It’s a major disaster, with hundreds of homes destroyed and damaged. But, public safety officials say the Mountain Fire could have been much, much worse.
No one died.
"That's amazing. There were 30,000 people in the impact area of this fire. They got out with their lives. That's what's most important," said Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner. "We can rebuild. But, what we can't... is replace humans."
Gardner said the last week has been a blur. He said they knew what was coming. For days leading up to the blaze, the National Weather Service was warning there was the potential for extreme wind, and explosive wildfire danger.
"We knew ahead of this we had horrible wind coming. Our partners at the National Weather Service gave us the differentiation between a normal Red Flag, and a dangerous Flag...a 99 percentile Red Flag that should make all of the hair on the back of our necks stand up," he said.
Gardner says the Ventura County Fire Department, in fact, every fire department in the region beefed up staffing as a result of the threat.
Then, on November 6, they got the call. There was a brush fire near Balcom Canyon.
"Fire seen on a hillside rapidly expanding," said Gardner. "That was the initial call. Our initial units got on scene to find a very fast moving fire...it was moving through orchards, it was moving through hedgerows, it was moving through homes, and it started spreading to every artery out there in the valley."
Gardner says with the extreme wind, the fire was unstoppable, with hot embers flying through the air miles at a time.
"Gusts more than 80 miles an hour, with relative humidity in the single digits, that kind of wind creates what we call a high probability of ignition," said Gardner. "All of those embers, everything bigger than an inch that hit the ground, started a new fire. It just started spotting, and spotting, and all those fires grew together."
As the fire moved into the Camarillo Heights area, public safety officials scrambled to evacuate people.
"It went into a much more densely populated area, and those same resources that were trying to do evacuations two and a half miles away had to get back into town," said Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff. "We pulled every resources we had...patrol resources, detectives, special enforcement, homeless liaison officers, and at one point we even locked down our two jail facilities and sent out our patrol trained deputies."
It came down to getting people out of the area as quickly as possible.
"Every artery was full of cars getting to the 101, to pull out," said Gardner. "But, we still got them out of the way. At one point, the fire was expanding at two thousand acres an hour."
Ventura County Battalion Chief Nick Cleary said it meant making some tough decisions. In some cases, firefighters had to leave a fire scene to make rescues. Saving lives came first.
"What we do is we go into a life-first mode, and we tell all of our people when you engage the fire, the first thing we have to make sure of is whether people got out of harm's way," said Cleary. "We can rebuild, but you cannot replace lives. I've received several, several complaints...I'll call them hostile complaints. They'll say we had a fire engine at our house and it left."
"We have GPS locators on our apparatus, and when a call comes in, it immediately relays it to troops on the ground. They say we have a person trapped," said Cleary. "They will actively stop what they are doing and engage that rescue. Often, that means property will get lost when we leave."
Ventura County Fire Chief Dustin Gardner said the first responders made more than 160 rescues. Gardner says at one point, he feared they would lose some firefighters, because of the dangerous situations they faced in the rescues, and the firefight.
The chief said there is incredible sadness, and sorrow over all the homes lost, and damaged, bit there’s also a huge sense of relief that no one died in the inferno.
"160 rescues in 24 hours," said Gardner. "That's 160 lives that are still with us."
