The Chimney Fire: Too close for comfort

With smoke billowing above our house a few days after the Chimney Fire began, we faced the possibility of losing everything we’d poured our hearts and souls into since we moved to Cambria’s backcountry in 2004. In the land of tinder-dry, fire-prone California, we found ourselves in the path of this raging and determined wildfire. This time, the fire was not just someone else’s problem. It was our turn to experience firsthand the stress and fear families all over our state have experienced since people started settling in California. For the first time since we moved here, the fire threat we’ve feared every summer became a reality with the Chimney Fire.

Living in the Santa Lucia Mountains in Cambria’s backcountry, many miles up a narrow and winding rural road, we should have been clearer about what it would mean if we had to evacuate ourselves, our pets, and our most precious and necessary belongings. Although we were among the lucky ones who survived this fire without having to evacuate, the preparations for moving out were mind-numbing at a time when we faced the clear and present danger of the only large fire to hit our mountain since 1960.

The realization of how close the fire was getting to our house, the difficulty of getting helpful moment-by-moment accurate information about the fire’s progress, the hard decisions about what to pack and what to leave, and the taxing physical work of packing things up and loading a lot of very heavy stuff into our truck and utility trailer left us physically and emotionally exhausted.

In addition to deciding what to pack, there were other issues we hadn’t thought about at all, like making sure any pending bills got paid, birthday cards and gifts got mailed, and emails from concerned relatives and friends got answered. Even in the face of advancing fire, real life still demanded our attention. Evacuation preparations were much more time-consuming than we’d ever imagined. We kept finding ourselves starting one task, getting distracted by something else we thought was critical, not finishing anything, and having to revisit almost everything we started. This was very inefficient when the clock was ticking.

The first week of the fire reminded me of when my children were tiny. I never started a day without having a hundred things to do first. The threat of evacuation was a lot like that. The first concern, of course, was getting the dogs off the mountain to our dear friend and pet sitter, Tami Righetti, who lives near the ocean. We knew we could move the cats out in a couple of minutes if we had to, so we kept them home with us, thinking that would be less stressful for them than relocating them to a strange place.

So many worries kept us up at night. Where would we start if the worst-case scenario occurred and we lost everything? Where would we live? How would we be able to care for our pets? How many thousands of phone calls would it take to get the ball rolling to rebuild our life?

Were we prepared for this fire, even after all the years of worrying about it? Not really. The bottom line is that, given the time we had, we were able to make some reasonably clearheaded decisions about what we most wanted to take with us. With only a few minutes to evacuate, all we could have done was get our animals and ourselves to safety. Will we be more prepared if there’s a next time? We hope so.

Because California has always burned, we know that fire could still be in our future. We hope we will always be as lucky as we were this time, but there are no guarantees. However, with the competence and dedication of our firefighters, as demonstrated during the Chimney Fire, we’ll be as safe as we can possibly be.

This story was originally published September 7, 2016 at 9:53 AM with the headline "The Chimney Fire: Too close for comfort."