It’s Fire Season and the Santa Ana Winds Are Lurking.

NASA satellite photo (provided by NSPO, Taiwan National Space Organization) from October 23, 2007, showing the active fire zones and smoke plumes.

Desert Living Series
Wildfires and Santa Ana Winds
By L. Bremner of DesertRoadTRIPPIN

The desert areas are fairly barren, but we do have our share of dry brush in the undeveloped regions.  There have been many fires this summer in the LA region, Santa Barbara and a few local fires as well.  I’ve been smelling the smoke here in the Coachella Valley over the past few weeks which I don’t remember happening last year.  I guess there are good years and bad years for fires. It just depends on the conditions and timing.

September has been named National Preparedness month for natural disasters including wildfires, floods and earthquakes. It is a timely month to think about being prepared. It is usually around Sept. and October when those folks who live in rural areas become very alert.   They watch the news coverage daily looking for weather reports and signs that may increase the fire conditions from dangerous to VERY dangerous.  The Santa Ana winds are one of the main ingredients of wildfires in Southern California and in northern Baja California.  The dry winds are most often hot and have been known to bring with them disaster in a big way.

Historical impact of the Santa Ana Winds . . .

The Santa Ana winds have fueled some of the largest wildfires including the Cedar Fire, Laguna Fire, Old fire, Esperanza Fire, Santiago Canyon Fire of 1889 and the Witch Fire. October ’07 is a memorable year for major wildfires.  The Santa Anas were behind the October ’07 fires in Escondido, Malibu, Rainbow, San Marcos, Carlsbad, Rando Bernardo, Poway and in San Bernadino, San Diego and Los Angeles.  The November ’08 California fires were also heightened by Santa Ana winds.

I’ve been working on an article off and on for the last year or so.  It is an article  about my own personal experience during the Witch Creek Fire  that started on Oct. 21 ’07.  It was the perfect day for a firestorm as the Santa Ana Winds hit 70 miles an hour that evening.   Here is my my story . . .

My home 3 days after the fire passed through our ranch.

What I Lost . . .
What I found
Firestorm 2007

Witch Creek fire: Fourth-largest in California history at 197,990 acres; 1,650 structures; two deaths. Began in October 2007.

My Location During The Fire: Poway, CA in the rural areas near Escondido and Ramona.  The two deaths were neighbors of mine who were sleeping when the fire engulfed their homes. I didn’t know them personally, but they lived down the road from us.

The boxes seemed a little heavier this time. After unpacking for several hours I discovered I only had four or five more boxes to unpack.  How had I accumulated so much stuff in so little time?  Nine months had passed since I fled from my home in the early morning hours of Oct. 22^nd,. I remember sitting in my Jeep at the end of my driveway mesmerized by the scene in front of me.  The flames from the Witch Creek Fire were rapidly approaching our ranch, fed by the sage-covered hillside and propelled by the 70 mile-an-hour winds.  It was indeed a firestorm.

The firemen were the ones who alerted us to evacuate immediately.  The fire was moving so fast they were doing what they could to save lives. No time to get out reverse 911 calls.   The fire was too big and too out of control to fight.  We got in our cars and left our homes, wondering what would be left when we returned. We headed to a hotel about 5 or 6 miles from our home only to be evacuated again at 5:45 AM.  It goes to show you how fast fire can travel with 70 mile an hour winds!

I was alone when I received the news a few days later.  A neighbor had called to tell us what we lost. They had stayed at their ranch during the fires and had access to my parents property on foot.  We lost three out of four houses and our family’s business, which was located in a barn structure on the ranch.  The only structure still standing on the property was my parents, 1947 built, wood-sided ranch house. There was hope.

Today I think back to that morning, remembering how it felt to have my life change so quickly.  It was as if we were playing a game of poker.  I was dealt a hand of cards and I had to play it out. I had lost my home, everything in it and my business. There was no going back or asking for a reshuffle.  While our losses were not our choice, how we chose to deal with them was in our control.

Mom and neighbor Mike with his tractor and cooler full of drinks.

It was with this attitude that we moved forward and sifted through the ashes.  What we found was our strength, our community and the most valuable thing of all, generosity.  In a way the fire was a gift.  It lifted up the curtains we had drawn so tightly around us.  The fire burned down the hedges that had grown up between our neighbor’s properties.  We could now see everything.  Our land had been stripped bare, leaving us all exposed and vulnerable. It drew our community closer together.  We shared a common tragedy.  Doors began to open, invitations to neighborhood parties arrived and help was always there when you needed it.

During our first visit to our property after the fire, the neighbor who shares our east boundary came down the hill in his tractor with a cooler filled with ice and beverages.  He offered us something to drink.  He told us how he fought the fire with his water truck, equipped from head to toe in fire gear.  At least he was prepared to stay for the fight!   And he did succeed in saving his home and I do believe he saved my parents home as well.     He recounted what happened that night and the few days that followed.  It was all a blur to him.  He saw my house go up in flames, he watched the office/barn and the other structures burn too.  He couldn’t quite find the words to describe it.  The sadness in his eyes told me of the vision he saw.  I said “spectacular in a bad way?”  He just shook his head in agreement.

I hardly recognized our property as I walked through a forest of burned out Oak trees.  It looked like a war zone. The smoke smoldered in the burned out stumps, everything was black and gray including the sky.  The smoke hung thick in the air and the pungent smell of ash overwhelmed me as I walked around the property.  It looked so different, so unreal.  I saw the spot where my house once stood and all I could do was stop and stare. It was gone, just a pile of gray dust and steel frames remained . . . a mark of what used to be.

The angel that survived the fire.

My feet became warm as the heat from debris on the ground penetrated my soles.  I walked into the area that used to be my office.  There was a burned out file cabinet filled with white dust.  I saw the wing of one of my angel statues sticking out from behind the remains of what used to be my desk.  It was still intact.  Unbelievable.  How did it survive, when nothing else did?  I placed the Angel on top of one of the cabinets and continued to dig through the ash and debris.

Mattress springs marked each bedroom and I found my way into mine.   Images of what used to be flashed through my mind as if a movie were playing.  My eyes were drawn again to another pile of white dust under my charred mattress springs.  Those were my journals.  I had tucked them safely away under my bed and had forgotten about them like so many other things.

After a few hours of sifting I realized that there wasn’t anything here to take away with me.  There were pieces of things, just stuff really.  When I left that day all I took with me were my memories, securely intact.  Under my arm I carried away the angel and with it the hope that something good would come from this experience.

The two-year anniversary of the Witch Creek fire is about a month away. As I look back over the past two years I can only see the good things that same after the fire.  One big change was the reorganization of our family e-commerce business after the fire.  When the fire took out our office, inventory and phone service we had no choice but to move part of our business to a new location.  Our business is an online publication with a store.  The store required space for inventory and for shipping orders.  My brother already had an office set up to house and ship products in the Los Angeles area for his own online business, so we passed on that part of the business to him.

It was like a wish had been granted for me.  No more shipping orders!  I liked that. My new job description was to focus my time and energy on developing content for our website, which is the part of the business that I enjoy the most.

With the old ball and chain of the store removed, I became totally virtual.  I could do my new job from any city as long as I had Internet access.  This led to another wish being granted for me . . . the ability live in a new area where I could afford to buy my own house. So I moved to the desert.

Cochella Valley is now my home.  I moved to the area in July ‘08.  The desert has been my winter playground for the past 10 years, so the move was not a big shock.  With a built in network of friends already here, I was excited to make the move.   Ironically, our online publication (desertusa.com) is an outdoor recreation and education website about the desert regions of the American Southwest.  Now that I live in the desert I have many more things to write about and I’m less than an hour away from two big desert parks.

After the fire, there were many decisions that I had to make in order to build a new life for myself.  Moving to a new city, buying a home, a change in my job and the opportunity to change many other things. Every choice I made was a puzzle piece that fit perfectly with the next to create the picture that I had in my mind of how I wanted my life to be. This picture had been in the makings for several years before the fire.  The fire was divine intervention.  It was the push forward that I needed to make change happen in my life.

While looking back and remembering the fire, I realize now that I really didn’t lose anything at all. Some material things may have been destroyed, but what I found after the fire was a community of helping hands and the strength to move forward.