RSF Feels Witch's Wrath

By Ian S. Port
Assistant Editor

The event was all-but-inevitable — yet somehow unbelievable.

On Monday, Oct. 22, a wildfire birthed in the scrubby chaparral northeast of Ramona whipped westward from the mountains and, fanned by speeding Santa Ana winds and parched fall air, surged into Rancho Santa Fe, leaving behind 76 smoldering properties and hundreds of acres of blackened open space.

Named the “Witch fire” after the area near Witch Creek where it started, that wave of speeding flames and embers forced the evacuation of not just Rancho Santa Fe, but a vast quadrant of San Diego County for the better part of a week. With many other parts of San Diego and Southern California evacuated or burning as well, the Santa Ana-fueled wildfires of 2007 captured the concern of the entire world.

But one would not have known it from the sight of things. With all residents and employees under mandatory evacuation, the Rancho Santa Fe area took on a post-apocalyptic air, aided by the ever-presence of odiferous smoke and orange-gray skies. Fire engines, National Guard humvees and Sheriff’s vehicles patrolled the streets, adding to the eeriness.

When residents were finally able to return around midday Oct. 25, many found their homes and belongings in smoldering ruin. While firefighters from around California staged a terrifically successful defense of all communities of Rancho Santa Fe, the fire won in a few places. A total of 55 structures were lost in the blaze; most of them homes. Another 21 were damaged. But no one was hurt.

The fire exacted its cruelty at random. Flames ran through creek beds and gullies, up hillsides and through trees to claim some houses and leave others untouched. Heroic residents resisted calls for evacuation to stay and save their own and neighbors’ homes. Others returned from afar to find nearby structures incinerated while their own home stood, miraculously untouched.

Some came back to little more than an up-thrust chimney and their possessions gone or disfigured, remnants spread on the ashy ground. And then they faced that daunting question — what to do next?

“I don’t know, maybe slit my wrists,” said Kevin Arms, a resident who lost all his things in a house on Zumaque, one of the hardest-hit streets in the Rancho Santa Fe Covenant area. Holding a shovel on Oct. 25, Arms’ eyes and face covered to protect him from the fumes emanating from the spot where his desk used to be, the former renter managed a resigned chuckle: “I’ll get another place to live.” He didn’t sound totally convinced.

The myriad emotions of residents grappling with the loss of their material lives are nearly unfathomable. But local fire experts say the rush of wildfires into Ranch Santa Fe was just a matter of time — as is another, similar event in the future.
The call to evacuate eastern portions of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire District, including the Crosby, went out before dawn on Oct. 22, though it didn’t become mandatory for the RSF Covenant until 10 a.m. By midday the evacuation area had grown to include all of Carmel Valley, and later that night Del Mar was added.

The impetus for the huge evacuation area was fearsome Santa Ana winds. With gusts up to 60 mph, the Santa Anas supercharged the brushfires, whipping them into 200-ft. walls of flame that sent burning embers shooting even higher and farther.

The Witch Fire had moved from the backcountry into Ramona, into Poway and across I-15 by the morning of Oct. 22nd. By that evening, with the help of the frenzying Santa Anas, the fire was burning in Rancho Santa Fe.

‘Highways of Fire’

It happened just like Irwin Wills thought. The former chief of the Rancho Santa Fe Fire District strongly advocated for better fire protection during his 13-year tenure — fearing the same set of circumstances that shuffled in the Witch fire. Like many knowledgeable observers, Willis also didn’t believe that the Witch fire would stop at Rancho Santa Fe.

“The predictions that we made as to how the fire would occur —it’d come from the east, it’d go down the San Dieguito river, it’d come out of the river on both sides, it’d hit Fairbanks, it’d hit Rancho – were very, very accurate,” Willis said.

Fire District Director Jim Ashcraft has his own name for the riverbeds: “We have what I call the highways of fire – the San Dieguito creek area and the Escondido creek area. They’re extraordinarily dangerous.”

The Witch took those routes on its blitz into the Ranch. But unlike other wildfires where a wall of flames works its way somewhat predictably toward an area, the finicky Santa Ana winds kept firefighters on their toes — and residents of areas from Olivenhain to Fairbanks Ranch guessing about their homes’ fate.

Surrounded on three sides by open space and chaparral-covered hillside, the R.E. Badger Water Filtration Plant off of Aliso Canyon lay exposed to what would become an ocean of flames.

The plant, surrounded by fencing and built of cement, uses hazardous chemicals to treat water for Rancho Santa Fe and Solana Beach — the same water that pours out of fire hydrants and hoses in a wildfire. “The main thing there is, we want to keep the plant on, because we need the water for firefighting,” Santa Fe Irrigation District General Manager Mike Bardin said.

Winds brought the flames to Bardin’s plant around 7 p.m. Monday evening. The glowing towers of orange shot embers up into the wind, spraying all around and threatening the “tank farm” where hazardous chemicals are stored.

By 10 p.m., the plant was surrounded by fire and firefighters, and operating on its diesel generators because the surrounding electricity poles had been incinerated.

“It burned right up to our fence line and then right around our plant and right up the rest of the hillside,” Bardin said. “Three-fourths of the way around our plant was open space and all that was burned. It’s surreal when you see it.”

But emergency planning with the fire district — and a pre-fire warning call to remind fire fighters to come up and protect the chemical tanks — had carried the day. Bardin’s cement plan survived unharmed. “We kept that plant manned 24 hours a day and produced water the whole time.”

The Battle of Rancho Santa Fe

Farther south, another branch of the Witch fire had run from Lake Hodges into the San Dieguito riverbed, where it raced toward homes on the eastern side of Rancho Santa Fe.

“Those drainages are kind of like chutes and they tend to funnel the fire, especially the San Dieguito river bottom,” RSF Fire District Chief Nick Pavone later recounted. “You have those really steep slopes and the fire just whips through those open space areas.”

The fire moved so fast Monday night that it didn’t completely burn the vegetation that transported it. But once in the river bottom, homes at the tops of nearby hillsides in Rancho Del Rio and the Covenant made easy targets.

Zumaque street lies on the far southeast corner of the Rancho Santa Fe Covenant: a steep, downhill-sloping single lane that ends close to the San Dieguito river. The homes on the west side of the street sit high on the edge of a hilltop, overlooking the river and mountain areas to the east.

Six of them were the Witch fire’s first victims in the Covenant. Two other homes on Zumaque were damaged. It would be the hardest-hit street in the area.

The fire raced through the Covenant Monday night, spreading through trees and embers catapulted from high-rise walls of fire. The high winds created the possibility that the flames could end up nearly anywhere.

“The problem with this fire is that it didn’t come in a straight line, it was like a chessboard or a checkerboard,” recounted Jim Ashcraft, who observed the blaze from RSF Fire District Station No. 1. “It bounced to different spots. So even if you had your resources at one area it would go somewhere else. We could have had triple the resources and we still would’ve had losses.”

From Zumaque the flames moved both north and south, engulfing homes on El Vuelo, Via Monalex, Las Cuestas, Las Colinas and other streets. But the southerly winds prevailed, pushing the Witch fire straight for the RSF Village.

Duncan Hadden’s family has owned The Inn at Rancho Santa Fe for 50 years. So when the call for evacuation came on Monday, Hadden didn’t leave — he set up shop in a central room of his business and waited. When winds freshened around midnight, the fire was headed for The Inn — and him.

“At 3 a.m. I was sitting in the living room of The Inn seeing these flames coming over the tops of the eucalyptus trees in the park — they were that tall — and all the hot embers coming into town,” Hadden remembered. “The front lawn was just sparklers of ashes and burning embers … I didn’t dare get closer than here, but you could hear propane tanks exploding from down there, eucalyptus trees exploding from the sap, it was just unbelievable.”
Standing alone on the lawn of his family’s Inn, wearing ski goggles to see through the smoke while watching towers of flame shooting into the sky, Hadden feared the worst.
He was seeing the fire at Camino Selva, a small street off of Via De Santa Fe less than a block from Stump’s Market and the Mobile station in the village. With flames so close to the middle of Rancho Santa Fe, the firefighters had a choice: work like hell to stop the fire there, or see the village and perhaps a large swath of the Ranch in smoldering ruin by sunrise. So the fire crews — many of whom were slaving through their second straight night of battling blazes around Southern California — turned their hoses straight up in the air.

“They caught their embers and at least got water on them — and then God was with us, because they didn’t land on a bad spot,” Ashcraft remembered. “Their energy was down just enough that nothing caught.”

For Hadden, the firefighters’ valiant efforts and upturned hoses also proved miraculous — his family business and the village it relied on were saved.

“I would’ve bet every penny in my pocketbook that we would’ve lost the town and The Inn if they hadn’t been down there,” he said.

Three hours later, the sun rose over a Rancho Santa Fe that looked largely like as it had the previous day. Three houses on Camino Selva, and many others in the eastern Covenant were gone. Only two homes were lost in Fairbanks Ranch, where the fire again jumped the riverbank and raced up a dry hillside.

The village, the schools, the churches, many businesses and most of the area’s homes had survived the night. But the Witch’s wrath was far from over.

The Command Center
When orders for evacuation were announced Oct. 22, law enforcement and fire protection officers poured into Rancho Santa Fe Fire District Station No. 1 near the Rancho Santa Fe School. The building that normally serves as a station for the RSF Patrol, local firefighters and other law enforcement was teeming with badges — many worn by individuals from out of town. Because RSF District fire fighters had gone out earlier to do battle on the eastern side of the district, some crews in the station early Monday also lacked in-depth knowledge of the Ranch.

That’s why, according to many who spent time there, RSF Patrol Chief Matt Wellhouser ran the show at the command center. When authorities wondered how to find seniors and others with special needs, Wellhouser knew where to find the list. When fire crews needed quick access to a creek or gulley threatened by fire, Wellhouser pulled out the maps and gave directions.

According to Association Manager Pete Smith, who also worked long hours at the RSF command center, Wellhouser and his Patrol officers served as the authority on Rancho Santa Fe for Sheriff’s deputies, Border Patrol, California Highway Patrol Officers, Firefighters and the National Guard.

“The next three days all flowed into one, and Matt stayed at his post for up to 20 hours per day,” Smith said. “All other agencies had organized shifts realizing that people perform best if they are rested, but for Matt there simply wasn’t anyone else that could do what Matt does. The people in the room — to their credit — they all deferred to Matt.”

As the second day of evacuations began, security became a key concern. Many Ranch residents were evacuated far from their homes and wouldn’t be allowed to return for days. But with many driveway gates left open, the National Guard on its way, and few people around, the area was ripe for looting — until authorities blocked off all entrances.

Even then, trespassers were found. Association Director Tim Sullivan had two saddles stolen from his barn. A CHP officer chased down two looters who ran through a roadblock. And the Patrol caught four suspected arsonists late on the night of Oct. 23.

Though firefighters had stopped flames in the Covenant early Tuesday morning, the heat was by no means off Rancho Santa Fe. With winds rising during the daylight hours, the Witch fire came around the other side of Lake Hodges and headed again down Del Dios — this time toward Rancho Cielo and the northeastern corner of the Covenant.

“Once it jumped Del Dios highway east of the fruit stand, it again started to go on the backside of Rancho Cielo and then went the back way towards the Escondido drainage,” Pavone said. “And that was high priority for us to stop it on the backside so it did not get into that Escondido drainage — so it never got to the Bridges. It got stopped around Aliso Canyon and Via Del Las Flores.”

By the end of Tuesday, the fire was out — sort of. Though a front of fast-moving flames no longer threatened to move west, numerous hot spots periodically thrust columns of blue smoke into the sky. Fire crews would spend another day and a half trolling residential streets as wind whipped heat held below the ground into fresh fires, any one of which could flare up and threaten more homes.

Even on Wednesday, with camouflaged National Guard humvees giving a wartime feel to the village of Rancho Santa Fe and fire engines everywhere, hot spots flared up around Las Colinas and Via De La Valle, burning trees and brush. The area was literally still smoldering from the heat of the fires.

‘It’s Going To Happen Again’

Vast areas east the Covenant were singed by the flames, but no homes were lost in Cielo, the Crosby or the Bridges — all of which were built after the fire district implemented fire protective building regulations.

Those rules, known as “shelter-in-place,” were the brainchild of former RSF Fire Chief Irwin Willis, who says the Witch fire provided fantastic validation for what remains a controversial idea: That if trapped by wildfires, residents of well-designed communities would be safer in their fire-resistant homes than fleeing on roadways. That scenario didn’t occur in the Witch fire, but Willis says the homes’ survival speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the guidelines.

“The [Cielo] houses were right at the top of the ridgeline, so it was kind of a worst-case scenario for a fire — you don’t want the structures above the fire with heavy fuels below,” Willis said. “So those structures withstood worst-case scenario fire and were untouched, totally untouched.”

Of course, the safest way to get people through a fire is to get them away from it — and that appeared to be the strategy with the massive evacuations for the Witch fire. But an equally important strategy is protection and defense — subjects Willis emphasized as fire chief.

“I said it hundreds of times at homeowners’ association meetings and any kind of group that I could get together and people would listen. I would say look, first of all Rancho Santa Fe burned once in the 1940s. And if you look at the history of fire, it tends to repeat itself.”

But Willis said that there were still as many as 400 shake-shingle roofs going into the Witch fire, and he knows of three that burned (including at least one on Camino Selva). Shake-shingle roofs are dangerous because embers that land on them can catch the shingles on fire in situations where tile or ceramic wouldn’t ignite.


“At least those three structures and probably a lot more didn’t need to burn. They burned just because the owners wouldn’t change their shake roofs,” Willis said. Although new development is required to meet stricter standards, many existing older homes are still around, waiting for the day when a nearby wildfire reduces them to ash. And Willis warned that such a day will come.

“There are certain areas that are fire-prone — they burn. Well Rancho Santa Fe, if you look at it, it has every single aspect that has led to major fires,” Willis said. “It’s got the heavy vegetation, it’s got the narrow winding roads. It’s built in. It’s only a

matter of time … it’s going to happen again.”