{"id":12698,"date":"2016-06-14T11:25:41","date_gmt":"2016-06-14T17:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=12698"},"modified":"2016-06-14T21:48:50","modified_gmt":"2016-06-15T03:48:50","slug":"baker-firefighters-wed-then-quickly-respond-to-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/06\/baker-firefighters-wed-then-quickly-respond-to-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Baker firefighters wed, then quickly respond to disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Big<\/a>

Photo courtesy of Becca Bumgardner<\/p>

Becca and Hugo Bumgardner, both of them Baker firefighters, had rather a big day on Saturday.<\/p><\/div>\n

Hugo and Becca Bumgardner were wed Saturday evening in Marmarth, N.D., 15 miles east of their home in Baker.<\/p>\n

Like nine or 10 people on hand for the wedding, Hugo and Becca are members of the Baker Rural Fire Department. At the reception afterward, right after dinner, numerous pagers started going off, alerting them to one of the biggest disasters in the history of Baker.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had just finished eating,\u201d Becca said, \u201cand thank goodness we got through the meal, because we were up pretty much all through the night.\u201d<\/p>\n

They and numerous other first responders had plenty of work to do after an EF-3 tornado, matching the most severe tornadoes ever recorded in Montana<\/a>, hit Baker shortly after 7 p.m. Saturday.<\/p>\n

The storm destroyed six houses and damaged more than 50. No one was killed after the tornado touched down, but at least six people were reported to have been injured.<\/p>\n

Becca said all the other members of the fire department at the wedding left immediately, as did some of the other guests. She and Hugo stayed in Marmarth for maybe another hour, catching up with some of the wedding guests, before racing back to Baker in her pickup truck.<\/p>\n

The drive back to Baker, she said, \u201cprobably wasn\u2019t your typical first moments alone, bride-and-groom style.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was on the phone with friends and relatives, including some cousins who lost their house, and they stopped several times to urge people driving toward Baker to stop and turn around, because there were reports of a possible second tornado on the way. Luckily, there wasn\u2019t another.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>When they got to town, Hugo went to the fire hall and Becca went home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to my house so I could get out of my wedding dress so I could get my gear on,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She spent the next three or four hours driving around with the assistant fire chief and setting up portable lights to aid in the search for survivors. Becca said she left about midnight to drive back to Marmarth to fetch their dogs. They had brought them along because they had planned to spend the night in Marmarth.<\/p>\n

Returning to Baker, she went to be with her relatives whose home was destroyed. Hugo worked until 3 or 4 a.m., looking for people possibly trapped under debris, then both of them went back to work at 7 a.m.<\/p>\n

Hugo said that when the initial reports came in, nobody knew the extent of the damage in Baker.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo clue,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it was a tornado touchdown, so I figured it wasn\u2019t good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through the night, Hugo said, people kept coming up to him with the same basic message: \u201cCongratulations. Sorry it couldn\u2019t have been more fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

A friend who was at the wedding, Talon Stoddard, works for Griffith Engineering in Baker, so he headed back to town quickly in case people needed generators or heavy equipment.<\/p>\n

Stoddard said they distributed five or six generators throughout the night.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything we had we brought out and let them plug in whatever needed to keep their food from going bad,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Stoddard described the scenes of destruction in Baker as \u201cjaw-dropping,\u201d with demolished or severely damaged houses and debris everywhere, some of the debris still flying around.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the stuff you see on TV, not in your hometown,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

If nothing else, Becca said, a lot of people have told her they won\u2019t soon forget her wedding. And she was taking it in stride.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody feels so bad about the whole situation. But I tell everybody, \u2018We got the marriage license signed.\u2019 That\u2019s what matters.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hugo and Becca Bumgardner were wed Saturday evening in Marmarth, N.D., 15 miles east of their home in Baker. Like nine or 10 people on hand for the wedding, Hugo and Becca are members of the Baker Rural Fire Department. At the reception afterward, right after dinner, numerous pagers started going off, alerting them to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[1188,4533,4534,4522],"class_list":["post-12698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-baker","tag-hugo-and-becca-bumgardner","tag-talon-stoddard","tag-tornado","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}