Arizona wildfire forces fast decision: Fight or flee flames?
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — In a small enclave in northern Arizona where homes are nestled in a Ponderosa pine forest and tourists delight in camping, hiking and cruising on ATVs, high winds are nothing new.
But when those winds recently ramped up and sent what was a small wildfire racing toward their homes, residents in the close-knit Girls Ranch neighborhood near Flagstaff faced a dilemma: quickly grab what they could and flee, or stay behind and try to ward off the towering, erratic flames.
Most of the property owners left. One couple stood their ground. Another raced to save animals on neighbors’ properties.
The blaze that started Easter Sunday swept across vacant lots, scorched tree stumps and cast an orange glow on the parched landscape. Flames licked the corner of one woman’s porch and destroyed two other homes, leaving a mosaic of charred land as the 30-squaremile fire finally neared full containment this weekend.
Polly Velie rushed out of a physical therapy appointment when she learned her home was in the evacuation zone. She sped through embers and thick smoke to find her husband hosing down the driveway. Her voice shrieked as she yelled above the smoke alarms going off throughout the house.
“Bill, we gotta go!” she hollered.
But Bill Velie — who cut fire lines with a dozer in multiple states for years — was intent on staying. Polly Velie said she’s never been more scared, but the choice wasn’t difficult: “This is our house, and he’s my husband.”
Firefighters encouraged them at least a handful of times to leave, and they agreed to if the winds shifted. More than anything, Bill Velie reassured them he had things under control.
He had thinned parts of the national forest on the other side of his property line, and he regularly mows the grass. At night, the flames twinkled on the hill behind them like red stars in the sky.
“I’ve seen some exciting stuff, but not like this for a while,” he said. “Do I miss it? No.”
Ali Taranto and her husband, Tim, own a house in the neighborhood. They saw news about the fire on a neighborhood Facebook page and drove from Winslow, where she works as a nurse about an hour away, to check on the 5-acre property.
Ali Taranto checked on her neighbor, Marianne Leftwich, who said she was fine. But Taranto didn’t hear from her for about an hour.
Then, Leftwich’s daughter called to say her mother was stuck in her house.
Taranto alerted emergency responders, she said, but dispatch told her she’d probably get to Leftwich before they could. Taranto found the woman semiconscious and gasping for air, in need of help to evacuate, Taranto said.
“As a community in an emergency like this, all the systems were totally overwhelmed,” Taranto said. “Thank God I got there and got her out in time.”