Tag: Holiday Farm

The little community of Blue River, upstream in the McKenzie River valley from Eugene, Oregon, has a brand-new fire station up and running —  almost four years after the Holiday Farm Fire in 2020 burned their station to the ground.

Station 2 in Blue River is part of the Upper McKenzie Rural Fire Protection District, featured in another of a series of stellar reports on KEZI by Noah Chavez. Christiana Rainbow Plews, the well-known and well-loved fire chief called “Chief Rainbow” by the locals, worked with the district both before and after the Holiday Farm Fire. She decided to retire as the chief, but only after the new fire station was fully operational.

She says the new station compared with the old one is just the difference between night and day. “It’s bigger and the building we had prior to the fire was really just a garage to house the trucks and equipment. It was not like a fire station,” she said. “It was really just a storage building, and the fact that we were able to build something as beautiful as this building with a day room and a kitchen and a chief’s office is just super exciting.”

Taylor Wickizer is one of the newest volunteers at Station 2. Born in Blue River, she and her family moved to Iowa, but Taylor returned after the Holiday Farm Fire. She said everyone in her family felt like they needed to come back to help the community and she has since become devoted to being a firefighter for the district — because of what the community has been through together, they are more than just neighbors.

“Up here it is not even like a community, it is like a family — I mean everybody is here for the people and especially the fire and emergency services,” she said.