⁍ Hundreds in Jackson County, Oregon, were reduced to rubble this week by the Almeda Fire.

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⁍ At least ten people have been killed in Oregon, and the death toll is expected to rise.

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⁍ For Tracy Koa’s family, like many others, the year had already been hellish because of the COVID-19 pandemic before the inferno arrived.

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– “We were feeling like, we’re finally going to be okay through all of this,” Tracy Koa tells Reuters. Koa, a high school teacher in Oregon, was in her classroom last Tuesday preparing for the first day of school—which would be online due to COVID-19—when her 13-year-old daughter called in alarm: A fire was coming, and they had to evacuate, now. Koa raced home. From the driveway of her house in Talent, she watched the cloud of smoke from the nearby wildfire turn to black from gray, a sign she knew meant homes were aflame. Within minutes, Koa, her partner David Tanksley, and her daughter Seneca had packed their car with camping gear and their cat and joined a crawling line of traffic to evacuate. They never saw their house standing again. It was one of hundreds in Jackson County, Oregon, which has a population of about 220,000, that were reduced to rubble this week by the Almeda Fire. At least 10 people have been killed in Oregon, and the death toll is expected to rise as conflagrations rage across the US West. Koa and Tanksley returned to Talent on Saturday with dread. “You think of every family and every situation and every burned-down car, and there are just no words for it,” she says. In the pile of debris that was once their home, Tanksley dug out a small Buddha statue that belonged to Koa’s daughter.