Residents Return After Fire Forces Rainbow Evacuation

Residents in the rural hills and canyons along the San Diego-Riverside County line south of Temecula were allowed back into their homes Monday night as immediate threat of danger passed from a 1,650-acre fire burning in the area, the California Department of Forestry said.

One ranch-style house near Pala-Temecula Road was destroyed late Monday but firefighters saved at least 45 other homes. Six firefighters were injured Sunday when flames fanned over them as they fought the fire in brush that had grown tall and thick for decades.

The fire was 40% contained late Monday and complete containment was expected by 6 p.m. today, Joanne Evans, a forestry department spokeswoman, said. The fire is not expected to be out until next Sunday, she added.

Fickle winds played havoc with firefighting efforts for much of the day Monday, alternately causing the evacuation of residents in some areas while allowing others to go back to their homes.

The CDF directed 1,000 Southern California firefighters to the blaze, which erupted Sunday afternoon just east of Interstate 15, almost alongside a California Highway Patrol truck weigh station.

The fire was about 40% contained Monday and officials hoped to have it fully encircled by 6 p.m. today.(9-29)

The injured firefighters were surprised by fast-moving flames Sunday evening and had to take emergency cover beneath their individual fire tents--reflective, aluminum-and-cotton blankets used as a last resort to deflect heat and flames. The firefighters were treated for minor burns, CDF Capt. Will Donaldson said.

More than 500 inmates under the supervision of the CDF worked shovel lines around the six-mile perimeter of the fire, and 106 fire engine crews from throughout San Diego, Riverside, Orange and Los Angeles counties were assigned to protect homes that sprinkle the rural area.

The fire burned right up to the manicured grounds of a remote, year-round CDF camp housing female inmates at Rainbow, which was transformed into a command post for the blaze. As exhausted firefighters snagged catnaps and food, towering plumes of mud-black smoke billowed almost directly overhead.

On the west side of the fire, resident Danielle Foster stood and watched in wonder as firefighters set their own backfires, directly across the street from her home on Rainbow Valley Boulevard. Within minutes, entire trees and thick chaparral were snapping and crackling as the flames rushed up the hillside, to meet the out-of-control flames atop the ridgeline.

“The firefighters are marvelous,” Foster said. “I applaud them.”

“This is intelligent firefighting,” said Foster’s friend, Daniel Grigor. “They looked around the house to get the lay of the land before they started their own fires. They know what they’re doing.”

The firefighting effort also included 11 bulldozers, six air tankers spewing orange fire retardant along inaccessible ridges, and six helicopters dropping bladders of water on hot spots.

Even as the fire moved stubbornly toward Pala-Temecula Road on the northeast, sparking a late-afternoon evacuation of those residents, homeowners along Rainbow Creek Road to the south, who were told to evacuate Sunday night and Monday morning, surveyed how close their homes had come to burning.

“In January, we knocked down a bank of vegetation, right next to the shed,” said Omega Roldan, who with her husband, Pedro, rents out five mobile homes along Rainbow Creed Road.

“It was a good thing we did clean it out.”

Cathy Fried, who is married to a firefighter and is herself a fire dispatcher and volunteer firefighter for the North County Fire Department in nearby Fallbrook, watched the fire from her front porch. Earlier in the morning, she sent her parents and her twin 13-year-old sons to another family home, safely down the street.

“The CDF told me they weren’t real concerned about my place, but an hour later the sheriff came up and said, ‘Didn’t you know you’re supposed to evacuate?’ That’s when I got my boys and parents out,” she said.

She packed a few of her own belongings for her parents to take on her behalf. “I couldn’t think what to take, when it got down to it,” she said. “So I took the absolute necessities--some work clothes and cosmetics.”

A mile away, Susie Justus stood in her front yard, watering down a pair of fruitless mulberry trees that she worried might ignite from the sheer heat of the blaze. The hillside across the street was ablaze and a lumbering air tanker flew low, unloading its orange retardant to the cheers of residents.

“This is scary, because this is all we’ve got,” Justus said. “We bought this home three years ago and have redone it, and now to have it maybe burn. . . . That’s pretty scary.”