FIREFIGHTERS

Three people were burned trying to escape a fast-moving fire that started Thursday 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of San Diego that overran a race horse training facility and a mobile home retirement community.

John Knapp did not initially believe a sheriff deputy's order to leave when he first spotted the fire outside his home in the Rancho Monserate Country Club.

"I thought he was full of bologna, but once I saw the flames and the smoke I thought that maybe he's right," Knapp said.

After leaving, he watched from a nearby highway for five hours as the community went up in smoke.

More than a third of the community's 213 mobile homes burned as fire zigzagged along a hillside, skipping some streets and razing others. On one street, all 24 mobile homes were gone, with only hulls of cars and twisted metal remaining.

Knapp was sure he had seen his house burn on the television news, so he was expecting the worst when he snuck past a police barricade to witness the damage and was surprised to find it still standing.

Others who managed to get out with little more than the clothes on their backs were not as fortunate.

Dick Marsala was too overwhelmed to speak as he searched through the smoldering remnants of his house, trying to find his wallet. A framed photo of him playing golf was still hanging on a blackened wall.

"I'll be darned," he said, his eyes tearing up as he put on sunglasses Tom Metier, whose home was spared, zipped through the mobile home park in a golf cart, giving bad news to some of the neighbors who called him.

"It's really horrible to see some of these little streets look like a moonscape," he told a friend whose home was reduced to black rubble.

The flames that tore through Fallbrook, the self-proclaimed "Avocado Capital of the World," also hit hard in the nearby town of Bonsall, where an estimated 30 to 40 elite thoroughbreds perished when the flames swept into barns at the San Luis Rey Training Facility.

Pandemonium broke out as hundreds of horses were set free to prevent them from burning in their stables. They nearly stampeded trainer Kim Marrs as she rescued a horse named Spirit World.

Marrs said it was devastating to see the remains of once regal animals.

"It's pretty apocalyptic," she said. "When you touch them it's just ash."

(Photo by Gregory Bull, AP) Firefighter Simon Garcia, of Heartland Fire Dept., gets a hug from a woman who did not give her name after she arrived to find her house was intact in the Rancho Monserate Country Club, Friday, Dec. 8, 2017, in Fallbrook, Calif. The wind-swept blazes have forced tens of thousands of evacuations and destroyed dozens of homes in Southern California.