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MONDAY 11-08-21 PODCASTS   6AM   –   7AM   –   8AM

TUESDAY 11-09-21 PODCASTS   6AM   –   7AM   –   8AM

WEDNESDAY 11-10-21 PODCASTS   6AM   –   7AM   –   8AM

THURSDAY 11-11-21 PODCASTS   6AM   –   7AM   –   8AM

FRIDAY 11-12-21 PODCASTS   6AM    –  7AM   –   8AM

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Friday 11-12-21 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information

ARTICLES I FIND INTERESTING TODAY

Global Cooling in the Arctic? https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2021/11/seemengly-insignificant-news.html (In spite of our own Gov Dim Bulb trip to Scotland to bleat “Cliiiiiimate”.

Communism vs “Communism” – https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2021/11/11/communism-vs-communism/

Steve Kirsch – Why can’t Anyone Explain Why These 14 Children Died? – https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/why-cant-anyone-explain-how-these

6:35 Rick Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government, www.DailyTorch.com and www.GetLiberty.org

Rick and I talk over my recent interview with Cong. Cliff Bentz. (Thursday’s 8am Podcast) I asked Cliff what level of “Impeachment Talk” there was in the GOP given the Biden administration is arguably committing real crimes against the people, open borders, criminal pot gangs in Jo and Jackson Counties, exacerbated by the President’s actions. They impeached Trump for much less. Rick talks the reality of the current GOP, and the path forward.

7:10 Outdoor Report with Greg Roberts at www.RogueWeather.com

8:10 Estrella Cervantes with Southern Oregon Humane – Saturday and Sunday, November 13 and 14 Noon to 5PM, as part of their 3rd annual Meows and Whiskers Weekend, you can ‘Spin the Wheel” to see which reduced adoption fee you will receive for an adult cat. No matter where the wheel lands, everyone is a winner!

 Additional information about the animals is also available by calling 541-779-3215, emailing adoptions@sohumane.org or visiting www.sohumane.org. Check out the SoHumane Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/SoHumane/

Where: SoHumane Adoption Center, 2910 Table Rock Road, Medford, Oregon

 

8:35 Brad Bennington, Executive Director of the Builders Association of Southern Oregon. www.BuildSO.org and we continue our discussions on the benefits of becoming a member of BASO, how it fights for TRULY affordable housing, their non-profit status and how you can contribute to help the mission and other topics.

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MEDIA AND SOCIAL MEDIA SUPPRESS SEN. RON JOHNSON HEARINGS.

One of the most suppressed stories of this week was the Covid-19 hearings held by U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. NO major media was there, but the full hearing was carried on Del Bigtree’s site – https://thehighwire.com/videos/live-in-d-c-expert-panel-on-medical-mandates-vaccine-injuries/

The Vlad Tepes Blog has posted several “highlights” from that broadcast of Americans who testified to Covid-19 vaccine damage to either themselves or family members having been injured.

When a doctor is vax damaged – https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/11/04/what-happens-when-a-doctor-gets-vaxx-damaged-and-tries-to-report-it/

How Pfizer manipulated the testing – https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/11/04/more-powerful-testimony-on-vaccine-damage-as-well-as-how-pfizer-cheated-its-own-study-by-design/

Little girl damaged in Pfizer trial – https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/11/04/vaxx-victim-from-pfizers-child-trials-crippled-and-ignored-in-pfizer-data/

Young Mother speaks on her vax damage – https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/11/03/young-mother-speaks-about-her-vaccine-damage/

Farmer video on damage – https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/11/02/farm-operations-manager-from-idaho-permanently-paralyzed-from-the-vaccine/

Father in Texas speaks of loss of his son – https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/11/02/father-in-texas-speaks-to-the-loss-of-his-son-from-the-vaccine/

Pilot’s career ended – https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/11/02/pilot-cody-flint-speaks-about-how-his-career-was-ended-by-the-vaxx-and-nearly-crashed-his-plane/

BTW, don’t bother trying to share these stories on social media, the deep state tech tyrants won’t let it go anywhere, but you could email these old school to people you know.

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Thursday 11-11-21 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information

6:35 Mark Mix, is President of the National Right to Work Committee which is a 2.8 million-member public policy organization. He also serves as President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

We dig into the supply chain problems and the role unions play regarding the problems.

FIND HIS WEBSITE HERE:

FIND HIM ON FACEBOOK HERE:

FIND HIM ON TWITTER HERE:

7:35 Dr. Kathleen Brown—who practiced dermatology for 21 years in Oregon and founded Oregon Coast Dermatology in 2011 as an alternative to a broken healthcare system regarding why we should Reject the Senator Sanders Deceptive Infrastructure Plan. Here’s her op-ed on the issue:

https://www.realclearhealth.com/articles/2021/09/16/reject_senator_sanders_deceptive_infrastructure_plan_111242.html

Reject Senator Sanders Deceptive Infrastructure Plan

By Dr. Kathleen Brown
September 16, 2021

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and his allies call their $3.5 trillion budget bill an “infrastructure” plan. But look high and low, and you won’t find mention of a single road or bridge. What you will find is the biggest expansion of government interference in health care in decades – one that, advances the government takeover of healthcare.

As a physician, I can say without hesitation that this is the wrong direction for American health care. 

The plan allocates some $1.3 trillion towards government-run healthcare schemes, a whopping 1.5 times more expensive than Obamacare. And remember, Obamacare cost taxpayers and enrollees far more than what we were initially told. The Sanders plan will be no different – you can expect that $1.3 trillion price-tag to be the floor.

Sen. Sanders is following a well-worn Washington playbook – gradually get more people off (excessively regulated) private insurance plans and into government programs to build government dependency and create constituencies for more and bigger government. This is a vicious cycle that, in this case, inevitably leads to government-run health care, and less choice for individuals.

To start, the bill would spend $370 billion to expand Medicare benefits for hearing, vision, and dental – benefits that Medicare beneficiaries already have access to at no additional cost to taxpayers through Medicare Advantage plans. In fact, Medicare Advantage plans already attract more than 40 percent of Medicare beneficiaries.

But, Medicare Advantage plans are private insurance products that compete with each other to deliver benefits to willing seniors under Medicare’s oversight. To Sen. Sanders and his allies, that looks too much like a free market, and they don’t like it. They believe adding new benefits will move people from this more competitive, efficient, and consumer-friendly option into traditional, government-centered Medicare – even though it would mean higher premiums for beneficiaries, higher costs for taxpayers, or both.

The plan would also expand Obamacare in two flawed ways. 

First, it would offer Medicaid directly to individuals in states that chose not to participate in the Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Because Medicaid pays doctors far less than even what Medicare does, they are far less likely to accept Medicaid patients compared to patients with private health insurance. This drastically limits who Medicaid recipients can see and their access to care.

Medicaid is also terribly wasteful.  In just two years it reported $143 billion in improper payments. Even more concerning is that Medicaid often provides substandard care, with a major study concluding that the program “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes.”

Americans already spend more than $600 billion a year on this wasteful and ineffective program. Yet Sen. Sanders thinks we should expand it. That is not the way to improve it.

Second, the plan would make permanent the increased Obamacare subsidies that were part of Covid relief, with much of that aid going to those who do not need it. A recent study conducted by health care expert Brian Blase, PhD, found that under this proposal “a family of four with a 60-year-old head of household and income of 600 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), or $159,000 a year, would qualify for an annual [Obamacare subsidy] of $16,845.”

Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office says the vast majority of this new spending would go to those who already have insurance, providing a huge incentive for some private companies to push employees off their company-sponsored private plans and onto the Obamacare exchanges.[7] The result would once again be more Americans on government-run health care and a shift in cost from the private sector to taxpayers. 

There is a pattern here.

And of course, what wasteful Washington budget would be complete without a special-interest giveaway?  In this case, a gift to the unions in the form of $400 billion to expand adult in-home and day care through Medicaid. In many states, these workers are designated “public employees” because Medicaid pays them, so they must join a union. This is special interest pork-barreling at its worst and it decreases choices for these workers.

One way Sen. Sanders proposes to pay for all this is to allow the government to fix the prices of prescription drugs. It sounds like a simple solution. But one only has to look to European nations with similar policies to see that allowing the government to set price controls inevitably leads to drug shortages and fewer new cures and therapies, effectively inserting the government directly into your medicine cabinet.

If the Covid pandemic taught us anything, it is that the way to get Americans quicker access to more life-saving drugs and treatments is to remove governmental obstacles and empower innovators. But price fixing does the opposite by deterring investment into research and development. As a result, vulnerable patients, including those waiting on cures for rare and complex diseases, will suffer most.

Congress needs to reject this government health care takeover masquerading as an infrastructure plan. We have serious health care issues in this country, and they can be addressed through personal options for health care that give people more choice and control over their own care. But, surreptitious efforts to move Americans off the private health plans they like onto government systems will only make matters worse.  

In spite of the enormous intervention of government into healthcare and the governmental protectionism afforded to the giant health insurance companies, hospitals, unions, and pharmaceutical companies, new entrepreneurial solutions are developing. The last thing that we need to do is shut them down or crowd them out by further protecting the giant market incumbents and enlarging the role of government in healthcare. More choice, more freedom, is an American value.

Dr. Kathleen Brown practiced dermatology for 21 years in Oregon and founded Oregon Coast Dermatology in 2011 as an alternative to a broken healthcare system. She and her husband currently live in Montana and now run Montana Dermatology.

 8:35 U.S. Congressman Cliff Bentz – We dig into the recent town halls, any talk of impeachment given the border collapse of security, and other issues including both “infrastructure” bills.

 

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Wednesday 11-10-21 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information

6:35 “Wheels Up Wednesday” with Eric Peters, automotive journalist with www.EpAutos.com and our weekly talk on politics and transportation including:

The Regime Comes Clean – https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2021/11/09/the-regime-comes-clean/

The Last Manual – https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2021/11/09/the-last-manual-and-when/

Risk Reversal – https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2021/11/07/risk-reversal/

The Whirlwind – https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2021/11/08/the-whirlwind/

8:10 Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD, (Oakland-California) board-certified anesthesiologist and immediate past President of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Is Fauci’s time over? Here’s her latest op-ed article:

November 9th, 2021

Sometimes It Takes a Puppy

by Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD

A few years back I returned from setting up our make-shift medical clinic in El Salvador after braving washed out roads and trying to stay on the right side of MS-13 to an “incident.” I had stored a banana in my purse to enjoy on the airplane. Upon arrival in San Francisco, I was approached by a Customs agent and his cute little beagle who had alerted him to the smell of contraband—my now-consumed banana.

I only hope the beagles who gave their lives for a perverted science experiment will similarly “bust” Dr. Fauci. We all know he has done much worse: suppressed possible life-saving treatment to AIDS patients, funded dangerous “gain of function” studies making viruses more deadly, suppressed early treatment of COVID-19, promoted ineffective, toxic remdesivir to treat hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and fanatically pushed for experimental mRNA “vaccines.”

Sometimes it takes a puppy.

But sometimes it takes all of us to turn back the clock from 1984. This story of a society held together by “thoughtcrimes” and “Newspeak” was supposed to be a cautionary tale to alert us to the insidious rise of totalitarianism. Sadly, apathy was the would-be overlords’ ally. Civil debate with exchange of facts and opinions based on those facts has all but disappeared. Many Americans became all too comfortable with silencing of views with which certain corners of society disagree.

Science was supposed to be the pursuit of knowledge through uncensored factual experimental or observable data. Now well-researched medical articles that challenge the party line have been “removed” from public view for unstated reasons.

The silver lining of COVID-19 is that the unscientific responses and public policies have exposed breaches of scientific integrity. It has also brought to light the assault on the patient-centered practice of medicine. This assault has been years in the making. First, the insurers called us providers. What a degrading term! We didn’t object. No matter what one’s health care skill is, we are healers, not mere service providers. Once we accepted being mere cogs, the insurers and Medicare could more easily insinuate themselves into the patient-physician relationship. Play by our rules or you don’t get paid. Purchase of physician practices by private equity firms, regulation of formularies, factory-like working conditions with patient over-bookings, and dehumanizing electronic medical records have become routine rather than a source of outrage.

The last straw may be the AMA’s most recent foray into the world of pre-Marxist ideology. With a straight face in the pursuit of equity, the AMA has released a document filled with “Newspeak”. It wants to erase the “narratives grounded in white supremacy,” “meritocracy and individualism” and use “a rich tradition of work in health equity and related fields, including critical race theory” to guide our thoughts and speech. We can no longer use the term “white paper” which of course has nothing to do with racial identity. We can no longer say vulnerable because “People are not vulnerable; they are made vulnerable.” Minority is out and BIPOC is in. We are to avoid saying “target,” “tackle,” “combat” or other terms with violent connotation when referring to people, groups or communities. Do they really think anyone is going to pay attention to such drivel?

I guess we should send this document to President Biden who said we have to keep punching at the problem of violence against women, or poor kids are just as bright as white kids or that Barack Obama was articulate and bright and clean.

The tide is turning. Toxic critical race theory and usurpation of parents’ rights was defeated in Virginia. Protests against medical tyranny are growing. States are filing lawsuits against vaccine mandates. The truth is coming out. The British Medical Journal has proudly published and spread through social media an article whose title speaks for itself: Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial. Some authorities are backing off on vaccine mandates (here and here).

And as for Dr. Fauci, he will be the next Greek mythical hero, felled by his hubris. Let’s all send him copy of Arthur Guiterman’s poem, On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness.

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls

Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just

Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear whose potent hug

Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar’s bust is on my shelf,

And I don’t feel so well myself.

His time is coming. 

8:45 Open for Business with Steve Johnson, “Steve The Goldsmith” from QuikFix Jewelry Repair in the Rogue Valley Mall, lower level by Macy’s. It’s GRAND OPENING time, and we’ll discuss all of Steve’s services – Call QuikFix at 541-690-1388 and more info at https://quikfixrvm.com/

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Tuesday 11-09-21 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information

6:35 Professor Rob Natelson

Robert G. Natelson is a former constitutional law professor, constitutional historian, and senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver. His research has been cited by Supreme Court justices, as he is especially known for his studies of the Constitution’s original meaning. He is the author of “The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant” (3rd ed., 2014). Natelson’s Constitutional Studies homepage here. As a weekly contributor to the Epoch Times, you can read his articles here

“Can someone explain how an unelected bureaucrat gets away with gain-of-function research without the permission of either President Obama or President Trump and is not held accountable?” Professor Rob Natelson

Natelson’s new Epoch Times article details the reasons why it is time to ‘Abolish the CDC & NIH.’

 7:35 Jo Co Commissioner Herman Baertschiger talks with me about pot, zoning, political tribalism and other issues affecting southern Oregon

8:10 Kathryn Hickok from the Cascade Policy Institute

 

Kathryn Hickok is Executive Vice President at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization, and Director of Cascade’s Children’s Scholarship Fund-Oregon program.

 How COVID-19 Turned 2021 into “The Year of
School Choice”

Click here for PDF.

By Kathryn Hickok

This fall, Oregon children began their third school year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. What started as two weeks of remote learning in March 2020 turned into a year outside the classroom for most K-12 students

Pandemic-related government and teachers’ union policies have disappointed and angered parents as their children fell behind, developed an aversion to “Zoom school,” and lost confidence in their academic abilities. The school closures have also given parents an unprecedented chance to examine the quality and content of their children’s instruction through the online “window to the classroom.”

These experiences are motivating many parents to take charge of their children’s education and to advocate for change. Out of this public health crisis can come a unique opportunity for Oregon to expand educational options for all students through a more personalized delivery of education services.

Long before schools closed or switched to remote learning platforms, the landscape of options to meet the needs of K-12 students was already diverse and growing. Oregon families were choosing private and parochial schools, public charter schools (including online schools), homeschooling, magnet schools, and more.

Since COVID-19, new types of learning environments have become household words, like microschools, pods, and hybrid education. The technological advances of the past few decades have made available to parents an almost unlimited array of curriculum resources and instructional aids. It has never been easier to homeschool, to supplement district offerings with web-based courses, or to combine in-classroom time with home learning.

Education policies should value all options going forward, and parents should be free to choose among them. Making education flexible and personalized lets parents match their children with what works for them as individual learners.

During the past two years, many more parents have begun “voting with their feet,” here in Oregon and throughout the U.S. Here are some shifts in education trends that have taken place since the COVID pandemic began:

1)    According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, regular public school district enrollment in Oregon fell by 5.5% between 2019-20 and 2020-21.

2)    Bellweather Education Partners claims 8.7 million children have switched from public to private schools in the U.S.

3)    Charter school enrollment in Oregon increased 20.8% between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years.

4)    Homeschooling has seen explosive growth. According to the U.S. Census, 11.1% of households with school-aged children report they are now homeschooling, double the percentage before the pandemic. Data from the Oregon Department of Education and Education Service Districts indicate that the number of Oregon homeschooled students increased 73% between the last two school years.

        Homeschooling families are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. The Washington Post wrote in July: “Between 2019 and May 2021, home-schooling rates jumped from about 1 percent to 8 percent for Black students—a more than sixfold increase. Among Hispanic students, rates jumped from 2 percent to 9 percent….”

As these enrollment shifts have taken place, broad-based public support of parental choice has also increased. Seven state legislatures passed new school choice laws this year, and 14 states expanded 21 existing programs. West Virginia enacted the broadest K-12 Education Savings Account program in the country, accessible to almost all students in the state.

Oregon policymakers should join this wave of support for options in education and expand the opportunities available to Oregon families. Here are a few places to start:

1)    Raise the arbitrary legislative cap on Oregon charter schools that limits enrollment to 3% of students in the district; this would allow successful and popular charters to meet student demand.

2)    Convert some of the state education funding—allocated per child but paid directly to district schools, regardless of individual outcomes—to portable accounts for students; let the money follow the child to the schools that are the best fit for them. An Education Savings Account program constructed along this model could expand students’ opportunities while saving taxpayers money.

3)    Expand district transfer policies so parents can choose among public school options; this would create incentives for schools to respond to parents’ needs and concerns and reward schools that achieve better outcomes.

As the state moves forward from the COVID-19 shutdowns, Oregonians should evaluate the ways K-12 education is delivered and funded and advocate for change. Now is the time to put education funding in the hands of parents so children can learn in the education settings that work best for them. Giving parents the power of choice in education is the school reform whose time has come.

Kathryn Hickok is Executive Vice President at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization, and Director of Cascade’s Children’s Scholarship Fund-Oregon program.

8:45 Open for Business with Cheriesse with No Wires Now, www.NoWiresMedia.com – call or text Cheriesse at 1-541-680-5875. She has gifts for people who bring her their bill to save money on satellite TV, phone, internet, home security and more from a LOCAL company. She’ll help you redeem any dish Mastercard offers and still deal with a LOCAL team. If not a mastercard offer, she still has the Google Nest router as a premium for signing up with her at No Wires Now, 1560 Biddle Rd Suite B, Medford, OR 97504

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Monday 11-08-21 Bill Meyer Show Guest Information

6:35 Dr. John Lott is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He was the senior adviser for research and statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, and he worked on vote fraud issues. Dr. Lott’s recent book is Gun Control Myths: How politicians, the media, and botched “studies” have twisted the facts on gun control

The Supreme Court Has an Opportunity to Defend the Second Amendment

By Dr. John Lott

The work that I started over 23 years ago with my book “More Guns, Less Crime,” which dealt with Right-to-Carry concealed handgun laws, is coming to a head today. When it decides on NYSRPA v. Bruen – scheduled for oral arguments today – the Supreme Court will have a chance to stop governments from restricting the right to “bear arms.”

The part of the Constitution guaranteeing that right has long been ignored by many state and local governments, despite previous Supreme Court rulings that there is an “individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” in the home. The situation is worst in New York, California and six other “may-issue” states, where officials can turn down requests for a carry permit for any reason, or for no reason at all.

More at: https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-has-opportunity-defend-second-amendment-opinion-1640471

7:10 Greg Roberts – Rogue Weather Dot Com and today’s outdoor report

7:35 John Anthony with the Sustainable Freedom Lab – www.SustainableFreedomLab.org

CDC’s Flawed Study Shows Desperation to Justify Mandates

 An October 2021 Israeli study showed the vaccinated were 9X more likely to be hospitalized than those who had natural immunity from prior infection.1

 Weeks later the CDC released a contradictory study claiming those with natural immunity, it claimed, were more likely than the vaccinated to be hospitalized. As Martin Kulldorf, an epidemiological biostatistician from Harvard Medical School who analyzed the study said, “Both studies cannot be right.”2

 More than 100 studies now show the effectiveness and longevity of prior COVID infections in preventing illness and hospitalization.3

 With the government’s push for vaccination mandates, the pressure was on the CDC to prove they worked better than natural immunity.

Their new study claims the Covid-recovered were 5X more likely than the vaccinated to contract Covid. Was everyone else wrong?4

 The study tells a different story.

Read More at https://sustainablefreedomlab.org/2021/11/05/cdcs-tortured-study-claims-vaccines-superior-to-natural-immunity

 

 8:10 Dr. Dennis Powers “Where Past Meets Present”

The Almeda Fire: Least We Not Forget

By Dennis Powers

Although fire-scorched trees, landscape, and bare concrete where structures used to be (or being rebuilt) are seen, the impact of the Almeda Fire is still burned into our memories. On a windy, early morning on September 8, 2020, people were going about their business, only to be struck by a fire that started south of Ashland’s city heart and raced with wind gusts along I-5 towards Talent, Phoenix, Medford, and Central Point. It didn’t stop.

Some say it was the windiest day ever witnessed here and the air felt dry. As a meteorologist concluded: High winds, hot temperatures, the ongoing drought, and dry conditions formed a “perfect storm” of fire conditions. The gusts of winds for hours were estimated at 40 mph or higher.

To the southeast of Ashland’s center, the grass field where the fire probably started (near Almeda Drive) was next to a 5-acre plot without trees or shrubs; the high wind gusts and dry grass alone pushed the fire out of reach. By the time, Ashland firemen arrived some seven minutes later, the field was blackened and reports of structure fires were being heard over the radio.

But after the fire tore through the field, it hit the wide-open Bear Creek Greenway and wind-whipped over a heavy fuel load of bushes, downed trees and timber, all extremely dry, raced along I-5.  Phoenix/Talent and Ashland Fire Department engines went to work immediately, spraying the homes that were hit and succeeded in saving a few.

Within a 360-degree orange glow, surrounded by fire during the day and night, and breathing soot and smoke, the firefighters tried to fight back. (Self-contained breathing apparatus (“SCBA”) and its 30-minute tanks aren’t much help when fighting house fires spreading like wildfires.) Helicopters with water or retardant began dropping their loads. But the fires were faster.

When fire engines were sent out to a subdivision on Willow Springs Drive, one house was already burning; firemen worked to prevent it from spreading to the other houses tightly packed around. However, scattered flaming embers sprang new fires near instantaneously. 

It wasn’t long before responders knew how dire the situation was: No help from outside Southern Oregon was likely coming. On that day, resources from Grants Pass to Ashland were all that were available. Fewer than 200 firefighters battled the Almeda fire during the first two days. A task force from Portland showed up at around 11 p.m. that night to help for the next 12 hours. But that was it.

As one fire chief observed: “It was pretty amazing, the next 30 hours to watch,” he said. “All of us are working 30, 40 hours in a row. And it’s not sitting at a desk. It’s physically demanding work of dragging hose, fighting fires, pulling people and helping people into vehicles, carrying stuff, moving stuff on limited sleep, limited food and water and no real breaks. Some of these guys were working 30-plus hours and their break was a five-minute drive to the next house on fire.”

On the first day of the fire around 9:00 p.m., a firefighter in Talent cracked open a hydrant. He discovered that the hydrants were dry–depressurized by the fire rupturing thousands of gushing pipes. They had to fill up the trucks from Ashland hydrants and race back–a 10-minute turnaround that yielded only about three to four minutes of spray. They only had two wildfire grass engines (Ford F250s), two engines, one water tender and eight firefighters for a roughly 6-mile stretch of road, but somehow managed to keep the fire from largely crossing over Talent Avenue.

Meanwhile, police were trying to evacuate areas ahead of the firefighters. Officers drove through city streets in near-zero visibility, knocked on doors, and evacuated those who either weren’t aware of the fires or unable to find a way out. Some were confined to electric wheelchairs. When unable to get out fast enough, police would stop in trucks, put the frightened folks into the back, and lifted the chairs with them. 

With Talent, Phoenix, even to Medford and Central Point being burned extensively, the following morning, the conflagration was basically under control—but with spot fires continuing on. The fire took three lives, consumed some 2,600 residences, and destroyed or damaged 200 businesses.

The reconstruction of the burned-out areas will take years. Elementary and high school students needed to be able to get their education with Talent and Phoenix being inoperable. The homeless needed shelter, food, clothing, medical assistance, and support. Housing and buildings needed to be replaced. 

Those of us who didn’t lose homes, pets, or friends can be thankful. All of Southern Oregon can be–for this could have been much worse.

Source: Trish Glose, “Remembering Almeda,” KTVL TV, at Almeda Fire; Sources: Joe Zavala, “We gave everything we had,” Mail Tribune, Sept. 7, 2021 at Fighting the Fire.

8:45 Open for Business with Marisa Payne from Prestige Senior Living Arbor Place. Next Tuesdayk 11/16 at 10am They’re putting on a FREE webinar with Laura Vaillancourt entitled “Caring for the Caregiver; How to Find Your Ground, Even When You Feel Lost”. During the webinar, Vaillancourt will be offering advice and guidance to people acting as caregivers for a loved one. To register for the free webinar, visit www.prestigecanhelp.com.

Laura Vaillancourt is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Geriatric Mental Health Specialist and Eldercare Coach, with experience helping families navigate the complexities and emotions of caring for a parent or other senior.

The webinar will be of great interest to anyone who is currently caring for a senior who will be in the near future.