By Ron Brown
 
August 27, 2010
 
BANDON, Ore. - Today, Bandon is a bustling Oregon coastal town where tourism and dairying are king.
 
74 years ago, in the middle of a massive heat wave and swirling winds, disaster all but wiped out the town, located at the mouth of the Coquille River off the map.
 
Fires that had been set to clear brush and logging slash flared up and blew out of control on Saturday morning, September 26th, 1936. By evening, the fire, moving at nearly 10-miles an hour, was bearing down on Bandon. Many residents were in the town's theater that night.
 
"Curly Wolmer... came in and said, he wanted all able-bodied men to come out and help them. Then he went back in the theater.... He said, 'I'm shutting it down because I'm sure the town is going to burn'," said Bandon Fire Survivor Edgar Capps in an August 2001 interview.
 
"I can also visualize looking up at the hill and these old homes... beautiful old homes on the hill. You could see them just igniting and just outlining the whole framework... and just a collapse and a shower of sparks. That's still imprinted in my mind. It's always there," said Bandon Fire Eyewitness Betty Hiley in an August 2001 interview.
 
"And the house up on the hill from us, Mack's house, just blew up. It's just like dynamite! Just blew up. And her hat blew off her head. She had a straw hat and it caught afire about 10 feet from her head," Harvey Hiley said in an August 2001 interview.
 
Gorse was growing all around Bandon. In between buildings and everywhere. So when sparks from the nearby forest fires landed in the bone-dry hedgerows, flames exploded into towering infernos with fire hundreds of feet in the air. Some people survived only because they were forced to evacuate.
 
There wasn't much time to escape, so many people headed to the docks, and to the beach and surf for
safety. Capps says firefighters did all they could, but it was mostly futile.
 
"Some of them were wooden and they burned. So they didn't have water. But the firemen stayed with every place they could... but their eyes were just completely destroyed! They all needed burn ointment in their eyes," Capps said.
 
Only 16 of the town's 500 buildings survived. Among those were the school and two mills. That meant jobs for survivors and school for the kids, but no stores or other businesses.
 
Temporary building permits were written on pieces of wood veneer, and rebuilding began immediately. One garage became a dorm for mill workers. Some families shared what few homes survived the flames. There were big plans to rebuild as a model town. But the rush to find shelter soon undermined those plans.
 
"It was going to be fantastic. But as many plans happen, nothing happened. So people built in a hodgepodge manner all around town," Betty Hiley said.
 
Miraculously, only 11 people died in the flames. But many suffered smoke injuries to the eyes and lungs. Hospitals ran out of eyewash, and many elderly people later died of respiratory illnesses.
 
According to the Oregon Department of Forestry, the towns of Coquille and Myrtle Point were also threatened by the 1936 fire, but were saved by the aggressive use of bulldozers and backfires.
 
A school burned near a logging camp in Lincoln County, and other homes were lost at Depoe Bay and Yachats.