On the Beat
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Angels with Wings: We’ve been through hell all right, but hell didn’t get past first base because we had angels in the outfield. Angels with chopper wings and angels with boots on the ground and hoses in hand.
True, despite the firefighters’ heroics, we lost 78 homes. But without a virtual Horatio-at-the-Bridge stand on the Foothill Road span, the San Roque neighborhood might be charred rubble today.
On the Beat
“Thursday night all hell broke loose,” one woman told me. A torrent of flame roared down San Roque Canyon. Once into Stevens Park, there would be nothing to stop the inferno until flames engulfed the prime San Roque neighborhood. To get a first-hand account of what happened then, I tracked down young Travis Lyon, who lives just up the street from me on Canon Drive.
About a half-dozen engines from Pasadena Fire Department pulled onto the bridge and started pouring water down onto the canyon, a virtual waterfall soaking the dry brush, Travis told me. It was a long, last-ditch battle but it worked. The flames never broke through the gap into the park. “My heart melted,” Travis’s mom, Cindy, said upon hearing where the engines came from. “We lived in Pasadena.”
Capricious flames hopscotched the hills, taking some houses and leaving others. On upper Ontare Road, George Burtness returned home to find part of his garden and the shed’s roof burned, but his home intact. “The risers on my sprinkler heads melted and drooped over. A house across the canyon was just missing. I consider myself extremely lucky.”
It was a wildfire like none I’ve ever experienced, and I go back to the 1964 Coyote blaze. We’ve lost more homes in the past but I’ve never seen 30,000 people ordered from their homes, or whole neighborhoods enclosed behind yellow police tapes. But many I’ve talked to admitted sneaking into their homes to briefly check on things, one telling me he’d used a “coyote highway” (creekbed) to go home. Others never left, and for some, it was high-risk: I was told of one garden-hose warrior who stayed to successfully fight at a home where you could have practically hit the advancing flames with a baseball. Oprah Winfrey’s people started packing valuables from her Montecito mansion. (She wasn’t home, and her place survived.)
There were sleepless nights of terror for many, while others snoozed, ignoring the peril or untouched by it. The darkness resounded with the roar of helicopters churning, plop-plop-plop, over homes at almost treetop level, shaking the houses, like something out of Apocalypse Now. Then there were the shrieking sirens, and the howling winds that drove the flames. You could almost hear Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”
I never thought I’d walk the streets wearing a paper mask. I never thought I’d go to sleep wondering if my place was about to burst into flame. I never thought I’d see the day when the Old Mission was closed, its padres dispersed. Or when the cloistered Poor Clares nuns would have to evacuate. Jimmy and Eleanor McCloud never thought they’d see the day when the wind ripped shingles off the roof of their mobile home. “I thought it was going to unravel the whole roof,” said Jimmy, who got up there to nail them back down.
On Saturday morning we awoke to an eerie silence. Dawn’s ugly light revealed the tragic ashes of once-cherished homes, and the fire still raged in the high country. But down on the flatland, yellow tapes started coming down, streets reopened and people started to return home, unpacking the belongings they’d hurriedly jammed into their cars days earlier. Police were here from far and wide, and Los Angeles police officers who in other times might have been seen as an invading army were offered coffee at the remaining barricades. For a few days, Santa Barbara must have been the most heavily policed small city in America. Cops and firefighters staged at Loreto Plaza shopping center got hugs from the locals. Thank You Firefighters signs went up everywhere. At the IHOP eatery, locals bought meals for cops and firefighters. But it was nothing like one early morning of the Tea Fire when someone walked into IHOP and asked if the place could feed breakfast to 120 prisoners brought into town to help fight the fire. IHOP scrambled to scramble eggs and fed the guys without breaking a sweat, a waitress told me.
Neighbors who normally have little to say to one another swapped stories. Strangers greeted one another on the street in a spirit of fire-spawned camaraderie.
“Fires,” one mused one woman who’d fled her home, “have a mind of their own. We think we’re so smart, but when it comes to nature we don’t know anything.”
Our streets, homes, and cars are ashy and sooty. We’ve gone through hell and back. Our hearts go out to those who lost homes. But through it all, Santa Barbarans have forged a tighter, friendlier bond. Volunteers and those who want to donate or otherwise help those hit by the fire can call the Red Cross at 687-1331.
Now the question is: Whodunit?