Sunday afternoon we were in church about 2:00 pm when we noticed the main chapel had grown quite smoky. Our bishop's counselor, Rian Jones, made some phone calls and found there was a wildfire burning near Santa Ysabel, 35 miles to the east of us. Rian reported the flames were being driven by the Santa Ana winds, and were expected to burn east and north. He prophetically said "They expect the fire to burn all the way to the coast." The Bishop dismissed church at 2:15, sending families home to prepare in case we needed to evacuate.
That night, we each packed a bag, choosing 4 days of clothes and a few important personal items for our ditch kits. We made sure our emergency kits were in the cars along with plenty of water. We went to bed late, but satisfied we had prepared in case we had to abandon ship for a couple of days.
Monday morning we were wakened at 4:30 by a phone call from our friend Robin Kaufman. Robin is president of the Rancho Bernardo Community Council, where Diane has served in the past, and in touch with everything that happens in RB. Robin told me we would be getting an evacuation call via the "Reverse 911" system in a few minutes, and that we should begin evacuating. The reverse 911 call came 15 minutes later, as we were beginning our preparations.
We took our packs from the night before, a couple of large bottles of water, and the guinea pig cage to cars. The wind was hot and wild, once carrying my bicycle across our large balcony, throwing it into the wall near the bedroom. The air was thick with smoke and there was a strange orange glow throughout the sky to the north and east. We turned on the radio but KPBS had no information about fires in RB that early Monday morning.
We made a couple of passes through our apartment, looking for precious things to grab. On one pass through our home office, I looked at the equipment on the desks and decided Diane's Mac mini was small enough to take with us. I unplugged it from monitor and USB hub and stuffed it into my backpack. I didn't, however, think to grab the USB disk attached to my nearby home server, which contained backups of the source code archives for several projects, two commercial and two open source. I left the server running on purpose, thinking it might help me keep tabs on what was happening at home.
Our neighbor Arthur Lopes, who had just moved upstairs in our building, told me the Westview High School evacuation site had just been closed, that we should go to Qualcomm Stadium, as he was dragging a large load down the stairs. Diane ran downstairs to wake Tom and Erica Blanchett, who had not gotten a reverse 911 call.
As we carried loads to the car, I noticed the sky was getting brighter and oranger. At 5:30 or so, carrying a final load down the garage one building away, I saw embers being blown on the wind. My friend Jason's daughter Ally called my cell phone and said "Are you packing? Get out now, it just burned over our back yard!"
I ran back upstairs to see if Diane had gotten our cat, Pansy, cornered yet. Pansy doesn't travel well and hates the kitty carriers. I told Diane we needed to get out quickly. We were both thinking we were just escaping the smoke, that we would be back in a couple of days, and had discussed how difficult it was going to be on Pansy to be trapped in a car for a couple of days at some evacuation shelter. With my pressing to leave, Diane decided to put down Pansy's multi-day kibble and water feeders with food and water for 5 days, and we left. As we departed, there were burning embers everywhere and the orange glow was much brighter.
A week later, we learned our neighbor in the next building, where our garage was located, saw what he called "a sheet of fire" erupt from the top of our building at 5:45, as we were leaving the building. We didn't know it, but our building was on fire as we were leaving.
We drove across the street, helped friends Ralph and Stacy Smith gather their 6 kids into their Yukon XL, and departed in convoy. Ralph and I are both amateur radio operations ("hams") and we had small walkie-talkie radios to talk between the 3 cars; me in our Land Cruiser, Diane and Bailey in our Beetle, and Ralph and his family in their Yukon.
We found no useful information on commercial radio that morning. I scanned several FM stations and the entire AM band, searching for any evacuation information. The commercial radio landscape was infuriatingly blank of any real information. The hams, on the other hand, were on the air as we left, collecting and disseminating information as it become available. Harry Hodges, W6YOO, was operating an information net on one of the Palomar Amateur Radio Club repeaters, and was calm, collected, and indispensable. Ralph and I contributed what we could to the info net, as we made our way to Qualcomm avoiding I-15 until we got to MCAS Miramar, where I-15 was the only way past.
At Qualcomm, we settled in with the kids, trying to find what was happening at home. While the stadium was opening, very little assistance had assembled by the time we arrived at 7:15 or so. No food was available yet, and I was, as usual, hungry in the morning. We hung around in the parking lot for 45 minutes or so, then volunteers began making sweeps through the lot letting us know we should proceed to the main gate to register and move into the stadium. We did so, taking most of a row on the upper level of the A2 section, where we could see the TV screens tuned to the local NBC news affiliate.
We alternated between following the news coverage on the TV and entertaining the kids. Trying to keep Ralph's younger ones from killing themselves around the stadium was a full-time occupation, but we had four adults and three older children to take turns watching the little ones, so the adults had plenty of time to worry and watch the TV coverage.
About 10:00 am, we saw coverage of La Terraza apartments looking like the center of Hades. The view, looking down an alleyway between two rows of buildings terminated by my garage, seemed to be surrounded by flames. Thick smoke and flames poured out of one the buildings while firefighters from three engines hosed the building and the surrounding area. We began to realize that leaving Pansy may have been a fatal mistake.
The news from Rancho Bernardo that day was spotty and mostly inaccurate. We heard that La Terraza was burned to ground, only one building standing. We heard that "most of" Rancho Bernard was destroyed. We heard a lot of things, but precious little real information.
We weren't allowed back into our neighborhood until Thursday afternoon, and then only for a few minutes. Ralph and I went to his house first, which we found mostly undamaged. Lots of ash, some burning in the front yard, but the house was intact and undamaged. We went across the street to La Terraza, parked with our police escort by the garage, and walked around the corner to find our building badly burned. The kitchen was mostly burned, the storage room at the end of the balcony no longer existed, and the dining room in the upstairs apartment had collapsed onto our dining table. The two bedrooms on the front of the apartment had been doused by a fire hose, the carpets were soaked, and everything reeked of smoke, standing water, and spoiled food.
Ralph and I walked the apartment, taking pictures and calling for Pansy. I looked in her favorite hiding places and did not find her. The next day we were allowed to return to Ralph's house, but my building had been "red tagged," condemned by the city as uninhabitable. Police and national guard troops guarded the 8 damaged buildings, preventing residents and vandals from poking through the remains. The next day, fences were erected around the condemned buildings and hired guards kept everyone away.
We ran back and forth between the fire department, the rental office, and the city Building Services department, looking for a way to get into the building, recover our belongings, and search for the cat. It was the usual and expected finger-pointing exercise, the owners said the fire department condemned the building, the fire department said Building Services is in charge of structural evaluations, and Building Services said the owner had to make the building safe, then call them to have the "red tag" upgraded to a "yellow tag" before we could recover anything. The owner wasn't about to do spend any money making the building safe, but wouldn't admit that officially.
Finally, the next Friday, the property manager, Amy Breitmeyer, called me and told me "We're not going to do anything for you. You're not allowed to go in, but there isn't anybody here who can stop you if you want to go in."
I called a couple of friends, ran to Home Depot to buy some hard hats, and was back at the apartment in an hour. Ralph and I entered the building and Pansy immediately ran out of Bailey's bedroom, down the hall, and into the kitchen. She hid in her favorite cupboard in the kitchen, the only one not burned away. I shoved burned and fallen ceiling panels and beams from the floor above aside, dove through the spoiled food, and got into the cupboard behind her. She was hidden behind large cans holding our long-term food storage. I called Diane, told her the cat was still alive, to come pick her up, and began moving cans.
After pausing to snap a picture, I managed to poke at Pansy enough to scare her out of the cupboard. I grabbed her as she attempted to run past me, too worn out and starved to really make much of a break for it. I struggled to my feet, slipping in the goo on the floor numerous times as she clung to me with all of her claws. I handed her to Ralph, who slipped and climbed out to the balcony to hand her to Diane, who had just shown up. Diane had already called the local vet office, and dashed her off to see the doctor.
Pansy returned home the next day. Her voice was raspy and congested from the upper respiratory infection and she had no appetite. We learned that loss of appetite is very dangerous for cats, especially overweight cats. If they go three days with no protein intake, their system will flood their liver with fatty acids and they will die of liver failure.
We nursed Pansy through the next several weeks, returning to the vet each time she crashed. She was unable to eat or drink, gagging when she approached her food bowl. She was occasionally able to drink from a running tap, but not enough to be healthy. Each time she visited the vet, she came home a little better, but she was obviously declining, devoid of energy. She seemed unable to smell and was unresponsive to catnip, which had been a favorite pastime before the fire.
As the vet bills mounted, we sought alternatives to bi-weekly vet visits. Diane demanded the local office show us how to administer subcutaneous fluids, something a friend has been doing for her aged cat for quite some time. They relented, and even sold us the kit at cost, showing Diane how to administer it on a cat in their custody that also needed fluids.
We administered to Pansy, hoping it would perk her up, and gave her the appetite booster the doctor had given us on the previous visit. Neither seemed to help much, though she purred when we petted her. That night, she seemed lethargic and unresponsive, and we knew the end was near.
Pansy woke us at 4:00 am Thanksgiving morning. She was on the floor at the foot of our bed, and sounded like she was retching. I jumped out of bed, turned on a lamp, and knelt over her. Her breathing was very labored and she was panting. We both knew this was the end. It took about 15 minutes, and she was obviously struggling. We administered subcutaneous fluids again, knowing this would not help her but hoping it would. We petted her and told her we loved her, not knowing what else to do.
Pansy's death has been the final blow to us, there is nothing else the fire can take. We are happy we got all our family out, and saddened that Pansy had to bear the burden of my hasty decision to leave without her. When we were packing we didn't realize how close the flames were, the thought our home would burn did not cross our minds. When we heard from Ally the fires were here in Rancho Bernardo, we didn't take time to think through our responses. We have regretted leaving Pansy since we saw the TV coverage of "the battle for La Terraza," and did everything we knew to care for her afterward.
Ultimately, my only anger in this is directed at the city government and especially the owners of La Terraza, who were too busy finger-pointing and trying to shuck responsibility to allow us to get into our home and find our kitty. Imagine how much healthier she would have been if she had received health care a full week earlier, when we should have been allowed back into our home. Imagine if the owners had just been willing to admit they were never going to take care of us and arrange for us to return safely to recover our goods, so we would have known our only recourse was to break the law a week earlier.
There was some coverage of this in the local news, at http://www.mylocalnews.com/nws/index.php?/main/content/renters_cry_foul_over_treatment/
I'll try to blog more about our experiences in the fire as I have time to write it, and to understand it. For now, I needed to tell Pansy's story while it is fresh in my mind, and perhaps to justify my anger you will read more about in the future.
