YATES CENTER — The sight was almost too much to comprehend.
A wildfire, fueled by winds in excess of 60 mph, was exploding by the second.
“It looked like a living hell,” Iolan Kaleb Evans said. “Those flames had to be shooting 50, 60 feet into the air. And the smoke was unbelievable.”
Evans was among the legions of residents who stepped forward to aid and assist crews battling fires that raged through Friday and into Saturday.
There were no injuries in the fire that destroyed a local care home, Yates Center Health and Rehab.
EVANS, A service technician for Cox Communications, was in Yates Center Friday afternoon for a service call.
The historic winds — gusts in the region were measured at more than 70 mph — had toppled a tree limb that in turn downed a service line for a local resident.
Evans had just repaired the line, and was moments away from leaving, when a second tree limb fell onto the line, toppling it once again.
He went back to work.
So it was, Evans was stuck in Yates Center a bit longer than he expected.
He completed the second repair, bid the elderly resident a good afternoon, and was about to head back to Iola when he realized what he thought were clouds forming overhead was actually a thick plume of smoke.
“Like everybody else, I thought, ‘what the heck is going on?’” Evans told the Register afterward.
He realized an out-of-control fire was quickly becoming something catastrophic
“That’s when it hit me,” Evans said. “I knew it was near where the care home is.”
Evans drove to the facility, on the southwest edge of town along U.S. 75, and saw staffers and emergency crews hurriedly moving residents out of the structure and onto a pair of shuttle buses.
Evans offered his services, volunteering his company’s van to help take the residents from the scene.
