday morning they discovered another 10 feet had slipped into the creek.

“I’m speechless,” Frank said as his eyes filled with tears. “The things we were planning — everything was based on this little piece of property.”

The couple found the house and land for sale during a fishing trip to Hells Canyon Reservoir. Traveling home they spotted a rusted “For Sale” sign lying in the mud at the top of the driveway off Highway 86 about a mile upstream from Oxbow.

The Edwardses said they immediately fell in love with the site, which is secluded from the highway and surrounded by ponderosa pines and thick brush. They sought out the real estate agent that day to clinch the deal.

Since then, they have traveled from their West Linn home whenever they could to enjoy the beauty of the area.

Tears trailed down Colleen’s cheeks as she pointed to the memorial rose garden established in honor of her mother, Esther Lindsay, and a rock monument they built to honor her rockhounding father, George Lindsay.

The couple recalled their first night spent in a tent on the property. When they awoke the next morning, they found a large pile of bear scat in the trail alongside them. In the past few days since the flood, they have seen bears uncharacteristically pacing up and down the opposite side of the creek in the middle of the afternoon, apparently thrown off by the disruption to their homes as well.

Elk, deer and coyotes also make regular appearances as do golden eagles, bald eagles and flocks of wild turkeys.

“This place has rekindled my faith in God,” Frank said. “Now we’ve got to put our lives in his hands. He’ll provide some way or another.”