May 11--Deanna Glinski saw the smoke plume rising from the Germann Road fire from 35 miles away, while she was driving home to Barnes from Duluth.
She saw the fire's flames as she drove down Douglas County Highway A, just miles from her home.
But the Barnes Volunteer Fire Department firefighter and former wildland firefighter knew just what to do.
"I called my husband and told him to get home NOW. ... I grabbed a box of birth certificates and other documents, the computer tower ... and a suitcase full of clothes for the kids, and I told my husband to take the kids to a motel in Hayward so I knew they would be safe," Glinski said. "Then I went down to the fire hall."
Glinski, an X-ray technician at Essentia Health in Hayward, spent the next 12 hours or so evacuating residents in and around Barnes, where she's lived most of her life, and then battling the fire near some of her neighbors' homes.
The fire hit just as their family was split between their rental home in Barnes and their new home near Ellison Lake, on which they had just closed three weeks earlier.
"We were just about moved in," she said.
Glinski and her Barnes Fire Department partner were busy battling spot fires -- small fires spurred by burning embers that fall far ahead of the main fire -- as well as creeping ground fires at some of her neighbors' homes near Ellison Lake. At one point in the night, she was just a few doors down from her new house, only 100 yards away or so.
"It was dark, and there was so much smoke. We saw other houses burning ... but you always hope that yours is going to make it," Glinski said. "To be honest, I was too busy doing my job to get too worked up."
During a break, at about 1 a.m., Glinski asked a fellow firefighter to take his personal vehicle and drive down the driveway at her new house. He came back shaking his head.
"I knew right then it was gone, just by looking at him," she said. "We were probably just down the road at somebody else's house when it happened."
The Glinskis were lucky, she notes. They received their insurance settlement quickly and paid off their mortgage "in the first payment," Deanna said with a laugh.
Now, all 5 acres of burned trees on their land have been entirely logged off. There's hardly a standing tree on the property. What had been a very private, secluded cabin is now out in the open. Still, Deanna, husband Ben (also a volunteer firefighter) and their four kids made the decision to rebuild at the same site "the day after the fire."
"My parents live across the lake. I've lived here most of my life. I can't imagine living anywhere else," Deanna said, adding that she's hopeful that the black of charred trees and the vast open spaces where burned trees were logged off will one day again be lush with green growth.
"The trees will come back," she said. "It may take a while, but it will happen."
Now, as their new home is just about complete, you can see for a quarter-mile in every direction. You can see some neighbors' homes that survived; new construction is going up where others burned.
"The Mason Fire Department stayed at that house with their super pumper during the fire and they saved it," Deanna said, pointing to a house just 200 yards from hers.
The fire burned so hot that it buckled the blacktop driveway and the home's concrete foundation. Ben Glinski remembers sorting through rubble in what had been the basement and finding shattered Pyrex cookware.
"That's how hot the fire was," he said.
A few charred bits from the old house are still strewn about the lot, mementos of the worst night in Barnes that just about anyone can remember.
The Glinskis say they were fortunate to be able to stay in their rental house just down the road as their new home was being built during the winter.
"It's been a long process, especially with how cold the winter has been," Deanna said. "We were paying for propane (to heat) both places. But it's just about done now."
Meanwhile, Deanna is the star of a new four-minute video produced by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on how homeowners in rural areas need to be "ember aware" of how vulnerable their property is to wildfire. The video uses footage of the Germann Road fire and the Glinksis' house in ruins.
Deanna said the family never had the chance to take precautions at the new house before it burned down. She and her husband knew, for example, that two white pines with branches hanging over the house needed to be removed. And her driveway at the time was too narrow for big firetrucks to safely navigate.
"Some crew probably checked it out and decided it wasn't safe to go down there, and that's probably why it burned," she said. "I would have done the same thing."
"I knew those were problems, but we just didn't have time," Deanna said. "I already knew from past fires how important those things are -- clearing out around the house. ... Now, maybe this fire will convince other people that this can happen to anyone."
Copyright 2014 - Duluth News Tribune
