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(continued)
Chris found himself thinking, "Man, why don't they just let us go to work here? This looks like something we can work on."
The firefighters were organized like a military operation, five engine captains working under each strike team leader, while the strike team leaders took orders from division supervisors or operations section chiefs, and so on. It was a chain of command, and the people on the top had the most information. It was their responsibility to prioritize the use of their resources to protect as many buildings as they could. They also needed reserves that could stand by and do nothing, mobile and able to easily move from place to place as needed.
Chris says, "being a brand new kid on the job driving by this stuff, it felt like you’re on a football team and your coach isn’t putting you in, and you’re just waiting to be put in. But I do remember that feeling, 'here we are, how come we’re moving again?'"
On the streets, firemen were pulling lines off their rigs, the engines, and blasting the fires with water and foam. Other men were working with axes or chainsaws to cut away dry plants, bushes or trees near structures, or were using shovels to beat out small spotfires spread by floating embers.
One man was cutting back hedges and brush that grew up under the eves of a house. If they had gone up, the fire would have reached the house's attic and burned through the whole structure.
Another man took a chainsaw to a tree and cut it down. The branches grew too close to a house; the structure would have burned. The firefighters were like gardeners energetically landscaping, only their tools were weapons and they seemed to be working in a minefield.
The rig Chris was on reached a place where they were enveloped in smoke.
It was a motor home parking lot. The gray smoke was like paint smeared over the windshield. Through the smoke, they could see lights glowing faintly where motor homes were ablaze. You would have to be right next to them to actually see the fire, in these conditions; Chris could barely see his hand when holding it in front of his face.
The men in the rig put on bandanas to keep from choking, and put on their goggles. The near-invisible figures of firemen appeared to float by in the darkness. Chris recalls of himself and Tom, "we were both brand new guys, like wide-eyed kids at Christmas, you know?" Chris asked the firefighters, “is this what this job is like?” No, his crew answered. This was a career fire, once-in-a-lifetime.
The fire born beside Laguna Canyon Road moved more rapidly than the fire trucks could arrive at the scene, in spite of their excellent reaction time. From their birth place, the flames leapt up the canyon walls, crossing the road in six places and jumping two thirds of the slope before alighting and finishing their rush to the top.
As the fire progressed, it turned into a roaring tsunami of light and energy. The fire blazed two hundred feet into the sky and raced across the earth, covering six miles in thirty minutes to boil its way from Laguna Canyon all the way up to the broad, blue expanse of the ocean. There it hit densely packed, old timber homes on the coast and burned them down. The blue of the sea turned into a murky brown as billows of smoke, thrown out to sea by the winds, blotted out the sun. Carried by these fierce winds, the fire’s embers could fly two to three miles before settling down and starting new blazes wherever they landed.
The flames reached the top of Emerald Canyon at 2:00 PM. The thick green foliage that spotted the canyon was laced with dry white, brown and gray shrubs and dry, gnarled plants. Birds could be heard twittering there on most days, there were pleasant hiking trails and the land had an atmosphere of peace. The fire made a mockery of all this, reducing the foliage to ash. It inhaled the earth at a rate of one hundred acres per minute, left it smoldering and flashed its way to Canyon Acres, covering one and a quarter miles in only seventeen minutes. At 3:30, it hit the canyon, torching many homes before leaping up a hillside to Mystic Hills.
Near 4:00 PM, it arrived. The Laguna Beach Independent newspaper would later report that Mystic Hills was “obliterated.” Four rows of expensive houses like long, beautiful ribbons had lined the top of the hill. After the fire had passed, they looked like bony carcasses. Ironically, many well-watered gardens survived the inferno, while the houses behind them all but disappeared. Broad, carefully tended, multi-colored bushes of purple, yellow, green and blue, or tall, dark green bushes laced with purple flowers remained tall and beautiful during the fire. The flames raced by and around them without taking hold while mercilessly snatching almost every house. The homes were left looking like empty scribblings of white chalk, shredded newspapers, or blobs of white pond-sludge. The fire burned its way on without stopping for a second to catch its breath, turning toward other populated areas.
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