From Go Now!
It was dusk on the last Saturday in October when Fire Captain Andy Parr turned up his two-way radio and heard San Diego forestry officials talking about a small blaze near Cedar Creek. A hunter had gotten lost, the officials said, and apparently lit a signal fire, hoping to be discovered.Parr climbed into his SUV parked outside the fire station, located in Lakeside, a residential area 20 miles northeast of downtown San Diego, and drove to a nearby ridge where he saw smoke far in the distance. In his 27 years as a firefighter, Parr had fought many blazes and wasn't too concerned about this one. "It was a wispy little fire that didn't have much life to it," he said. So at 11 p.m. he headed home to his family.
Deep in Lakeside's rural foothills, Larry and Laureen Redden were enjoying a quiet evening, entertaining friends for dinner at the house in Lake View Hills Estates that they shared with Laureen's parents. The tight-knit, gated community of million-dollar homes was two miles down winding Muth Valley Road. With its rolling hills, 100-year-old oaks and magnificent views of the lake, few places possessed such peace and beauty. "We didn't need to go anywhere else because we lived in paradise," said Laureen. Larry had recently retired from the local fire department where he'd been a firefighter for 35 years.
After dinner, the Reddens and their guests went outside on the deck. They saw gray smoke on the mountain ridge beyond the lake. "Has this area ever burned?" Larry's friend asked.
"No, never," Larry said. "Besides, there's no wind." Many times over the years, Redden had battled ferocious fires triggered by the powerful Santa Anas, but so far this year the area hadn't experienced the dreaded offshore winds. After their guests left, the Reddens went to sleep, but the smell of smoke woke them around midnight. When Laureen turned on the radio, there were no news reports about the fire. So they closed all the windows and went back to bed.
At home with his wife and three teenage kids, Andy Parr couldn't get to sleep. His radio monitor crackled with increasing chatter about the fire. "I got a bad feeling," he said. He kissed his wife goodbye and went back to the station to call in his crews.
Even though the wildfire wasn't anywhere near Lakeside, he knew that fire chiefs in the affected areas would need assistance. He made a dozen calls, but as it was late on a Saturday night, he wasn't having much luck reaching anyone. One group of guys had gone to the desert, where cell phones didn't work. He left them messages: "Come in if you can."
By midnight, as he drove north along Wildcat Canyon Road, the main access through the foothills, he saw the increasing red glow. "The fire was expanding much faster than I expected," Parr recalled. When he got to his office, he put out a second round of calls to his crews: "Come in. No matter what!"
At 2:40 a.m., Sheriff's Deputy Dave Knight was working his regular weekend night patrol south of Lakeside when the dispatcher's urgent call came in. Knight didn't mind working the late shift. He wasn't married and had no kids, but he had a full house nonetheless. He kept a menagerie of animals -- a horse, five donkeys, a sheep and a goat -- at his ten-acre property in nearby Jamul. Knight had been involved in search and rescue and law enforcement for 25 years. He had assisted with evacuations and medical emergencies in previous fires. As he gassed up his patrol car and headed into the canyon, he wondered how this blaze would compare.
He drove north on Wildcat Canyon Road, joining a caravan of official fire and rescue vehicles. Coming from the opposite direction, cars full of evacuees crawled along, bumper to bumper. Knight turned into one driveway and dirt road after another, shouting over his loudspeaker: "Get out now. The fire's coming!" He ran the siren, and kept the patrol lights flashing continuously.
Down one side road Knight saw a family struggling to load up their horses. He tried to reach them in his car, but the fire was moving too fast, and he ran to help them on foot. The woman was crying; she couldn't fit all the horses in the trailer and had to leave one -- the Appaloosa -- behind. "You must go now," Knight yelled. Down another dirt road Knight tried to help a man who was fiddling with the latch on a gate to get his dog out. "There's no time!" Knight screamed. The man kept pulling on the lock. Knight couldn't wait; the flames were less than 100 feet away. The sky was blood red, the air dense and smoky. As he sped back up the road, Knight knew the man would not survive.
Monster
Shortly after 3 a.m., the worst possible thing happened. "The hair on the back of my neck stood up," Captain Parr recalled of the ferocious Santa Anas, which swept through the canyon like a blowtorch. "The fire became a monster. A giant 100-foot wall of flame vaporized everything in its path. It was pandemonium." He assembled his crews farther north on Wildcat Canyon Road. A thick black curtain of smoke spread ash for miles. It hurt to breathe. Visibility was gone. Cars plowed into one another. Power lines split open and crashed to the ground. Houses exploded. Trees incinerated in a matter of seconds.To listen to the news back then, it seemed all of Southern California was on fire. In San Bernardino County and north, in the Simi Valley and Ventura area, where ranches and horse farms abound, the fierce winds triggered another 13 fires. Coming off a record- setting hot October, the area was parched and dry. Thousands were forced to evacuate as flames scorched acres and acres of land. The federal government declared Southern California a disaster area. In the smoky red skies were images from wartime: military reconnaissance planes roared overhead and low-flying helicopters left trails of bright pink fire retardant in their wake. Firefighters were called in from Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and Colorado, but even with all that added help, the fires still burned out of control.
Back on Wildcat Canyon Road, Captain Parr split his crews. He sent four fire engines farther north in the canyon and four down Muth Valley Road. "At that point we weren't trying to fight the fire because it was just raging," he said. "A hundred fire engines wouldn't have been enough. The crews were there to rescue people." They put an elderly couple, who had no transportation, in one of the officials' cars. A mile down Muth Valley Road, Parr's crews were blocked by a wall of flames. "It's getting really ugly," his troops reported. "We're getting trapped." Parr ordered them to turn around and get out. "There was nothing else we could do," he said. "We had to save the people we could and not die ourselves. I had an uneasy feeling we didn't get to everyone down the road."
Deputy Knight had the same sinking feeling. Around 3:30, he headed down Muth Valley Road but could get only to the first house, where the homeowners were also loading animals. Knight helped squeeze all three of their horses into a two-horse trailer. But he couldn't make his way to the next property only a few hundred feet away. "The fire was solid," he said.
At 3:15 a.m., the phone woke the Reddens. It was their neighbor, Joe McLean, alerting everyone in Lake View Hills Estates. Outside, towering flames were closing in. "The fire was huge," Larry recalled. "It was like nothing I'd ever seen." The retired firefighter urged everyone to stay put. "It was moving too fast," he said. He'd been taught to take cover inside a structure and wait for the main body of fire to blow over, but Laureen and her parents wanted to leave. "I was panicked and thought there was no way we'd survive here," she said. She grabbed her purse, and together they loaded their three dogs and five cats into two cars. Laureen's parents followed in their own two cars.
Another neighbor, Stan Penn, a casino owner, woke his brother, Mike. By then, fire was all over the hillside. "I'm goin' now," exclaimed Stan. He put his bulldog, Ace, in his car and sped up the road. Mike called 911, but "I knew there was no way anyone was coming," he said. He grabbed his laptop and left ten minutes later.
A stream of cars maneuvered through the black smoke toward the community's security gate. The McLeans made it out first, and barreled 80 m.p.h. down Muth Valley Road. Stan Penn, close behind, also made it out and got all the way to Wildcat Canyon Road. But he was the last of the group to make it that far. Less than a quarter-mile behind Penn, Natalie Corbett, who was housesitting in the neighborhood, hit a tumbling power line and flipped over in her Bronco. Flames swept over the car. Sure that she was going to die, Corbett closed all the windows and tried to go to sleep.
A minute later, as Steve Shacklett followed in his 33-foot motor home, a wall of flame overtook the road. Mike Penn was behind the massive motor home as it attempted to turn around, then got stuck. "There was no other way to go but back," Mike said.
At the gate, Larry Redden saw the blaze coming toward them and advised everyone to turn around and go home. Laureen tried calling 911, but her cell phone didn't work. "Don't bother," Larry told her. "They've written us off. There's no way they can get to us. We're on our own."
Shattered Lives
On the way back, the Reddens, followed by neighbor Bob Daly, passed the Shohara family. Jim Shohara shouted that they were headed to the lake to wait for the fire to blow over. Daly advised against it. The fire was coming too fast, he said; they could get trapped. Then Daly and his wife pulled into their driveway and jumped in their pool as they watched their home burn to the ground.When the Reddens got home, the fire had reached their deck. "It was a furnace," remembered Larry, "and you couldn't look directly at the fire because you'd go blind." In their yard, ash and burning embers fell on their heads. The wind blew fiery leaves and tree limbs at them. They ran in and out of the house with buckets of water from the pool to douse their burning shrubs. Laureen cursed at the fire. "You're not going to take my house," she yelled over and over, battling the blaze with anything she could find.
At the Penn house, Mike shut all the windows and turned off the gas. Red ash was in the air and would have ignited the home, he believes, had it not been for the tile roof and double- glazed windows.
Fifteen minutes later, as if on cue, the fire passed, moved west, leaving the Reddens' and Penns' homes, and three others, intact. "That's the ironic thing," Larry Redden said. "Most of us who didn't make it out were able to save our homes."
By Monday, the fire was burning in Crest, Julian, Cuyamaca, other parts of Lakeside and inside the city of San Diego. Exhausted and dazed from working 36 hours straight, Andy Parr took a break. He went home to an emotional reunion with his wife and kids.
That evening, Deputy Knight was so hoarse from yelling that he could barely talk. But that was the least of his problems. The fire had moved into his neighborhood, and he had to evacuate. He loaded all his animals in a large trailer and took them to a friend's ranch several miles away. The fire never actually reached Knight's house, and he and his animals were able to return three days later.
But in other San Diego counties the flames raged on for several more days. In mid-November, when all the fires were finally contained, the devastation was beyond belief. The most destructive wildfires in California's history had scorched 740,000 acres and wiped out 3,600 homes. Twenty-two people had died.
Days after the fire, the scene in Lake View Hills Estates is surreal. At the gate, a handmade corrugated metal sign reads: "Looters Will Be Shot." There is little left to steal. Five of the homes are rubble and ash. The hills are scorched black. The smell of smoke is in the air. Once regal oak and pine trees are now gaunt black skeletons. The charred remains of rabbits, squirrels and coyotes litter the hills. On the road down to the lake sits the Shoharas' burned-out truck. Their 32-year-old son Randy's car, now nothing more than a twisted metal frame, is a hundred feet away. All three perished in the fire.
As did Steve Shacklett. Out on Muth Valley Road, the remains of his motor home resemble a dinosaur's carcass. When he got stuck trying to turn around, he got out and ran, but the fire overtook him.
For those whose loved ones died, there is no just compensation. But, at least in San Diego, there may be some measure of accountability as federal officials investigate whether to file arson charges against the hunter who reportedly lit the signal fire.
No one, especially Natalie Corbett, expected to survive. But the flames passed right over her Bronco and did not ignite it. Others who survived, like the Reddens and the Penns, are left "feeling a mixture of relief and guilt," says Laureen, who credits Larry with saving their lives. "If he hadn't made the decision to turn around at the gate, we would have died," she says. For the time being, they have returned to their home to live amid the rubble and charred destruction. There, for them, hope is not lost. A few days after the fire, tears filled Laureen's eyes as she watched hummingbirds circle the feeders out front, and three quails walk across her driveway. These are the bright spots, but it will take months, even years, to repair all the shattered lives.