Several alumni fled their San Diego area homes to esape the wildfires that ravaged Southern California in late October.
Kevin Harkenrider ’77 got a phone call from a neighbor just before 5 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 22. A large fast-moving wildfire was approaching and neighbors were evacuating. Harkenrider, his wife and his daughter evacuated their home in central San Diego County within 35 minutes.
He was one of a handful of San Diego area alumni including Joyce Anderson ’85 and Hunt Eggleston ’76 who evacuated their homes to escape the devastating wildfires that swept across Southern California in late October and destroyed an estimated 2,330 homes, according to the California Office of Emergency Management.
By early morning on Oct. 22, the Witch Creek and Harris fires in San Diego County, fueled by strong Santa Ana winds, showed no signs of retreat.
“We ended up stopping at three different friends’ homes that day. They too were evacuated as the fires progressed westward towards the ocean,” Harkenrider wrote in an e-mail. “We felt like it was stalking us. In fact, we joked to the last family friend we evacuated to at 9 p.m. that the fires were following us, so they may not wish to take us in.”
About 24 hours before Harkenrider left his Rancho Bernardo neighborhood, Eggleston had packed up and evacuated his home in neighboring Poway. Fighting thick smoke, he evacuated at 3:30 a.m. Eggleston did not return home for five days, much of it spent watching local news as wildfires enveloped buildings within 200 yards of his house.
Firefighters stopped flames within 20 feet of some houses and set up a battle line along Espola Road in Poway, Eggleston said. One roadside sign read, “Thank you firefighters for saving my stuffed bear collection—I love you all.”
“The firefighters were not going to let the fire cross Espola Road. They had 20 fire trucks lined up to make sure the fire did not break through. If it had, over 1,000 homes would have been in trouble,” Eggleston wrote.
The Witch Creek fire in San Diego County was one of 23 separate wildfires that burned in a 200-mile stretch of Southern California, according to the emergency management office. The Witch Creek fire burned 197,990 acres over central San Diego County during several days and destroyed 1,125 homes. A second fire in the county, dubbed the Harris fire, burned 90,400 acres and destroyed 460 buildings.
The two fires claimed seven lives and left scores of firefighters injured. At one point, Qualcomm Stadium, home to the San Diego Chargers football team, housed 12,000 evacuees.
At Sea World, where Chris (LeDuc) Jernigan ’97 works in the Animal Training Department, was closed for two days. The popular San Diego tourist attraction is rarely closed. And San Diego State University, where Elissa (Mirkin) Oransky ’95 is associate director of planned giving, was shut down for a week during the fires.
“You could see the burnt land from the 15 freeway and we could smell the burnt, ashy land—a pungent reminder of the devastation that just transpired and the fires that were still burning,” Jernigan wrote.
The wildfires of 2007 came four years after a series of wildfires devastated the region in October 2003. The Cedar wildfires claimed 22 lives, destroyed 3,600 homes and scorched 743,000 acres, an area slightly smaller than Rhode Island.
During the Cedar wildfires, Oransky was forced to evacuate to a friend’s house for two days. The wildfires crept within a mile of her house. The family monitored local news and called their answering machine to assure their house was still standing.
In the 2007 wildfires, Anderson’s home in the Carmel Mountain Ranch section of San Diego was never seriously threatened by fire but she and her husband, David, elected to evacuate their two daughters as a precaution.
As they left on Oct. 22, smoke and ash made it difficult to breathe, Anderson said. The family returned after two days in a hotel and has since been helping friends as they rebuild.
“Our girls attend the Poway Unified School District, where 20 staff members and over 340 children lost their homes. Over 60 members of our church, Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian, also lost their homes,” Anderson wrote. “It was a very scary time and it will likely take many years for those families affected to recover.”
Jesse Bye ’05 is a mechanical engineer at Boeing and lives in La Jolla, a beachside neighborhood in southern San Diego. Bye was about 15 miles from the fires but still battled smoky air and falling ash.
“The air was very smoky and my car was covered in ash. The most spectacular thing I saw were the sunsets. I surf every night until the sun goes down, and during the week of the fires the sun turned bright red and, after reflecting off the water, everything turned red and orange,” Bye wrote.
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