Heroism amid the horror

California fires the ‘worst-case scenario’

AGOURA HILLS, CALIF. • Jeff McClenahan hiked up a winding road toward a terrible unknown, expecting the worst.

The ferocious Woolsey Fire had come through Friday after leaping the freeway. McClenahan had grabbed his wife’s computer and some documents and evacuated.

He had stayed awake all night, thinking: “I’ll never wear that cowboy hat again. I’ll never wear that sweater again.”

But fires can be capricious. Maybe he still had his home?

He got home Saturday, and stared.

A house that has succumbed to a wildfire is rarely just a little bit destroyed. The damage almost always looks as if the structure had been not merely been burned, but also bombed. A water pipe spurted halfheartedly over the ruins.

“On the one hand … it’s stuff,” McClenahan said, struggling to maintain his composure. “But it’s a lot of history. Everything, our whole lives were in here.”

Then he crumbled to his knees and sobbed.

The wildfires scorching California have been vast, bringing their destruction and lethality to numerous communities, including this one in Los Angeles County and another gigantic burn along the northern mountains.

The Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento, is now the most destructive individual wildfire in California’s history.

With hearses standing by, crews stepped up the search Sunday for bodies in the smoking ruins of the town of Paradise, and relatives desperately looked for more than 100 missing loved ones.

The fire destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in and around the mountain town and has been blamed for 23 deaths.

“This event was the worstcase scenario,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said. “It’s the event that we have feared for a long time.”

Authorities called in a mobile DNA lab and anthropologists to help identify victims. The search went on for the missing.

“I still haven’t heard anything,” said Laurie Teague, who was looking for her 80-year-old stepfather, Herb Alderman. She and her brother called shelters, hospitals, the sheriff’s department and the coroner’s office.

“He has friends in that area,” Teague said. “I’m hoping one of them grabbed him and took him to shelter.”

Officials and relatives held out hope that many of those unaccounted for were safe and simply had no cellphones or other ways to contact loved ones.

Sol Bechtold drove from shelter to shelter looking for his mother, Joanne Caddy, a 75-year-old widow whose house burned down along with the rest of her neighbourhood in Magalia, just north of Paradise. She lived alone and did not drive.

Bechtold posted a flyer on social media, pinned it to bulletin boards at shelters and showed her picture to evacuees, asking if anyone recognized her. He ran across a few of Caddy’s neighbours, but they hadn’t seen her.

As he drove through the smoke and haze to yet another shelter, he said, “I’m also under a dark emotional cloud. Your mother’s somewhere and you don’t know where she’s at. You don’t know if she’s safe.”

He added: “I’ve got to stay positive. She’s a strong, smart woman.”

Surgical nurse Nichole Jolly, who turned 34 on Friday, spent her birthday helping evacuate all the patients from Chico’s only hospital. She didn’t know if her home survived. After clearing the hospital, she tried to leave the area but was trapped by smoke and flames. Her car caught fire. A call from her husband, in a place where cellphone service is notoriously spotty, came through and “he told me to get out and run.”

“I told him I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out,” she said. “I told him I loved him and told him to give the kids a kiss. He told me to get out of the car and run, that if you’re going to die, die fighting.”

A bulldozer picked her up and brought her back to Adventist Health Feather River hospital, where staff, trapped in place, started a triage area outside because “the whole place smelled like burned plastic.”

Staff, patients and anyone who could hold a fire extinguisher watched for spot fires. She said there were about 10 nurses, two doctors and a respiratory therapist who spent the next five or six hours treating anyone who found their way to the hospital.

“People were making sure no one was left behind,” she said. “Strangers helping strangers. We might be a divided country, but it didn’t matter that day.

“Black, white, Democrat, Republican; none of that mattered. People just helped one another, and it was amazing to see.”

In Southern California, investigators said two bodies were found.

About 200,000 people were forced to evacuate from the Woolsey Fire, which sparked into existence midafternoon Thursday.

It proved to be truly explosive, expanding within 24 hours to some 35,000 acres. “It’s spreading quicker than it used to,” said Mark Lorenzen, chief of the Ventura County Fire Department.

This was an unpredictable fire, one that burned some houses to the foundation, everything gone, nothing but charred ruins, while leaving the one next door untouched.

That was the case in Oak Park. People were still gradually returning to their neighbourhoods over the weekend, and what they found was a largely intact community pocked with destroyed houses.

Californians have a relationship with fire. They read smoke signals. They will study the fire glow on a ridgeline and forecast their immediate future based on what they smell. They know what to pack. They know to turn their cars around in the driveway, aimed toward safety.

They are required by law to have “defensible space” around their homes, free of brush, a firebreak built into the building codes. They know how fire spreads: “We get this ember wash. It looks like a billion fireflies,” Lorenzen said.

The embers were largely gone by Sunday, but the smoke remained — inescapable, pooling in lower elevations.

Sharon Woods, 48, who owns a winery, was horrified by the hellscape all around her. Her two-storey wooden house somehow had been spared, with a trail of fire circumventing it as it heeded the property line. The only things she lost were a couple of garbage cans. She’d won the fire lottery.

“I’m still completely dazed,” she said. “I’ve been crying for 20 hours.”

Back in Oak Park, Richard Gwynn, 75, and his wife, Lynda Gwynn, 70, surveyed the burned landscape. She became emotional, looking at a canyon where her children had once played, which was now blackened by fire.

“Winds are coming back tonight and they’re going to blow all day Monday,” Richard Gwynn said. “But there’s nothing left to burn.”

Nearby, a rabbit hopped over charred ground.

“There’s one alive?” he said.

“We can’t get rid of them no matter what,” Lynda Gwynn said.