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Betty Dunkerley’s Wildfire Miracle
On Monday, Sept. 5, former Austin City Council Member Betty Dunkerley learned that her Bastrop home had burned to the ground.
Then, on Tuesday, Sept. 6 something strange happened, not for the last time.
“Early that morning, our priest’s husband went into the neighborhood,” Dunkerley says. “(He) told me my house was still standing.”
Her relief was shortlived.
Midafternoon, her fortunes reversed again when Dunkerley spied her address in the Tahitian Village subdivision listed on a website as still standing.
After 5 p.m. that same Tuesday, an official map showed the area where she lived as most likely destroyed.
Her rollercoaster ride was not over yet. Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, whose officers helped out with the disaster response, checked on the residence.
“On Wednesday afternoon, he drove me by to see the house from the outside,” Dunkerley says. Miraculously, the three-bedroom, ranch house with extensive woodwork wrapped around a backyard patio and even beds of flowers and vegetables were virtually untouched.
Across the street, a neighbor’s house was reduced to rubble. Across her backyard, all was gone, razed by the time we recently visited.
Dunkerley’s longtime friends, former City of Austin purchasing director Sue Brubaker and her husband, retired businessman Stewart Brubaker, joined us examining the general devastation, along with Dunkerley’s former aide, Suzie Harriman, and her husband, retired classical music writer Randy Harriman.
“It was a like a tornado,” says Stewart Brubaker, who lives not far away. “It just bounced right over Betty’s house.”
The Brukbakers’ house also survived.
Dunkerley points out where a wooden fence once stood, where the wildfire lapped up next to the patio, where a wooden tub planter burned at the base, yet its brilliant yellow hibiscus blooms flourished.
The whole near-miss aspect of Dunkerley’s story was tempered by the losses around her. As we inspect mile after mile of pines, poking up like used matchsticks, we note subdivisions wiped out, or with a lonely structure still standing. Here, a house is gone, but its garage is untouched. There, open space and meadow protects a cluster of untouched homes.
Along the back roads, a blanket of gray ash looks like forlorn snow.
Over dinner an excellent meal at the family-style Las Cocinas Mexican Restaurant on Texas 95, we hear about some of the wildfire’s saving graces. How FEMA, the Red Cross and the Austin Community Foundation responded quickly and expertly to the disaster. How local churches banded together to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for those who must replace everything.
(Dunkerley and the Brubakers are heavily involved with Calvary Episcopal, whose rector, the Reverend Lisa Hines, lost her home, and yet spent the days after wildfire ministering to her congregants as they dealt with the emotional and spiritual aftermath.)
Financial wiz Dunkerley, who stays active consulting on Austin’s proposed medical school project, just smiles and raises her eyebrows when she takes another look at her incongrously serene home.
“It must have been a guardian angel,” she says. “And some wet St. Augustine grass.”
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