Travis Dorman

Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel

GATLINBURG, Tenn. — If the Gatlinburg firestorm had come at another time, Claire Brandau believes she may have perished in the flames. If it had come in the morning, she may have been blind. If it had come on another day, she may not have been able to walk, a result of her battle with Lyme disease.

When fires propelled by hurricane-force winds ripped through the town Nov. 28, killing at least 14 people and damaging or destroying more than 1,600 buildings, Brandau could see, and she could walk. As far as her health, she was having a relatively good day. But she didn’t have her car — her Prius was being worked on at Toyota in Knoxville.

While most people were driving away from the flames, a 22-year-old Toyota employee drove toward them, determined to deliver Brandau's vehicle to her in the midst of one of Tennessee's worst natural disasters in recorded history.

Brandau, a 49-year-old woman, believes she was infected with Lyme disease, caused by bacteria spread by ticks, nearly 15 years before she began treatment. As a result, the disease made its way into her brain and now “affects everything.” Every day is different, and she said she never knows what the future will hold.

“It’s totally unpredictable,” she said in a phone interview Saturday as she stood outside the evacuee shelter at Rocky Top Sports World. Since the disaster, she's stopped taking her many medications, which she said make her feeble, in order to be more able-bodied.

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“Some days I can’t walk. Some days I can’t even crawl. It’s hard to explain, but I can be on my hands and knees, but I can’t place them properly on the floor. They just go where they want, and I do a face plant. It’d probably be pretty funny to watch,” she said, laughing.

Some days she wakes up and can’t see. Other days, she wakes up and can see normally for an hour or two, but then her eyes start “jumping” and shaking uncontrollably and she sees double; or dark spots form on the sides of her vision and gradually grow, swallowing her up until she feels like she’s trapped “inside a black tunnel,” her caretaker Stephanie Ball said.

“Sometimes I’m her eyes. Sometimes I’m her crutch,” said Ball, who has taken care of Brandau for more than three years, cooking for her, cleaning her house, doing her laundry and giving her rides to weekly therapy sessions. “… I drive her everywhere because you don’t know when her vision’s going to go. She’s not really supposed to be driving.”

On Monday night, Brandau didn’t receive a mobile alert notifying her of the mandatory evacuations in place for Gatlinburg and parts of Pigeon Forge. No one did, officials confirmed Saturday, citing interrupted communications because of “disabled phone, Internet and electrical services."

Even if authorities had sent out a mobile alert, Brandau said, she and many others in the area probably wouldn't have received it — she never gets cellphone service at her house.

It was the sky that served as Brandau's warning. As night fell, the sky turned orange, and her brain, she said, turned to mush.

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Once she had collected herself, she called Toyota. She said she told the man who answered the phone to search "Gatlinburg" on Google.

"I heard him tappity tappity tap, and I heard him say, 'Oh my God.' They're in Knoxville. They had no idea what was going on up here. I said, 'You guys were supposed to deliver my car last week.' That's when he said, 'I'm getting in the car and I'm coming, I'm bringing your car.' "

Connor Reis, a service writer at Toyota, drove Brandau's car to her, buffeting by winds at speeds topping 90 mph. He said he persuaded his roommate to follow him in his truck so he could get a ride back to Knoxville.

Reis knew he didn't have to do it, he said.

"But knowing what was going on, knowing that she had a very real risk of losing everything she had, even her not being able to make it out of there, I couldn't in good consciousness let it be," he said. "I had to do something.

"When we got down to the areas that were being evacuated, as we got closer and closer to the fires, we noticed a whole bunch of fire trucks and workers. The winds were just awful, like I was almost getting blown off the road while I was driving down there. It was crazy what was going on. When we got to that point, I was scared."

Reis said he became "truly terrified" when a tree fell and blocked the road about a quarter-mile from Brandau's house.

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"I was thinking, 'I can't drag this out, my friend's truck can't drag this out.' But some guy who lived nearby showed up with a chainsaw, asked us if we needed help and started cutting down the tree. We dragged the pieces out of the road and eventually got to her house."

Once in her car, Brandau, who took classes on wildfire ecology at the University of Tennessee and has had training in crisis debriefing, turned on the radio, sang along and didn't look back.

"The first rule I learned is never traumatize yourself on purpose. If you see something burning behind you, don't turn around and look at it. Just keep going, because it's all you can do."

Another tree fell and blocked Brandau's path as she drove away from the firestorm.

"We were screwed, and these two guys — God bless them wherever they are — they'd already gotten safe past the tree. They stopped, got out of their car, ran back and moved that tree for us so we could get out."

"There's so many heroes," she said later. "All I can think of is I'm so proud of us. I'm so proud of us. Because we didn't sit around and wait. There would have been a hell of a lot more deaths if people weren't smart enough to say, 'I'm not waiting on them to evacuate us, I'm getting out.' "

Follow Travis Dorman on Twitter: @travdorman