Ventura residents wait helplessly as fire marches toward their homes

As a destructive fire swept into Ventura early Tuesday, residents felt helpless as a they waited to see whether their homes would survive.

About 12:45 a.m., Karen McCleery stood in her driveway near plastic candy canes and other Christmas decor, watching the fire burn a nearby hillside.

Like many of her neighbors, McCleery took solace in that fact that the fire had one more hill that it would have to burn before reaching the neighborhood.

She said she lost power about 6 p.m. Monday.

“That was our first sign,” McCleeey, 65, said. “And then you could just see it racing across” the ridge.”

In McCleery’s neighborhood, Foothill Heights, just south of Foothill Road in Ventura, many neighbors stood in driveways, watching the fire burn, wondering when it would be time to leave.

Not far from McCleery’s home, Eddie Barragan, 43, and his wife Maria, 39, sat in folding camp chairs at the corner of North Wells Road and Loma Vista Road. The couple had been watching the fire for four hours as family waited inside their home.

Barragan, a union iron worker who has worked as a wildlife firefighter, said he was studying the flames and paying attention to how the wind shifted.

“If it comes over this next ridge, or the wind shifts, it takes one ember to get on one of these houses, and there it goes,” he said.

The fire swept from the mountains into Ventura, burning an unknown number of homes.

Fire officials said there was little they could do stop the flames being pushed by wind gusts of up to 50 mph.

“The prospects for containment are not good,” said Ventura County Fire Chief Mark Lorenzen at a news conference early Tuesday. “Really mother nature is going to decide.”

The fire had burned at least 25,000 acres. But fire officials expected it would rip through at least 50,000 acres in the mountains between Santa Paula and Ventura.