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‘It was scary as heck’: Flames chase residents from their Ventura County homes

Homes burned to the ground by the Thomas fire in Ventura County.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times )
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Inside the shelter at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, some volunteers handed out water and bananas to evacuees who had spent the night. Others grabbed the green cots that peppered the concrete floor and walked them over to the larger livestock shelter where the evacuees were being moved.

Rudy Avendano and his family voluntarily left their home on Richmond Road in Santa Paula around 3 a.m. His daughter Felicia had awoken in the middle of the night to use the bathroom when she saw lights from emergency vehicles on the street.

She stepped outside and asked the police if they were being evacuated.

“We strongly suggest it,” she remembered the officer saying.

She quickly woke her parents and two sisters. They grabbed the items they had packed earlier in the day — clothes, blankets, documents, photo albums and a mandolin — and jumped into their cars with their pitbull-Labrador mix, Bear.

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Rudy Avendano said he saw a continuous ribbon of orange flames licking the hills on the drive to the fairgrounds.

Throughout the drive, he said, he thought of the extra food he should have thrown in the car. A gallon of Sunny Delight and a box of crackers from Trader Joe’s weren’t enough, he said with a laugh.

The family didn’t hear that their home was safe from the flames until 10 a.m.

“There’s an element of fear; a whole lot of not knowing,” Rudy Avendano, 60, said as he sat next to his dog. A black top hat with Christmas decorations rested in his lap.

Avendano said that when everyone first arrived in the early morning hours, they had to ask each other what was going on.

“It was scary as heck,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that and I’m from Ventura.”

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Still, he said, he’s confident that his home will survive the fire.

“You never thought you’d see yourself here,” he said. “But I think we’re going to be all right.”

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