Fueled by wind, fires left misery in wake
SAN DIEGO -- They know what the winds can do. They forecast them. Fight the fires the winds fan. Ready for evacuations that, in years past, never came. They thought they knew, until seven days of fury began a week ago.
From almost the beginning, this Santa Ana was different somehow.
Meteorologist Philip Gonsalves recognized it when he saw the smoke through the picture windows of the National Weather Service station in Rancho Bernardo, closing in on the office itself. He had helped forecast the tempest: an ominous combination of strong gusts, low humidity and soaring temperatures. In weather speak: red flag fire conditions.
Fire Battalion Chief Tom Zeulner understood it, too, when en route to his first blaze of the week, his wife called to tell him five more had begun.
Dan Crane thought it was "situation normal," his words for the Santa Ana fire season that torments Californians every October through February, when blustery winds blow out of the desert. He's lived through a half-century of them, and never once had to evacuate -- not even during the two-week onslaught of 2003, when fires burned 750,000 acres and killed 22 people.
This time, he awoke to neighbors honking and smoke wafting through his windows.
By Saturday, more than a half-million acres would be gone, 1,700 homes destroyed, with the damage surpassing $1 billion.
Stunned homeowners who just last weekend were setting out Halloween decorations and watching football would find themselves sifting through kindling and ash, mumbling things like: This used to be my kitchen. This used to be my bedroom.
This used to be ...
Even a week after it all started, several thousand would remain evacuated as blazes burned on relentlessly.
------
Gonsalves is a man who usually takes things in stride, especially the weather, perhaps because he knows it so well. He knows how easily a fire can kick up when the winds get going, and computer models at work had predicted a nasty Santa Ana for days.
And so, on Sunday morning when he stepped out of church and sniffed smoke, he was hardly surprised.
Fires -- plural -- were everywhere:
The Ranch Fire, sparked at 9:42 p.m. the night before, racing through 500 acres some 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
The Canyon Fire, ignited at 4:50 a.m. in Malibu, forcing 1,500 people -- even Hollywood's elite -- to evacuate.
The Harris Fire, begun at 9:23 a.m. southeast of San Diego, exploding to 500 acres in just over three hours.
The Witch Creek Fire, burning at 12:37 p.m. in a mountain town northeast of San Diego, consuming 3,000 acres in two hours.
------
Crane awoke early Monday and looked at the clock: 4 a.m. He smelled smoke coming through his bedroom window, but when he got up to shut it, he heard something on the street below. A car honking, he thought. He peered outside.
Rancho Bernardo's Lancashire Way, Crane's home for 20 years, looked like an erupting volcano.
"We gotta go!" he yelled to his wife, Sherry, still in bed. "Now!"
The biggest evacuation in California state history was just getting started. Some 560,000 would be forced from their homes in San Diego County alone. Qualcomm Stadium, home to the NFL's San Diego Chargers, was opened to evacuees in a scene reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina. The Del Mar Fairgrounds and schools housed others.
By nightfall, more than 500 homes had already been demolished in San Diego County. Two fires that began just that day in the mountain vacation haven of Lake Arrowhead would destroy 300 more. Elsewhere across California, more than a dozen fires were now burning, incinerating 374 square miles in seven counties.
The wrath of the Santa Anas was far from over.
------
All the chatter on the radio was about San Diego. But Zeulner and his crew had their own firefight to deal with -- for 4½ hours Tuesday afternoon near Piru, after a blowing ember landed in steep vegetation.
They had spent much of their time doing structure protection: clearing away brush and moving wood piles stacked next to wood-sided homes, work homeowners themselves should have done in this drought-stricken state. The Ranch Fire, 1,000 acres when Zeulner first got the assignment, had grown to almost 40,000.
But he was proud that his crew had yet to lose a home.
In San Diego, Crane couldn't say the same. Tuesday, watching the news with his son at a friend's house where they'd taken refuge, he saw a reporter walking up and down Lancashire Way.
"Twenty-five homes, on this one block ... have burned to the ground," the reporter was saying.
And, then, he started reading off house numbers.
For a moment, Crane and his son thought they didn't hear 18626. Then: "635 ... 629 ... 626 ..." the reporter said.
Crane and his boy, whose own family lived a mile away but whose house survived, looked at each other.
"Now we know," Crane said.
------
Come Friday, Gonsalves and his colleagues were back at their computers at the weather office, swapping war stories in between work about their own fire encounters. The office was unscathed, but for the lingering stench of smoke.
Gonsalves was lucky; his family never had to evacuate. One colleague remained displaced from his home in Julian, though even that evacuation order had lifted by Saturday morning.
Zeulner was enjoying his first 24 hours off in five days, although, given the circumstances, enjoying hardly seemed the right word. He still had no idea when he might head home, or whether he'd miss a vacation to see his 5-month-old granddaughter.
At the remains of his home on Lancashire Way, Crane's eyes were noticeably dry of tears. Instead, there was a sense of optimism in him and the neighbors who flooded back to begin cleaning up, and returned Saturday to pick up more pieces. They exchanged hugs and "I'm so sorrys," talked about getting together, already, in the coming days to discuss rebuilding.
"Did I want to start over at this time in my life? No," 60-year-old Crane said. "But my family is fine. I'm fine."