San Diego at the mercy of flames once again

SAN DIEGO -- Diane Doroski knew it was time to pack up and leave home when she saw a strange new ingredient sprinkled atop her breakfast quesadilla: ash.

“That was with all the windows closed,” said Doroski, who on Monday hastily grabbed family photographs, an antique toy carousel and her great-grandmother’s butter dish before fleeing her house in Rancho Santa Fe.

Doroski and several hundred thousand residents evacuated their homes as wildfires engulfed vast areas of San Diego County. For many residents, the smoky, anxiety-filled scene was an all-too-familiar replay of the deadly 2003 Cedar fire, which was the largest in state history.

Many residents had stayed up all night, monitoring the blaze and planning their escape. Others woke up Monday to find the fire bearing down on them.

But the size of the exodus made escape impossible for some.

Cathy Conklin of Ramona said friends had convinced her of the need to evacuate her family early Monday morning. She packed some clothes and photos and was ready to follow them out of town.

“They started out into that traffic and moved maybe a foot in about two hours,” said Conklin, a Department of Defense employee. “I said, ‘We’re not getting into that until it starts moving.’ And it never did.”

She never left town but made it to Cheer’s bar where, nursing a beer, she said tragedy would have struck if the fire had come closer.

“If people really needed to get out,” she said, “they wouldn’t have made it.”

Roads throughout San Diego were jammed with evacuees or blocked off to traffic because of the fiery conditions. Some folks started out in one direction, only to find that the closed roads forced them to find another escape route.

While the streets were busy, other parts of San Diego were desolate under sooty, dark skies. Many business owners shuttered their shops and headed for safer ground along with their customers.

But where to go?

Tom and Shelly Donnelly, of Carmel Valley just east of Del Mar, rounded up their three children and two dogs and made for a hotel room they reserved in San Clemente. But they arrived to a surprise: No dogs allowed. They then headed for Orange County, but changed their minds after recalling that Irvine was ablaze as well.

“I don’t know where we’re going to go,” Tom Donnelly said as he fueled his car in San Clemente.

“We’ve got to figure it out,” his wife replied.

Many residents with nowhere to go ended up at evacuation centers set up throughout the county. Among the hundreds of evacuees at Qualcomm Stadium were retirement home residents.

“I’m a little too old to be doing this,” said 99-year-old Sara Sally Meland. She and other residents of her retirement home were told to pack a suitcase and bring their medications. Meland couldn’t remember if she had brought her pills.

“This is the worst position I’ve ever been in,” she said.

Many of the fire’s refugees at Qualcomm followed the blaze’s progress on televisions mounted throughout the concourse.

Bruce Thyden, 79, and his wife, Garnet, 84, were among those to receive a “reverse 911” call. They don’t have a phone in their bedroom in their home in the Oaks North neighborhood in Rancho Bernardo, and Bruce Thyden barely heard the ring at 4 a.m. A recorded voice told him to seek safety.

The Thydens leaned against a stadium rail they had covered with two bright pink quilts someone had handed them. “Somebody just gave these to us,” Garnet Thyden said. “We don’t know what the future holds and we might need them.”

Elsewhere, some stubborn homeowners ignored evacuation orders. Several said they were convinced they could battle the blaze better than the county’s firefighters, who were stretched thin.

In Bridlewood Country Estates near Lake Poway, Rita Skomra and her husband and son evacuated their Spanish-style home only to later sneak past fire crews in an attempt to save it.

Using a garden hose, they extinguished flames along a fence. Soon, however, the fence was ablaze again. That sent Skomra searching for a fire truck to flag down.

“After all this work, I don’t want that fence to start everything burning. We worked hard to save our home,” she said.

When a fire official knocked on the door of Larry Redden’s rural Lakeside home in east San Diego County to give him the order to leave Sunday night, the 68-year-old retiree wouldn’t budge.

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Redden, who four years earlier survived the Cedar fire, which killed four of his neighbors.

The stunned firefighter relented, but told Redden he was on his own.

Redden isn’t just any retiree. He served 35 years with the San Diego Fire Department and had a 5 1/2 -horsepower water pump standing by. “The message I’m sending is the wrong message,” Redden conceded. “If you’re told to get out, you should get the hell out.”

As the fire swept into the vineyard-covered San Pasqual Valley, Carl and Deborah Mongiovi resisted the urge to follow others evacuating the area. They turned on the sprinklers, unrolled the garden hoses and decided to fight the flames.

The couple raced around the 2.5-acre lot for several hours.

Just when the fire seemed to die down, a transformer exploded. Within hours, two of their neighbors’ homes were destroyed and the new wall of fire had reached the Mongiovi home. Firefighters arrived just in time to save it.

By 3 p.m., Deborah Mongiovi was drinking a beer and her husband wiped the sting from his burning eyes.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t leave,” Deborah Mongiovi said. “We saved our house.”

Seeing the smoke blowing from the hills, she added: “We’re not in the clear yet.”

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