Living on the Edge

Dennis Smith’s mind kept changing with the winds.

As they shifted to the west, the smoke thinned and the ash fell more lightly, he figured he’d stay put. But then the wind would switch more to the south, the smoke would start blowing back over the crest across Jamboree Road, and he’d figure it was time to move.

“It’s just been so iffy,” said Smith, 27, of Tuesday’s blaze.

By 10:30 a.m., the threat solidified. So did his decision: Time to move. With the help of friend Kathy Thompson, 39, he began Operation Ark, ferrying horses and llamas two at a time from their corrals off Newport Avenue to a friend’s ranch farther west toward Orange.

The animals did not go willingly.

“It’s getting too close,” Thompson said as Smith, who tends the animals for owner Leonard Chaidez, shoved a balky llama into the two-bay trailer while a horse kicked inside the next stall. “They’re nervous. They were huddled all together. They smell the smoke.”

The animals weren’t the only nervous ones. In a crescent stretching from north Irvine’s Northwood housing development through Tustin Ranch, Lemon Heights, Cowan Heights and Orange Park Acres, residents spent a nervous day gathering up valuables in a frenzy of activity that they hoped would ultimately be unnecessary.

But with billows of smoke overhead, they said, taking precautions was the only option.

“We’re trying to put the things that mean the most to us, the family things, in the car,” said Craig Furniss, 38, who took the day off from work.

As he walked around videotaping the family’s Lemon Heights home, his wife, Janice, 38, hurriedly packed the family cars. Their three children--ages 3, 5 and 7--wandered about.

The family moved to the house two years ago and went through a similar drill last year when fires burned through a nearby neighborhood. The winds then were different, though, blowing the fire away from their street near Peters Canyon Regional Park.

This time, Craig Furniss said, the wind was against them.

“This year it looks like it might be worse,” he said, “We’re going to see how it goes. We had six firetrucks in front of the house two hours ago.”

The heavy equipment was a constant presence throughout hillside neighborhoods as teams were deployed to different locations to wait, watch and keep track of floating embers. Few people seemed to have evacuated, but driveways were filled with loaded cars, and anxious neighbors stood around swapping stories of past blazes.

Lisa Mendoza, 28, went to work at her family’s restaurant, Rancho Mendoza in Santa Ana, but after a quick breakfast decided to come home.’

“After 9 o’clock, there was no more news on TV, so I didn’t know what was happening,” Mendoza said as she stood along an open stretch of Skyline Drive, watching smoke billow over the horizon. “I decided to just come and look around.”

Mendoza has lived in the Cowan Heights area for more than a decade, but after the Lemon Heights fire last year thought about moving out. Community ties kept her here.

“I know all my neighbors,” she said. “There’s no problems with crime. But you do worry when the wind comes up.”

For Gary and Renee Lee, who moved with their two children to Northwood this summer from Dallas, the whole experience was new.

They awoke Tuesday morning to the smell of smoke, and at 7:30 an Irvine police officer knocked at their door to alert them to a voluntary evacuation. The phone began ringing with alerts from phone trees at the children’s school and day-care center, both closed. Meanwhile, the hillside just north of their home in the Tremaine subdivision, usually dark green with groves of avocado trees, was shrouded by dark, thick smoke.

“I didn’t think any of this hill would ever burn,” Gary Lee, 44, said as an air tanker banked overhead to make a pass at the heart of the fire. Overhead, meanwhile, the smoke lightened to a soft brown, as though a homeowners association architectural review committee had persuaded the sky to turn beige, the external color of choice through the planned community.

“I told the kids to pack their clothes,” Renee Lee, 43, said. “The next thing I knew, they had garbage bags filled with Star Wars toys, Beanie Babies. . . . We packed the photo albums, the videotapes of the house, the birth certificates and the marriage certificate.

“We were ready for an earthquake. We weren’t ready for this.”