Fire Evacuation Goes According to Plan

At Camp Bravo in the San Bernardino Mountains, kids playing their version of “Survivor” were about to jump into the pool Tuesday afternoon when they were told to get dressed -- a raging wildfire was headed their way.

Counselors Lacey Phelps and Heather Macrorie, along with other staff members at the performing arts camp near Barton Flats, piled kids into their cars and made their way down the mountain.

“It was very organized,” said Phelps, whose passengers sang to a Kelly Clarkson CD as they headed to the evacuation center at Yucaipa High School. “None of us had ever been through this, but it was like we had. It turned out to be this fun, energetic thing.”

An estimated 1,000 children at 14 summer camps in the area were forced to flee the 68-acre wildfire in a part of the San Bernardino National Forest thick with summer camps and thousands of dead pine trees.

The wildfire, though small, triggered the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s long-standing mountain evacuation plan and put emergency crews and camp directors to the test. Fire officials have been on edge about the extreme fire danger in the area, especially since deadly wildfires decimated several mountain communities near Lake Arrowhead two years ago.

As counselors and rescuers rounded up campers, a fleet of school buses was called in to ferry the children and staff to safety as the flames came dangerously close to some of the campgrounds.

When Rocky Wilson, director of Camp Conrad-Chinnock for diabetic children, got orders to evacuate, he gathered medications and supplies for the campers and his book of emergency contact information.

“We’ve been doing evacuation drills for 15 to 20 years and this is the first time we had to use them,” Wilson said.

For the 197 kids and 73 staffers who remained at the evacuation center Wednesday, Yucaipa High School became an extension of their respective camps. They played basketball and volleyball, watched movies and had food-eating competitions.

“We’re the camp that won’t go home,” said Artur Cybulski, director of Camp Bravo. “The show must go on, so we’ve just taken Bravo on the road. The parents have expressed an enormous amount of gratitude that we didn’t walk away.”

Firefighters had the blaze 76% contained by Wednesday evening and public safety officials praised the rapid evacuation of the camps for helping to avoid serious injuries.

“The evacuation went very smoothly,” said San Bernardino County fire spokeswoman Tracey Martinez. “It’s a great plan.”

The evacuation plan provides authorities with estimates of the number of campers, visitors and residents in the wildfire country that stretches across the San Bernardino Mountains. It is revised continually by the Sheriff’s Department in consultation with the Mountain Area Safety Task Force, which was formed in 2002 in response to severe drought and the bark-beetle infestation that killed thousands of trees.

A U.S. Forest Service worker in Barton Flats first noticed the blaze Tuesday within a quarter-mile of Camp MorningStar. She reported the fire to dispatch and alerted the Yucaipa sheriff’s station of the need to evacuate.

“We all knew there were 34 camps, with as many as 6,000 children, and 96 summer homes in Barton Flats,” U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Ruth Wenstrom said.

“It’s already plugged in, so we don’t miss anybody.”

Buses rushed up Highway 38 to the camps, transporting children and camp leaders to a staging area at Barton Flats Amphitheater, where other buses picked them up and moved them 14 miles down the highway to the evacuation center.

“The priority is a quick response,” Hernandez said. “The deployment needs to be immediate, whether they squelch the fire right away or not.”

Hernandez said camp directors have remained a critical part of the mountain evacuation plan.

“We put a lot of responsibility on the directors, to let us know their numbers, to do the head count for their kids, to gather emergency numbers for the parents and to get the kids oriented about the fire emergency plans on the day they arrive,” Hernandez said.