2007 Wildfires, One Year Later: Louise in Encinitas

It is one year from the day our family, and many other families in the area, were evacuated due to the devastating California Wildfires of 2007. We were very fortunate that none of us were hurt, none of our property was lost, and nobody we knew was hurt or suffered serious loss. It was, however, still a very significant event in our lives, one that I hope not to repeat. I wanted to acknowledge what happened a year ago and invite those who were affected to contribute writing or photos as a way to collectively remember. Please also view the online photo gallery, "Beauty and Danger: California Wildfires 2007" for photos. If you have your own rememberances or photos that you would like to add, please email me by the end of the month and I will include them also.

The following is a combination of notes I took in the days immediately after the fires and recollections a year later

Sunday night, October 21, 2007

That smell. If you've lived in So. California long enough, you recognize that wildfire smell. There's nothing else quite like it. I hear the Santa Ana Winds gust through the night with their hot, sickly smell. I can almost taste the ash, bringing me to the surface of sleep. That can't be good.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Surreal. That's the word that best describes this day. Here's how it starts:

We get an auto-call from the school district letting us know that intersession programs are cancelled. Ash floats down from the sky, which is a sickly yellowish gray. The sun is a weakly glowing orange globe that you can look directly at. I watch the TV news—it starts to give a picture of the Witch Creek and Harris fires, but the information is a bit frustrating. It's hard to figure out exactly where the evacuation areas are, although they do tell people to stay off the roads if they don't need to be out. I freeze the low-res picture of the evac. area on my TiVo and try to match it up with my Thomas Guide to find out if we're affected, as the instructions they give, e.g. from Del Dios South to 56 and between 15 and 5, are a little nebulous in our area.

Jim started in to work but turned around after hearing that people were evacuating in other  neighborhoods and they were asking folks to stay off the road. Our neighbor Cathy calls to find out if we know anything about evacuating. The next time she calls she says she will be at her daughter's and we say we will get ready to go, but don't think it will actually happen.

Then about 45 minutes later we get "The Call," the Reverse 911 call from the sheriff. Later, JIm can't remember anything it said except "sheriff," and "evacuate." We don't have any corroboration that it is our own sheriff (some neighbors say they heard Olivenhain) and if the evac. is mandatory or voluntary. The feeling is totally surreal. I never would have thought our neighborhood 10 minutes from the beach would be in jeopardy. Jim has a plan, though. We decide to pack our gear  (including our two kittens) and head to my parents' house in Vegas instead of an evac. center locally. Having our pets with us is a prime consieration. As it starts sinking in that we are really evacuating our home due to a wildfire, we explain to our 9-year-old daughter what is going on and that she needs to pack up clothes for a couple days and a few of her most important items in a backpack. I never thought as a mother that I would hear myself having to say those words. We don't know what will happen. She made us very proud and was the epitome of grace under pressure, asking what else she could do to help when she was done packing her own things. They say a person's true nature comes out in times of stress, and I was so proud of my family that day. I'm not so sure I was that graceful myself, but I did my best. 

We pass on to others what we've heard as we start packing up the truck. It seems pretty much everyone is going, but some will stick around longer than others. I tell my neighbor Debbie where we are going, and she gives us the number of where she is headed. This will be very helpful in the hours and days to come, as we know we have a contact in a non-evac. area (we hope).

After some hectic and, it turns out, patchy packing (photo albums, yes; toothbrush, no) we head on out, and I see one of the most surreal sights I have ever witnessed—a woman walking her horse towards us going west down the sidewalk of Encinitas Blvd. The Del Mar Fairgrounds was the large animal evacuation center, and my guess is they were heading that way. I call my parents to let them know we are coming. A few minutes later Mom calls to say she has heard that 5 is backed up with evacuees. We want to call back to corroborate but then they aren't home. It turns out she was calling from work, so we call on her cell a bit later. We hadn't thought that much about traffic. In the end we don't experience much delay on 5.

We tune to KPBS as we are pulling out, and they are taking calls from people around the county with accounts of what they experience on the ground, which is helpful. They also take questions from folks who want to know what is going on and which roads are closed. From this we learn that 76 is closed where we were headed, so we decide to head into Orange County instead. Luckily we have an AAA map of CA in the truck. This will prove very useful, although some more local area maps would have been helpful too. Fortunately the CA map is pretty comprehensive for the area we are covering. When KPBS trails off around Misison Viejo, we turn to the next closest public radio station. It tells of other fires in L.A. area but they don't seem to be on the freeways we're driving on. The toll road is closed, so we take 55 to 91 to Corona. Lots of high wind in the area, lots of overturned big rigs. 

We made it up to just south of the pass through the San Bernardino Mountains (the Lake Arrowhead fire spewed smoke into the sky just east of us) but after some squirreling around detours due to local brush fires (at one point we drove right past freeway guardrail posts that were smouldering with tiny licks of flame peeping out) we were denied passage any farther north for reasons unknown to us, as we'd passed all the immediate fire danger. Cell phone communication to friends in Leucadia, my Dad in Vegas, and the CalTrans hotline gave us a patchy picture from which to base our next decision, which is to find a hotel room in the area for the night instead of trying to skirt the mountains to the east to get to Barstow. Current, reliable information is something you take for granted until you are basing major immediate decisions on it. The next day we found out that it was due to downed power lines. Fortunately we were close to the Ontario airport and thought we would try to find a room there. The first hotel we went to did not take pets, but directed us to the Sheraton down the street who did. I am so thankful to the folks at the Sheraton Ontario Airport who were taking in evacuees at a reduced rate and let us bring our two cats in with no extra charge. They were top notch. In the hotel we had a chance to feel a little more normal. Room service and some food and litter for the cats did us all good.

The next day (Tuesday) we made it the rest of the way to Vegas without incident. Calls back to our neighbor Debbie who had evacuated to Leucadia revealed that our area was out of immediate danger but the air quality was still really bad. She came back home and kept an eye on our turtle for us (we figured he'd be better off digging in than coming with us), and was an important source of information over the next few days. 

We stayed in Vegas a few more days and then came home on Thursday the 25th, driving back into smoke-filled air but out of immediate danger. I took this screen shot of the Google map of the fires put together by KPBS when we got home, and it shows that there was still a lot going on. It's an interesting little slice of history. (FYI, KPBS has a Fire Season Map on its web site this year also.)