Dozens Flee as Flames Head Their Way

Even before the neighbors phoned, even before authorities rolled up with lights flashing and orders to evacuate, Tim Devine knew that he had just a short time to pack the things he loved and head for safety.

As is his custom when the weather turns cold, the Ojai Valley citrus rancher was up at 3 a.m. Wednesday to check on his crops.

What he discovered when he stepped outside his McNell Road home was a wall of flames cutting a diagonal swath down a nearby canyon and racing toward his bucolic neighborhood northeast of town.

“I didn’t see smoke; I didn’t see a glow. I saw fire,” said Devine, who along with his wife, Jana, gathered their two kids, the family dog and her newborn puppies, a pet turtle named Spike and a collection of Christmas presents and family photos, and headed to the Red Cross evacuation center at Nordhoff High School.

“It was like sitting in the middle of a bonfire,” he said. “And the bonfire was coming our way.”

Devine was among dozens of residents who fled their homes early Wednesday as strong winds pushed a stubborn wildfire dangerously near homes on the eastern edge of this emerald valley studded with citrus trees and upscale residences.

The blaze and subsequent evacuation orders by sheriff’s deputies created a mad, predawn scramble along narrow roads that push right to the southern edge of Los Padres National Forest.

Residents loaded vehicles and grabbed garden hoses to spray down wood-shake roofs and the gnarled oaks that grow tall along the roadsides here.

Many spent the morning coaxing horses into trailers and driving them to safety. The Ojai Humane Society made the rounds, offering free shelter for pets that had nowhere else to go.

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After a 5 a.m. knock on the door from a neighbor, followed by a more insistent knock by deputies, Thacher Road resident Phil Burton grabbed photo albums, wedding albums and Christmas gifts, and headed out the door.

“They said when the sun comes up, the fire is going to come down on you,” he said,

About 35 residents, including a handful of senior citizens from an Ojai Avenue retirement home, ended up at the Red Cross shelter.

Shawna Pavlocak, 25, waited in the high school parking lot for the green light to return home. Her compact car was packed with clothes, photos and CDs. She kept an ear to the radio for news of the fire.

“This is really new for me,” said Pavlocak, a U. S. Postal Service worker who moved to Ojai from Philadelphia three years ago. “When I woke up this morning, the whole mountain was on fire.”

Still others chose to stay put and hope for the best.

Despite being advised to leave her Garst Lane home, 11-year resident Cathy Zacher decided that she would be better off just keeping an eye on the blaze.

Zacher was in the area in 1985 when a brush fire above Wheeler Hot Springs burned for 15 days and charred 120,000 acres.

So when she saw the flames Wednesday morning and heard the evacuation order, she packed her Chevy Blazer with photos, baby books, insurance papers and guitars, and pointed the vehicle nose first down the driveway.

Then she spent the rest of the day watching the wind-whipped blaze flare up and die down along a ridgeline at least a mile away as helicopters and air tankers attacked its eastern flank.

“We’re just going to stay around here,” she said. “I’ll feel a lot better, though, when I look at that canyon and there are no flames.”

At nearby Thacher School, where students are away for the holidays, a skeleton crew of maintenance workers and faculty who live on-site evacuated before dawn as the fire burned to the edge of the private high school campus, tucked into a hillside at the far end of the valley.

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Business manager Bill Prather said fire crews were able to set a backfire that saved two homes at the elite prep school, although a storage shed was destroyed. The campus has its own fire truck, he said, and school personnel were able to fight some of the blaze themselves.

By noon, the fire was still threatening a 650,000-gallon water tank and had burned all around an observatory above the school.

“I would say that thus far, we fared well, but it was a close one,” Prather said.

A few miles away at Ojai Valley School, teachers and staff evacuated early Wednesday. But Headmaster Carl Cooper said he, his son and school President Michael Hermes stayed through the night as flames swept down a canyon that surrounds the private school’s ridge-top buildings.

School personnel evacuated 20 horses from the campus stables about midnight as the fire marched in their direction. The blaze burned right up to the girls’ dorm and the school’s soccer field.

“The school is my life,” Cooper said. “I went to school here. I was a teacher and now I’m headmaster here. What else would I do? It’s kind of like the captain going down with the ship.”

As day broke, the mandatory evacuation loosened. It became more of a stern warning for families to be prepared to leave if necessary.

Residents slowly trickled back to their homes, even though the nearby hillsides were smoldering, sending up thick plumes of smoke that made the sun appear to be a blood-red fireball.

By midmorning, McNell Road resident Jane Cusumano walked her horse Netty along a street leading to her two-story home. She and her husband, Jim, were startled out of a dead sleep about 4:30 a.m. by a neighbor warning that the fire was approaching.

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The couple packed some things and tried to load the horse into a trailer, but it slipped and fell during the process. Jane Cusumano instead walked the horse out of the danger area.

“What a morning,” Jim Cusumano said as the couple returned home to the noise of water-dropping helicopters. “I’ll tell you it was so scary. But I think everything will be OK now.”