A Worker’s Quick Action Saves Sawdust Festival Site

The Sawdust Festival, home of the summer-long showcase for local artists in an open-air gallery, found a hero last week.

Kurt Branton, 26, is being credited with saving the festival’s grounds. As the fire approached, Branton, an assistant groundskeeper for the Sawdust Festival, had been helping a family move things out of their house when he began worrying about the festival grounds.

He hopped on his mountain bike, sneaked past the blockades on Laguna Canyon Road and headed toward the grounds.

“I opened the gate to find the bases of three trees on fire, a seating area with a planter and a huge tree that was on fire, and the hillside on fire,” Branton said. “The canyon on both sides was engulfed in flames.”

He turned on the sprinklers, grabbed hoses and ran from one fire spot to the next.

“My first thought was, ‘Hey, Kurt, if you go in here you might not be coming out,’ ” he said. But the festival grounds--where he has occasionally worked during the past 10 years--and the nearby Boys Club are his “stomping grounds,” he said. “I’m at both places every day. . . . That’s my home and I wanted to save it.”

As the embers landed on the festival’s grounds, small fires erupted that Branton doused with water.

“There were a couple of times that I wanted to give up,” he said. “One reason or another, I just kept going.”

The city requires the festival to have a 50-foot clearance around the site, which probably helped slow the fire, said Darlene Brokaw, the festival’s general manager. The blaze stopped right at the property line, while the surrounding property is entirely burned.

“I’m pretty much in shock,” Brokaw said Friday. “I had expected this to be gone.”