This time, hamlet dodges disaster
LA CONCHITA, Ventura County — La Conchita should have gone up in flames. How it didn’t, no one here knows for sure.
This time it wasn’t a giant mudslide threatening the town, like the one that killed people in 2005. It was an inferno marching up from the south, spilling over the hills and spewing embers like grenades into the streets.
But somehow, in the morning, everything was intact. Unburned.
Maybe it was the wind, which changed paths early Thursday morning and pushed the blaze up a nearby bluff. Maybe it was the dozen or so men who helped battle 60-foot flames with barely functioning fire extinguishers and garden hoses. Or maybe the town with a reputation for disaster finally had a miracle.
“We honestly thought we would lose it,” said Mike Bell, 70, known as the unofficial mayor in the unincorporated community of 300 people. “We really did.”
But the Thomas Fire, which has razed 439 structures and damaged 85 more in Ventura County, spared this surfing hamlet. Not even the mangled remains of homes buried in the infamous 2005 mudslide, ominous relics of the disaster that killed seven adults and three children, were charred.
On Friday, the single exit off Highway 101 finally reopened. Drivers inched past the old gas station and turned onto one of the town’s 10 residential streets. A few children wearing snowboarding goggles rode a beach cruiser down the town’s main drag. Some had evacuated to Carpinteria, or Carp, as they call it. Finally, they were home.
The night the Thomas Fire headed toward La Conchita’s stretch of the coast, officials were saying the fire’s pathway indicated the town would be spared. Those left behind went to bed. But just after midnight Wednesday, the flames shifted. They shot around the bluff and past the oil processing plant just north of the community. Fanned by the Santa Ana winds that have bedeviled the whole region all week, the firestorm raced toward town.
Eucalyptus lining the ridge lit up like Christmas trees. On the outskirts of La Conchita, a couple of Mexican palm trees exploded, shooting huge embers into the grid of houses only 6 feet apart. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, stationed engines at the end of every street.
Luke Hart, 24, drove down Bakersfield Avenue, blaring his horn to wake people up. He’s training to be a paramedic and plans to enroll in a firefighting class next fall. All night, he could feel it in his gut: The fire was coming. He needed to warn everyone else.
Thierry Brown, 61, was one of them. He didn’t wake up, not at first. He was tired, and it didn’t feel real. Then the adrenaline kicked in. Fight or flight: Brown decided to fight. He climbed out of bed and juryrigged a series of showerheads onto his roof. They sprayed the eaves and gutters, his Brazilian banana trees and the dry ficus out front. With all that water mimicking rain, it feels like Northern California in the yard, he thought.
“It was unreal, man,” he said. “It was consuming the mountain. Those flames were fingers of death. It was like a symphony, how perfectly timed out it was as it crawled down the hill.”
Two doors down from Hart’s home, a neighbor’s fence kept sparking. Hart tamped down the embers with a shovel. A police officer yelled at him to leave. He and his four friends, whom he knew from lifeguarding, pretended to get in the car. Then they ran back to fight the fire. They sprayed water from hoses and tried to put out spot fires with a couple of extinguishers, which were expired and spewed only a little retardant before they petered out.
The wind was hot, and it blew flaming tumbleweeds down the street. Hart knew it was time to leave. The flames were getting too big. It was too dangerous.
“The whole town is going to be leveled,” Hart remembers thinking. “Where am I going to call home? They’re never going to let us rebuild here. It’s the end of La Conchita.”
Then the wind shifted. Just as quickly as the fire had rampaged toward town, it raced away. The orange glow bled to black. Cal Fire left for another fire front. Residents went back to bed. Hart and Brown shared a beer. Then they went to bed, too.
“We deserved that break,” Brown said Friday, drinking coffee on his porch. The power, cut by the disaster all around, was still off, and the contents of his fridge, swordfish and bluefin tuna, were going bad. He was thinking of having a barbecue, but that “didn’t seem very appropriate.”
“We were on the edge,” he added. “God bless La Conchita.”
Bell slept through the entire night. It must have been the double-pane windows. On Sunday, he and his sister are taking a dozen men out to dinner at the Palms in Carpinteria. They helped save the town, he said.
“It’ll be a $400 to $500 excursion,” he said. “To my sister and me, it doesn’t matter. We’re just so happy to be here.” Chronicle staff writer Kevin Fagan
contributed to this report.