San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
In Bay Area:
Rescues divert crews, bringing close calls, death
Many homeowners in California are choosing to ignore fire evacuation orders, which diverts emergency resources and puts others in danger.
The North Complex Fire had been burning for weeks through Plumas County when heavy winds suddenly drove an 8milewide swath of flames into northeastern Butte County, prompting Cal Fire officials to frantically order evacuations.
But many homeowners in the area stayed behind, even as flames driven by gusts of 35 mph swept across 70,000 acres in 24 hours starting on Sept. 8. Some residents of the remote area may have missed a call announcing the order, but most simply chose not to leave immediately, officials and relatives of victims have said.
Firefighters rescued at least 100 people as the fire blew through communities including Berry Creek, Feather Falls and Brush Creek. Hundreds of homes burned, dozens of residents were injured and at least 15 people were killed.
The disaster could have largely been avoided had residents listened to emergency workers when there was still time to get out, said Cal Fire spokeswoman Lynne Tolmachoff. The victims were among scores of people who have defied evacuation orders during the wildfires that have been raging across California, a distressing trend that officials say puts emergency workers at risk, hampers firefighting efforts and often ends in loss of life.
It happens in almost every natural disaster, but the problem has become more pronounced this year as flames swirl across the state, burning more than 3.4 million acres and threatening thousands of homes from north to south and east to west. There have been similar stories of people staying behind in the CZU
and LNU lightning complex fires in the Bay Area, sometimes to defend their own and neighbors’ homes.
“As much as we try to tell people it’s not safe, it’s not smart, that you can replace a house but you can’t replace a life, people still don’t listen and defy us,” Tolmachoff said.
“Firefighters need to be there to slow or stop the fire, but when they are faced with someone who refuses to evacuate, it takes time and resources away from fighting the fire,” she said. “And it puts firefighters in danger when they have to save someone’s life who ultimately made a bad choice.”
Why would anyone play chicken with a roaring forest fire?
Chris Woolf, 50, who lived in a cabin in Brush Creek, in the hills east of Oroville, said he defied the North Complex evacuation order on Sept. 9 largely because he was afraid looters would raid his property in his absence and because he trusts his own instincts more than he does government bureaucrats.
The former U.S. Navy medic had defied evacuation orders before, during the Camp Fire and several other smaller blazes in the nine years since he bought the property, so when the latest order came in at 4 p.m. that Wednesday, he and his sister, Kellie Flynn, decided to stay put.
“I fully intended to stay,” Woolf said. “In the past, I’ve always been able to do that and the fires never got close enough for me to be fearful.”
That was until things took a turn for the worse. Shortly after 10 that night, he sent a drone above the trees next to his property and saw flames shooting as high as 300 feet on three sides. The convection was so strong that it sucked the drone into the flames. He rushed in and told his sister, “It’s time to go. Now.”
They packed their three dogs and tore out on the only passable road, barely escaping a towering wall of flames.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. I don’t feel like I had any more time,” Woolf said. “Literally an hour before we fled, I had convinced everybody there is nothing to worry about. For sure, I was overconfident.”
They weren’t the only ones. The same day Woolf reluctantly left his home, a firefighter near Highway 162 was heard over the radio telling dispatchers, “We have a bunch of people who are gonna ride it out.” Homeowners who have stayed behind often say they had survived previous fires and didn’t believe their homes were in danger. Some think garden hoses and water buckets are sufficient protection, a delusional and dangerous belief given how erratic fire behavior has become in recent years, officials said.
“The only concept that I can really wrap my head around is that I guess some people just believe that it won’t happen to them, and that maybe some divine intervention will ultimately spare them from Mother Nature, but at the end of the day Mother Nature wins out,” said Mark Pazin, the chief of law enforcement for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “These fires are dangerous, they are intense. You cannot take them lightly.”
There are no statewide statistics on how many people defy evacuation orders, but Pazin and others say there are a stubborn few in every wildfire. One problem, he said, is that those who do make it through, usually by pure luck, are often touted as heroes, inspiring others to take similar, often illfated, risks.
“It’s distressing because right now we have people in Butte County who opted not to adhere to the evacuation order and they perished,” said Pazin, noting that law enforcement officers are not allowed to physically force people to evacuate.
Evacuation orders were also ignored during the LNU Lightning Complex fires, which burned through Napa, Sonoma, Lake, Yolo and Solano counties and killed five people. There were evacuation scofflaws in Santa Cruz County during the CZU Lightning Complex fires, where one person was killed, and in Guerneville, which was threatened by the Walbridge Fire in Sonoma County. One Guerneville woman said she and her teenage son stayed home after the evacuation because they couldn’t afford a motel. A man who refused to evacuate in Big Sur was arrested after setting illegal backfires in an attempt to protect his 55acre compound.
Fire officials say most people who die in fires are individuals who think they know more than the experts.
Some people were not willing to leave their horses, cows, goats, sheep and other livestock, Tolmachoff said. Hundreds of animals were nevertheless killed during the North Complex fires. As for the 15 people who died in Butte County this year, she said, “obviously they are not around to tell, so we don’t know the exact reason why they stayed behind.”
Some of the surviving residents told authorities they defied the order because they were confused about whether they were supposed to evacuate. That may have been because they lived in remote locations without cell phone service and didn’t get alerts.
Another reason people have cited for refusing to evacuate is that they did not believe there were enough firefighters or engines available to protect their homes. Firefighters are, no doubt, exhausted and resources have been stretched thin as they’ve battled the historic blazes. The coronavirus pandemic didn’t help, infecting numerous members of inmate fire crews.
But Tolmachoff said the first priority for any firefighter is to protect lives and property, even if they have to be pulled off the fire line. That, not a lack of resources, is the main problem, she said.
Wildfires today burn hotter, move faster and are more erratic than ever before, Pazin said, and no garden hose is going to stop one that is heading your way. There have been 25 wildfirerelated deaths in California this year. The blackened acreage is 27 times the amount that burned last year, and it isn’t even autumn when the worst fires typically burn.
“I’m no psychologist, but I see it time and time again where people think they can ride out natural disasters,” Pazin said. “They are dead wrong, pun intended.”