Feeding the firefighters

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Valley Center, San Diego:

A day after George and Katie Ramirez were evacuated from her Valley Center home, the couple got an offer from state fire officials they couldn’t refuse.

They would be allowed back through the roadblock if they opened their restaurant in the morning to serve firefighters. The tabs, a Department of Forestry and Fire Protection liaison assured them, would be picked up by the state.

On Wednesday morning, the doors of Papa Bear’s were barely open before firefighters began streaming in. The location, along State Route 6 in Valley center, was easily accessible to crews working the Witch Creek and Poomacha fires.

Fresh from the front lines, some faces blackened with ash, they brought hearty appetites.

‘They’re asking if there’s a limit on what they can order,’ a waitress said to Katie.

‘They didn’t give me a limit,’ she responded.

Katie’s house was OK. And she slept there, but not for long.

That’s because she had to make a late-night run to Food 4 Less in Escondido to beef up the kitchen inventory with 15 loaves of bread, seven gallons of orange juice and two huge bags of potatoes.

‘We already had most of the major supplies,’ she said. ‘But we needed bread because our bread guy couldn’t get up here to deliver it.’

Within hours of opening, they ran out of hash browns and had to run back to the store.

About noon, the couple ran out of hamburger buns and were strategizing another shopping excursion.

By then, with two cooks and three waitresses on duty, they had served about 160 firefighters, CHP officers and others working the fires. Everyone had their hands full, and three more firetrucks were pulling in.

‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m going to do with them,’ Katie said, looking around at her dining room, not a seat in the house.

As if on cue, a group taking up a couple of booths in the back of the diner got up to leave.

‘Thanks,’ they all said on their way out.

‘Be safe,’ she told them.

-- Christine Hanley