Homeowners rebuilding after summer grass fires

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Two months after hundreds of wildfires scorched thousands of acres in Oklahoma, residents are using fire to help sweep away the ashes and rebuild.

Bill Leatherbury burns branches and foliage to improve the view from the deck he's just built on his wife, Judith's, studio in the Arbuckle Mountains of southern Oklahoma. Bobby Howell clears away charred timber to give grass a better chance to grow.

Between mid-August and mid-October, 962 wildfires gnawed through 93,700 Oklahoma acres, said Pat McDowell, Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Forestry Services assistant director.

About 157 structures, including about 75 homes, were reduced to rubble at an estimated cost of $4 million. But a price tag can't be taped to lost efforts and items.

Howell can't retrieve the hours spent building and maintaining his two-bedroom, split-level cabin with polished furniture.

Leatherbury never will thumb again through the white Bible, thicker than the Dallas yellow pages. It was in that Bible that his mother had written family history dating back to the late 1800s.

Howell and Leatherbury spend their days cleaning up and preparing for the future, rather than letting the tragedy tear them down.

For an entire September night, Howell thought that all was gone.

Flames were storming across a nearby ridge as he tossed drawers of clothes in the back of his Chevrolet pickup and evacuated as told.

His family went into Davis. Howell drove to a nearby service station that was used as a command post. He stayed awake through the night, thinking.

"That's just it, I didn't know what I was going to do if I lost my business and home," he said, "but the firefighters and helicopters did an excellent job. It could have been so much worse."

Six of his seven cabins, as well as the Cedarvale restaurant and gardens, were not damaged.

McDowell said ground and air firefighting efforts saved 1,763 structures valued at $90 million.

That included Ruby Lewis' home, only a few feet from another that burned. While emergency personnel watered down Lewis' home, Leatherbury -- her son-in-law -- put the garden hose to his wife's art and antique studio.

Both Lewis' home and the studio were saved.

Elaine Thompson's shock was so great the first two times she visited her property after the fires ripped through Logan County she didn't realize her home was gone.

The home she shared with her husband, Charles, for 20 years was destroyed in the massive wildfires that swept through the county in September.

"You're kind of in a state of shock -- you forget what you had," she said.

Two months later, workers are moving the red dirt in their once charred-yard. They are preparing it for new landscaping and pouring cement for a new carport.

Elaine, 73, and her husband decided they would rebuild on that land even "before the embers stopped glowing," she said.

Many residents whose homes were destroyed by the fires are back in new homes, rented houses or mobile homes just in time for the holidays, said Pat Oliver.

Oliver, director of the Logan County Red Cross, said the last of the chapter's 45 cases from those fires was closed recently.

The Red Cross helped families affected by the fires with rent, new furniture and supplies. The last family is now in a home.