Foothills Fire Lets O.C. Off Easy

Dan Dulac jolted awake to the red glow and saw the flames leap, one ridge, then another, closer, closer by the minute. He was ready.

You don’t live for 10 years perched above a canyon with a wife, three daughters and four Dalmatians without knowing the enemy. Always the enemy was an invisible force on their little piece of paradise, a 4,000-square-foot stucco house, with no neighbors for miles except the ranch hands down the hill and the deer, mountain lions and coyote.

So you clear the brush from your 100-acre ranch, you keep enough water in storage tanks to fill a backyard pool, you mount floodlights everywhere in case the fire sneaks in under the cover of darkness. And you get to know the firefighters at the bottom of the hill so when the call comes, in the middle of the night, they know: That’s the Dulac property--a family of five, with four other families of ranch hands in trailer homes.

Orange County firefighter Mike Overton got the call about 11:15 p.m. Monday and knew what he was up against. A raging brush fire in the remote Baker Canyon area, feeding on dry hillsides and heading for the Dulac ranch, 1,600 feet above the canyon floor. A steep and winding dirt road leads to the ranch, which has no fire hydrants.

Dulac, 37, knew the price of front-row seats to the Cleveland National Forest. He would stay and fight to save his house, 20 feet from the edge of a cliff, just as he had always prepared to do. But no fire prevention manual could have prepared him for the sight of a 30-foot wall of flame barreling toward the house he built. No one could have told him that 100-mph Santa Ana winds would splinter a stream of water into a wimpy shower.

“You prepare and plan for this like I did for 10 years, but when it happens, you forget everything you learned before,” Dulac said Tuesday. “I mean, this is incredible. These flames were taller than the trees.”

Dulac is not sure what woke him Monday night. But he had run through the drill so many times in his head that he never even thought to start packing up. He hustled everyone awake, called the Fire Department and started hooking up hoses. He flipped on the floodlights so his property was lit like a stadium. He sent a ranch hand to watch the attic in case the vents sucked in stray embers.

Meanwhile, down the Dulacs’ winding road, four families in trailer homes also watched the fire hopscotching the ridges. Firefighters rounded up the families, which included 10 children, and brought them up to the Dulac ranch. It’s too risky to try to get you down the hill, the firefighters told them. The escape route had already been mapped out: a hiking trail down the back side of the hill.

Dulac’s wife, Dianne, who is five months pregnant, watched 10 fire engines pull into their yard, one by one up their single-lane road, a nightmarish procession of flashing lights and wailing sirens.

“When I moved up here with him,” she said, “fire was the first thing I thought of. It’s my worst fear.”

The families huddled together in the house. There was nothing to do but wait for the fire’s approach. Nicole Dulac, 12, watched the tips of flames peeking over her backyard swing set.

The first flames shot into the shrubbery and charred the hibiscus and birds of paradise. About 4:30 a.m., the wind whipped the fire around to the side of the house and back, blackening a big palm tree and burning a 40-foot pine tree to the ground.

“That’s when it got very hairy,”’ Dan Dulac said. “That’s when I thought for the first time that we weren’t under control.”

“Suddenly,” said County Fire Capt. Joe Lowe, “we had flames everywhere.”

Firefighters managed to beat the flames back, spraying hot spots, shooting water down the hillside, letting it burn itself out on dry patches. By 8 a.m. Tuesday, the winds had shifted, the flare-ups had stopped and the danger was over.

No one was injured; no major damage had occurred.

The Dulacs’ threatened hillside took on a celebratory air. The family tracked the fire on distant mountains, cheering when fixed-wing aircraft dumped plumes of fire retardant along the ridge lines. Firefighters stretched on the front lawn, using their helmets as pillows or digging into a lunch of canned sausages and ravioli. Others took turns splashing their faces from a water-filled trash can and trying to wash the red from their eyes.

And in the frontyard, Nicole and her 9-year-old sister, Michelle, could finally run around, bandannas pulled up over their nose and mouth, mimicking the firefighters who had saved their house. They were safe again. For now.