Evacuation essentials: diapers, water, canned peas
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At 1:30 p.m., evacuees were continuing to pour into San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium from their homes in Rancho Bernardo, Encinitas and elsewhere.
Bus after bus pulled up, filled with elderly people from nursing homes and patients from Palomar Hospital, including babies from the neonatal care unit. Volunteers helped unload the many patients in wheelchairs, some with oxygen tanks.
Inside, in the concourse area between the stadium’s entryway and the field, more volunteers stood behind tables stacked with essentials: diapers, lotion, shampoo, bottled water, tuna, canned corn, soap, canned peas, loaves of bread. Other volunteers, some imitating hawkers at the ballpark on a very different sort of day, called out their wares: Iced tea! Apple juice! Donuts! Hot dogs! Cold water!
Some evacuees sat on blankets on the concrete concourse. After officials opened the stadium’s stands, many others took shelter from the sun under an overhang. Most watched updates on the fires playing continuously on the stadium’s big screens.
Shervi Balhin, 19, of Rancho Bernardo was at the stadium with her family, including her mother, Mardi Craig, her 9-year-old brother, Nathaniel, and her son, Anthony, 16 months. Nearby, Shervi’s husband was helping unload patients in wheelchairs.
‘I’ve been up all night,’ Balhin said, adding that the family had left home at 6 a.m. after an evacuation order. ‘I’ve been watching the news all night. I’m really scared.’
Balhin said she didn’t know about her home’s condition but said she had heard from another evacuee that ‘our street wasn’t burned yet.’
Nearby, Bruce Thyden, 79 and his wife, Garnet, 84, leaned against a rail they had covered with two bright pink quilts that had just been donated to them. They said they had received a ‘reverse 911’ call at 4 a.m., with a recorded message telling them to leave their Oaks North neighborhood in Rancho Bernardo.
Of the quilts, Garnet said: ‘Somebody just gave these to us. We don’t know what the future holds, and we might need them.’
The couple said all they managed to take with them were important documents, jewelry and medications. ‘I didn’t get underwear, I didn’t get clothes,’ Bruce said. So many people were on the roads that it took them more than an hour to go three-quarters of a mile, he said.
Caroline Chi, an emergency medical technician in training to be a nurse, was volunteering nearby, helping a group of people in wheelchairs. ‘I just heard what was going on and I came down here to help,’ she said.
-- Elizabeth Douglass