RMWD CEDAR FIRE HEARINGS

SESSION 3

 

Miscellaneous Diane Conklin Christopher Dale Edgar Frank Gilbert

Hanna and Hank Isaac Judy Kathleen Leon Joseph Mitchell Diane Conklin

Mack Ned Patty Renee and Reggie Sally Ted

 

Miscellaneous Issues

Kit Kessinger:  …requiring only that driveways be paved on new construction or replacement construction.  There has been some talk around the county about requiring that the entire access be up to county standards, that means paved and with a certain width all the way out to whatever, out to a highway, however that is not currently a requirement it’s simply being talked about by the county.  It’s something that Steve is telling people when they call his office he feels that the citizens should be aware that there is a potential that sometime in the future that requirement might go into place although I’m not sure how much of a potential.  As of today, no, we the Ramona Fire District, Ramona Water District and also the county are only requiring the driveways be paved and I should say that there are additional requirements for steep slopes on certain areas but that’s aside from the fire.

 

Unidentified Speaker:  The county doesn’t even pave it’s own roads, are we supposed to pave those too?

 

Kit Kessinger:  Quite often the case, however, like I said, as of right now there is no requirement that we pave the road.  That’s the driveway, if you go in and process your permits right now and if you go into the fire marshal here in Ramona that’s the only requirement they’ll place as far as pavement goes.  And we didn’t talk about the sprinklers.

 

Bob Krysak:  My understanding of the sprinkler issue is that the county is consistently requiring that new construction contain sprinklers in the residence, you may have read in the paper this morning, it is waiving many requirements for sprinklers in new construction and they’re really getting into hot water with the county.  The county is ready to jump all over them but the county is very insistent and they’ve been very consistent across the board in requiring that all new construction have sprinkler systems built into the house.  See with the driveway issue the reason they don’t really have a really strong leg to stand on, although they are the 800 pound beast and they don’t need very strong legs, historically there has not been consistent application of that requirement, they’re going to find it very difficult to all of the sudden in the wake of the fire victims, all of the sudden decide to impose that condition across the board.  I think that gives the residents some leverage, however with the sprinkler issue, they have been very consistent in maintaining so there will be no question of preference or sudden decisions that they’ve made so it looks like they are going to require the sprinklers but not at this point, but that could change.  That’s all within the county verbiage.

 

Kit Kessinger:  I think it’s good for anyone to put your permit applications in as soon as possible in case of any kinds of changes like that.  On another note at the beginning of this meeting this is our third meeting so we’ve had two up to this point and I’d have to say that the testimony that people have made has been quite an eye opener to me and I think also to Bob and to many others who have participated.  We’ve learned a lot about what happened to you and to the community and frankly your participation in this and I see many faces that I’ve seen at previous meetings, your participation has really been a valuable thing for this water district.  I hope and I believe that it will be valuable thing for those agencies that are reviewing the Cedar Fire so I want to thank you all very much for coming and helping us in this process and telling us what you know about that disaster.

 

Bob Krysak:  Also one other thing that I haven’t actually pointed out before is even beyond just submitting our report to the agencies and then washing our hands of it we’re also going to be looking to some remedial activities that we as a district or as a community can undertake ourselves, in absence of county action.  A lot of the issues that we’re talking about, evacuation plan, county wide unified fire departments, which frankly I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not, I have to look at it more, I would think not, especially for a community like us outside that no one ever hears of, but we will be looking remedially within our own organization to determine what we can do on a local level without the county.  We’ll try to facilitate some plans to help theses citizens in such an emergency.  Diane do you have anything you’d like to say?

 

Diane Conklin:  Diane Conklin, 19412 Kimball Valley Road, I am the spokesperson for the Mussey Grade Road Alliance and I have a sore throat so bare with me.  First of all I want to thank you Kit for checking on the paving issue, it’s a very important issue.  I had heard from a source today and I don’t think he thought he was going to be quoted so I’m not going to mention his name, that he had spoken with Fire Marshall Delgadio as well and that Fire Marshall Delgadio had said, and this is of course, second hand that those homes that did not pave the road would have do not protect stamped on their plans so I think that’s a rather silly idea because since we have homes on roads that have burned and homes on the same road that have not burned not to protect one means that you put all in danger so I don’t think that would be realistic.  If there are any changes that are drastic I certainly would hope that the water board would inform the Mussey Grade Road Alliance because…

 

Bob Krysak:  We’d inform the whole community.

 

Diane Conklin:  Good and I’d like to get a call personally because we’re very concerned about the issue but thank you very much for clarifying it at least to this extent that it is only the driveway and that this has been checked into by the water district and by dent of the contract with the CDF, Fire Marshall Delgadio is an employee of the water district.

 

Kit Kessinger:  On that same note, he also made it clear that he had no intention of changing his policy however there was the potential that he might be forced by other agencies.

 

Diane Conklin:  Well it’s really interesting isn’t it because we had a meeting with Supervisor Diane Jacob on Tuesday and she said we have to check with the fire marshal, so you know how this goes.

 

Bob Krysak:  The only way that’s going to happen is if the county mandates.

 

Diane Conklin:  All right, that’s great, I’m glad to hear that, thank you Bob.  The second thing I’d like to do just on a housekeeping item is to say that we talked to you last time about the list of commissions that you would be sending this to.  Bob’s answer was you send it to everyone, that’s excellent, what we’d like to do if we can, request this, and obviously we can, and then hopefully you can help us with this as to when you send it out to the commissions you can give us a letter with the report saying where it went so we can have that and we’d also like the water board to announce somehow in the newspaper or through meetings, regular meetings, how individuals can get copies of the report and what they would cost.  We would request that you use as much testimony as possible and any written materials that you deem important that have been submitted, ideally I think that unless you have a huge number of written materials it would be good to submit all of them, unfortunately those people who have submitted written materials didn’t always sign their name and date the information and so I don’t know how useful those are.  I’d like to remind people that if they submit anything to the water board that the questionnaire was an idea of questions, it wasn’t meant to be an actual questionnaire but it could be used that way of course but you need to sign it and date it because there’s no signature line or date line.  I would like to request if the water board could please, this Ad Hoc Committee of the water board could please extend the written submissions until…

 

Bob Krysak:  I already did that Diane.

 

Diane Conklin:  Until what date?

 

Bob Krysak:  Until whenever they come in and if we haven’t done report we’ll…

 

Diane Conklin:  Okay excellent, I didn’t hear you…

 

Bob Krysak:  I’m not going to close anyone down.

 

Diane Conklin:  Okay fine, I didn’t hear you but I was thinking to extend it to at least a week, Friday, February 6^th to make it feasible for you to start your report writing.  I didn’t want to have, I think if people haven’t submitted by next Friday, they probably won’t.

 

Bob Krysak:  It’s all on the computer so if something comes the day before the report is finalized we can certainly incorporate the information…

 

Diane Conklin:  That’s very generous of you and then that means folks that we have copies here for you, the Mussey Grade Road Alliance has made copies of these, the yellow one is the letter that was sent out and the white one is the questionnaire and I’m going to be sitting over there stapling these together and put them in the back.  If you haven’t filled one of these out, even though you’re going to speak today, or if you haven’t written anything down and you’ve submitted it in writing then please, please do so because the written record is very important even though we have a video record and we have the audio records too, these will be put back over here.  Okay fine, thank you very much, then I would like to say that I’m going to submit to you today some of the documents that I had a hand in presenting, helping you with and presenting to you actually.  These are actually all the things that I did present to you and that I may reserve the right to produce something else later but I understand that the water board, the Ad Hoc Committee will be writing the report, that you all will be writing the report and I think that’s the way we’re going to have to do that.  There was at one time, and I did, we would write it together but I don’t think it will work that way but I do want to say that the cooperation from Bob Krysak has been outstanding and he’s been very polite and he’s been timely and he’s also is trying to make a living and I really appreciate that.

 

Bob Krysak:  All right.

 

Diane Conklin:  Now I have a little talk I’d like to give in advance and then I’m going to stop.  President Krysak, Director Kessinger, Mussey Grade Road Alliance members, friends and Ramona citizens.  This is our final hearing in a series of three hearings conducted by the Ramona Municipal Water District at the request of the alliance.  We believe these hearings will help the district to understand the great pain and suffering that has been inflicted on the victims of the Cedar Fire both as individuals and as community members.  The fire has not gone away and it will not go away until there is full recovery for victims and justice for entire communities within Ramona.  One of those communities is Mussey Grade Road and it’s environs.  We do not blame individual firefighters and they are not part, the party to whom we turn for justice.  We turn rather to the Water District, which collects our money for fire protection.  To the district we say once again it is imperative that you write a fair, balanced and informed report based on the individual testimonies you have heard and will hear again this evening and send this report on to the commissions investigating the fire.  We rely on your understanding and compassion in this endeavor and what should that report say?  We have learned many important things as a result of these hearings.  We have learned that calls were made to 911 as early as 4:15 PM on Saturday, October 25^th, the first day of the fire.  We have learned that inadequate notification was given to Ramonians and areas through which the fire passed and that people may have died if their neighbors had not called them.  We have learned whole areas of Ramona did not receive fire protection and support.  We have learned that houses in the Mussey Grade corridor burned down after the head of the fire passed through, hours later, houses that could have been saved if an effort had been made to save them.  We have learned that inaccurate information regarding the progress of the fire in the Mussey Grade area including information that everything in the Fernbrook area was destroyed, was given to residence while the fire was still in progress.  We have learned that not a single fire engine arrived and stayed to fight the fire in Fernbrook.  We have learned that our fire protection was non-existent as it applied to this catastrophe.  On behalf of the Alliance, I want to thank all the citizens of Ramona who came forth to make this hearing exercise a true success.  I also want to thank the district Ad Hoc Committee for its cooperation and support in this hearings process.  We look forward to receiving all the written documentation provided to the district and eventually the full report.  Our quest for recovery and justice remains strong.  We are determined to get to the truth, most especially so that this disaster will never happen again.  Thank you.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you.

Kit Kessinger:  Diane, Diane, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.  One of them you just answered by giving us a copy of this, thank you very much.  The other one is, this is our last meeting where we’re taking public testimony.  Do you, I know you’ve been in contact with a lot of individuals about coming and speaking here, do you know of individuals who have not had the opportunity or had not taken the opportunity to come to these meetings?

 

Diane Conklin:  Unfortunately there is a number of people who haven’t come to the meetings, I think that we have a problem of sampling.  We’re only going to have a sample because even so the number of letters that were sent out went only to around 130 families rather than the 190 that are listed and that was partially because, wholly because the list obviously was given to the district and partially because the individuals in Mussey Grade Village did not receive individual notification.  The other problem is people, often times, have left the area, people have reacted differently to this, they’ve gone on vacation, they’ve gone to visit relatives, they’re gone.  If they are, as I said before in the last meeting, if they are around and they haven’t come, sometimes the reason might be is that they just feel incapable of speaking about it.  So what I think is that the Ramona Municipal Water District has tried to give adequate notice to people to come to these hearings, I have never seen the kind of cooperation you’ve received from these hearings in any other, with any other issue in Ramona, even though many issues are very very hot like for example, planning, land use issues, but this has been an extended series of meetings and I think you’ve gotten fairly good cooperation.  I certainly think that themes have arisen from the hearings and as to the actual facts; well those will be determined by other commissions as we’ve already discussed.  You don’t have the infrastructure but at least you have done this bit, which is to try and find out what people on the ground saw.  I think that the report will be of great interest to the Blue Ribbon Commission of San Diego, it should be of great interest to the San Diego County Fire Safety Committee, it should be of great interest to the Governor’s Commission, it should be of great interest to Sue Hisari who was the person heading up the investigation called for by CDF Chief Manor who is the top CDF official in San Diego and the U.S. Forest Service and I think that at least those four or five bodies should receive it, if not more.  So it’s not going to be perfect but, excuse me, I’m so glad that you, we’ve done at least this much together.

 

Kit Kessinger:  Thank you.

Bob Krysak:  For everyone’s information my number, my home number and my office number are listed in the Orange Book and if anyone ever wants to call me, just look it up in the Orange Book, and I’ll be glad to talk to anyone and get more information.  All right, let’s get started now that all of the politicians have gotten their wind out.  First speaker I have is Christopher.

 

Christopher:  Thank you Bob.  First, the last meeting I mentioned that a neighbor of ours, by the way Christopher, [San Diego Country Estates].  A neighbor of ours video taped the fire and I said I’d get you a copy and I do have one here and it was filmed by XXX and she approved of me bringing the tape to you and also said that if you or anyone else wanted to talk to her, I neglected to get her phone number but it’s under either XXXX and it’s a vivid description of how savage the fire was as she filmed it as it was coming up, they live at the top of the hill on the left side of the end of Ramona Oaks and we lived at the top of the hill on the right side and she filmed that fire coming up there and the fact that there was one or two police cars that went by, this was probably around 12:00 or 12:30, no fire trucks, and it was particularly vivid for me because as the flames got up on the ridge and hit my house is when it just exploded and the flames were extremely high at that point and it’s a great piece of film work of a tragedy and again if you want more.  She also said that Tom McPherson, I don’t know who he is; he’s with the CDF I believe.

 

Bob Krysak:  I know Tom.

 

Christopher:  He has a copy of it to. 

Bob Krysak:  Have you looked at it Christopher?

 

Christopher:  Yes I have.

 

Bob Krysak:  Are there any fire trucks in it, in any of the video?

 

Christopher:  No.  There’s two scenes where the police patrol car with the lights flashing drove up on the, I think it’s Shalom at the end of Ramona Oaks, turned around and came back out but there were no fire trucks and the other interesting part of the film is as you view it, as she left the house to evacuate and her husband was driving behind her, she inadvertently panned across the dash of her car and it recorded the time and I talked to her today, I believe it was 1:10 and I asked her if she had changed the clock on the car with daylight saving come up and she said no she had not so that time would be based on whatever the time was earlier in the day.  From a personal standpoint, just to give you what happened to us, we obviously lost our house in the fire.  We probably were the first house in the Estates to go, we’re at the eastern most point of the Estates [] and one of the choice lots from a view standpoint and obviously one of the choice lots for the fire to hit although we firmly believe that it could have been avoided.  We were first notified of the fire about 5:30, maybe a little before, by a friend that lives up on the other side of the Estates, up on the ridge, and he called to see if we were aware of the fire and at that point we were not.  It was a very very small fire, just a small curl of smoke coming up, way back on the other side of the river, up there in the hills.

 

Bob Krysak:  Do you have an idea of the distance?  I know it’s hard to judge distance.

 

Christopher:  Several miles on the other side of the river so I’d say it was probably five to seven miles from our place and so I told him I would immediately call 911 and he said, “I already have,” and that was Perry Jones and he isn’t positive of the time because at that point in time I don’t think anyone was pinpointing time as being a critical part of the scenario, it was, what do we do?  Anyhow, we watched it, it didn’t seem to be growing at all, it was still a very small fire.  We left the house about 6:00 and just went down to the club and had dinner, came home around 9:00.  Between 9:00 and 9:15, I think a CDF firemen, I didn’t try to identify him, pulled up in the driveway in a pick up truck, had a flasher on his dash and I asked him whether or not he thought we were going to have to evacuate or whether it would be contained, and I’m not blaming him, he was giving his best opinion and he was on the radio talking to people down on the fire line I guess, but he said, “no I don’t think there’s any problem at all up here, it’s in an inaccessible area at the present time and when it burns down close to the river bottom they’ll be a crew down there and we should be able to contain it without any danger up here.”

 

Bob Krysak:  He said that to you directly?

 

Christopher:  Yes.

 

Bob Krysak:  You heard that from him?

 

Christopher:  Yes.  He was, and I’m sorry I can’t identify him, and maybe that’s good, I don’t know.

 

Unidentified Speaker:  What time was that?

 

Christopher:  Between 9:00 and 9:30.  At that time I had no reason to question it, if it looked like, we’ve had the 22 years we’ve lived there, there have been numerous small fires back there that have always been put out and so we didn’t think too much about it.  We kept an eye on it and then about, I would think probably around 11:30 the wind started bring, coming up a little bit and then at that point we could see the fire was starting to move.  It was still back on the other side of the river and then we became alarmed and started gathering some stuff to put in the car, I think that the CDF or the fire department says that they went over in a helicopter and advised people to prepare for evacuation.  I’m certainly not saying they did not, we did not hear it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and then we were loading the cars and getting ready to evacuate and this was probably about 12:30 and it was obvious we were in big trouble, the Santa Ana had kicked up and the fire was moving, it jumped the river.  I talked to one of the CDF people that was not on the fire but was out there, more or less a volunteer, and he said that the fire moved from the start down to the San Diego River, probably four or five miles in four to five hours, it moved from the river bottom up to the Estates in less than 45 minutes so when that Santa Ana kicked in it literally got out of control at that point and my wife was on the phone with, tried to get a hold of 911, frantically to tell them we’re in real trouble, we got to have some fire protection out here, and I was out on the back patio with a garden hose foolishly thinking I could do some good with wetting down the decks and so forth and I think it was the same fireman, I’m not positive on that, came up into the top of the driveway, we’ve got a curved driveway that goes up to the top and he said, “you have to get out of here right now,” I said,  “well I’m trying to wet things down and hold on until there’s a fire truck that gets here,” and he said, “there aren’t going to be any fire trucks,” and unfortunately he was right, and he didn’t explain, he said, “there are none available and you must evacuate, I demand that you do.”  I was going to stay and my wife said she wouldn’t leave unless I did so we, I guess right, got into the two cars and left.  I stopped, I sent her on down to the club house, I stopped down on Ramona Oaks, probably a half a mile down and parked and tried to, I thought I would walk back up because I wanted to get back up to the house and there were several sheriffs down there and they stopped me and again I’m sure they were doing exactly the right thing.

 

Bob Krysak:  What time was this?

 

Christopher:  Probably 12:30, a quarter of 1:00, pretty close to the time that YYYY was evacuating their house and of course we stayed down in the lodge around the spare room down there and one of our neighbors came through probably an hour or two later and I saw him and he said, “Christopher,” he said, “I was up close, I walked back up and he said your house is gone,” and then we watched some of the houses on the ridge on the other side of the Estates that were burning so the fire department, the CDF maintains that the blaze was virtually unstoppable when it got to that point.  I’m not a fireman and I can’t judge.  The one fireman that I talked to said, “if we had been able to get a truck up there at the last minute,” he said, “we’d had lost the truck and the firemen along with your house.”  Now, I can’t judge on that and I can’t deny it.  I’d never seen anything like it in my life.  The fire was probably, I would judge, a quarter of the mile, maybe a half a mile away, the actual fire, and the burning embers and the flying brush was coming across at almost a vertical, or horizontal I mean, level and that obviously is what hit the house.  I had earlier in the evening, when I first knew we were going to evacuate, I shut off the propane tank, pulled the drapes away from the windows because they say the heat from the windows can start a fire just from the drapes and then was attempting to wet it down.  Earlier than that, a year or more ago, in fact quite some time ago, I had cleared my land back, clear back, we back up to the Cleveland National Forest and I had cleared everything right down to the Cleveland National Forest line which is well over 100 feet and then the other vegetation around there was basically ice plant and so forth.  It was moving at such a high volume and a rate of speed that it didn’t, a hundred feet just meant nothing at that point.  I’m not saying it doesn’t help in a small fire so that basically is what happened to us.  We’d gone through the trauma I guess that all of you have that lost your homes, debating what to do.  We went over and spent a week in Henderson, Nevada and thought we were going to get out of here, thought more about it and we’re now dealing with an architect and a contractor and we’re going to rebuild.

 

Bob Krysak:  Christopher, back to the 12:30, 12:45 period when you tried to walk back up to the house and were stopped by sheriffs…

 

Christopher:  Yes.

Bob Krysak:  Were there any fire trucks in the area or just the sheriffs’ cars?

 

Christopher:  There was a couple of fire trucks that came up Ramona Oaks as I was leaving but I don’t recall any of them when I was attempting to get back up.  There may have been and there may have been one or two that went up on the side street, I’m not sure.  The fellow that I talked to with the CDF and he asked me not to quote him and he talked very frankly, he said that they had called and they asked for 25 teams, he said we got to have 25 teams in the Estates and the dispatcher said we don’t have 25 teams, everything has virtually been sent up to Julian because they thought they could get in and fight the fire from the Julian side, they knew they couldn’t get in from down below.  It seemed that there was some confusion on their part, maybe understandably, on how to access that area from the ground.

 

Bob Krysak:  So you’re impression, there was no local knowledge of the area.  That’s one of the things, everyone being pulled away from this area, people out fighting the fire were not local people who had local knowledge of the terrain or the roads or anything like that.

 

Christopher:  It was my understanding that the units that were sent to Julian were at least, part of them were local units, the end of that story was, they said we can send you three units but it’s going to be a little while before they can get there.  Well obviously it was too late, by the time they got there I guess they looked at the street that I’m on and were, Ken’s house is right next door, his house burned, they decided it was too late to save those and they dropped back to a, but my concern and really anger I guess is not that we didn’t have the fire protection at the point when the flames hit us, it was probably too late at that point to do anything, what I have a hard time understanding is why we didn’t get out there and take care of it when it was a small fire and you know you get a lot of pros and cons on could the helicopter have gone in with air drops at the appropriate time even though it was getting close to the, what, the half hour before sunset and it’s easy to blame the dispatcher, it’s easy to blame and helicopter pilot, personally if I had been flying the thing I’d say go to hell, I’m going to bring in some more water but that’s easy to say when you look back and you weren’t the guy there so I’m not, suffice to say I think the, 90% if not all of the fire could have been avoided if it had been attacked at the point when it was just a very very small fire allegedly set by this nut who was out there hunting and didn’t know what to do when he got lost.  And I say allegedly so.

 

Bob Krysak:  Right.  Everyone is telling us that the fire started around the Cedar Falls area.  Are you familiar enough with the terrain behind your house to know whether that’s an accurate assessment because we’ve heard testimony that was actually two or three miles from there where the fire started?

 

Christopher:  Well it looked to me, Ed maybe you have a better…

 

Bob Krysak:  That’s who we have the testimony from.

 

Christopher:  Yeah, it looked to me like it was north of Cedar Falls, although at night and looking out there, and you have at that time, it was just a fairly small glow, and initially there was virtually no ground wind out there at all.  The smoke curled up and just went right straight up until it got to a fairly high altitude before it started blooming so I think it could have been fairly easily contained at that point if they had either had air or ground support to knock it down.

 

Kit Kessinger:  Christopher, north of Cedar Falls would be closer to the San Diego River then?

 

Christopher:  Be what?

 

Kit Kessinger: Closer to the San Diego River?

 

Christopher:  Well the San Diego River kind of meanders up there, I’m sure it was way on the other side.  When I say north of Cedar Falls, I think it was beyond Cedar Falls and then north.

 

Unidentified Audience:  (Inaudible).

 

Christopher:  Yep.  Okay.

 

Bob Krysak:  Anything else?

 

Christopher:  Nope, other than, probably all of you, I read in the paper this morning, I think it was the Lake City Fire Department had had a meeting similar to this only the testimony was being given by fire department personnel who said here’s where we were, what, when, why and where and I think that would be extremely valuable and probably tough on the fire department people but I think rather than, and this is good, don’t misunderstand me and I appreciate the opportunity but instead of a lot of us saying here’s what we think happened, it would be very helpful to have the fire crews say here’s what happened, we were here, we were pulled off and we were sent to Julian or we were here and we were told not to go there.  You could have gotten Mussey Grade but we weren’t allowed.  Whatever the situation was.

 

Bob Krysak:  That’s the next step of this committee is to meet with CDF and the U.S. Department of Forestry and get, now that we got all the public input from the ground we want them to explain to us what happened so that will be melded together in the final report.

Christopher:  Very good and thank you very much for the interest that the Water Board is showing this whole thing and I appreciate the fact that you’re intent is not to have this as a hearing for dress and then forget it, it’s going to move forward and take some action, whatever needs to be done.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you Christopher.  Dale.  Dale.

 

Dale:  My name is Dale and my wife and I live at [Mussey Grade].  If you live down there, this was the house, remember it?  Yeah, yeah, we spent about 18 months and a lot of money of ours and a lot of money of the banks, we ran out of money at one bank and went to another bank and got more money and anyhow.  It was about 6:30, I got a phone call on my cell phone since we’re camping basically out there, working on the property for the last 18 months, from a friend in Escondido and he said, “you were on fire, it was on the news,” and so we knew something was different because it was, the light wasn’t right in the morning and so we went out and looked and sure enough we could see in the southern area, back in through there, there were some red clouds so I got up on top of the house, being a tall house I could see quite a ways and the Santa Ana’s were blowing from east to west, typically as they do and it wasn’t moving north that fast and so I said, it looked like we’re going to be okay with this thing because firemen are going to be out here and we pay a lot of good money to have them out there and there’s going to be planes in the sky real soon and they’re going to be dropping on this thing and we’re going to be okay and plus we have a brand new road out there that was paved and that’s going to be a real nice fire break and we could get up here and make a stand right here for this.  I’ve cleared all the brush there and around and I’m a plumber by trade and so I’ve got water lines all around the property and we can soak everything down real nice and we proceeded to do that.  I started getting phone calls from my friends around there, are you guys okay, are you guys okay and then we started to notice to the east of us where the trailer park is, back in there, smoke coming from that direction over the hill.  We couldn’t see the fire yet but it was coming that way and about 8:00 you could start to see the flames coming from both directions.  The fire from the south was moving about a mile an hour and then it would catch some of the underbrush and just like, it would just move, it would just go.  I’ve got some photos of it, this is looking south, everybody recognizes that, what used to be and the flames were getting pretty high and I was telling my wife we better start putting some things of value in the car and truck, animals and such as that and we had a sea land van that was kind of in the edge of the field there, solid steel, we had all of our earthly belongings in there, we figured that would be okay, it’s about 30 minutes later and we figured, maybe not so we got fire sprinklers in the house, you know they made us put these in, it’s a good idea so we made sure those valves were all on and the road isn’t paved yet but it’s sixteen foot wide just like the little fire marshal came out and stomped his foot and made sure that I was right on that and we’ve got water tanks out there, make sure that we can connect our water valves to it so they can fight that fire, go boys go, so at 9:15 it started to look like Vietnam, I was a Sergeant in the Marine Core in Vietnam and you don’t put a private in charge when you want to fight a battle, you put a general in charge, basically in my opinion there’s a lot of privates in charge, they didn’t make the right calls.  Of course I’m taking a lot of anger out here but when you get burned out then there’s some anger to be vented, I appreciate you being here to listen to it.  When it got to this point my wife is indicating that we should leave right away and being male and stubborn we started watering things down and the flames are getting up pretty high, they were jumping and it was said by the gentleman here, it was going horizontal, the fire was, it was actually like napalm, it was leaping away and landing on things, you can’t fight that.  When it got that big it was just get out of it’s way, that’s all you can do and that’s basically all we could do is just get out of it’s way.  There’s not anything out there that can be built that’s worth your life so this was at 9:30, this is the photo at 9:30, see how big the fire is behind the house and we should have been gone right here, this is not a real smart picture of me, gas can in my hand, forty foot flames in the back but the truck was almost empty and I could just see me being stopped out there on the road somewhere without gas, you know, waiting on somebody and the thing dying.  You really can’t tell that’s me and that’s good.  But anyhow it was almost empty and so I figured okay, but we actually took things out of the house and put away so it wouldn’t cause a combustion, set them out in the middle of the field, we put things from the house into the storage container thinking the storage container would save it, well as you well know, it all melted, it’s all gone, everything is just all gone and this is what we came back to.  One thing was good though, I’ve got a picture of it right here, sprinkler valves are on, intact and there was water actually running, but sprinklers are there to protect you from getting killed, well my truck protected me from getting killed.  My friend calling me at 6:30 protected me from getting killed, it wasn’t anybody notifying me, nor was anybody helping fight the little brush fire that could have been fought and put away with.  You know we’ve got fire jumpers in this area and California you know it’s shake or bake, it’s either earthquakes or we’re on fire and with that kind of reputation you would think that the privates are in charge would mandate that we have better personnel to fight these things.  If they’re afraid of coming down Mussey Grade because of their lives, they’re in the wrong business, they’re firefighters because they risk their lives to protect other people.  If they’re afraid of coming down the thing and protecting us, we’re down there fighting our own fires or getting our butts out of its way.  They’re out there guarding the road to keep people from coming down; you’re in the wrong business if you’re afraid of coming down and fighting a fire. That’s my call on it and I appreciate you being here to listen to us gripe and vent. One other thing, when we were getting the planning process of building this, went to the little fire station up here, water department and they stamped red all over that front page, you got to do this, you got to do this, you got to do this, fire marshal drove down there, stood at my gate, in my property and stomped his foot at me, said, you will do this, and you will do that and I got angry at him because he’s a water guy, he’s a fire marshal, to stomp his foot on my property at me, telling me you will have a water tank, you will or we will not fight you…

 

Bob Krysak:  This is when you first built the house?

 

Dale:  Yes, you will have this road paved.  I said why, we’ve got to get a truck down that thing to fight your house, we need a place to hook our hoses up to so we went through thousands and thousands of dollars, nobody there.  So if you want my road paved, come down and pave it.  And if you want, I’m going to rebuild you know, it didn’t touch the guest house, it burned all the material away and probably after this meeting they probably won’t let me build on it but that’s alright.  This is the guest house spot, the fire went all the way around it, 1200 feet, that’s fine because I’m in a little trailer right now, we’re going to rebuild on this and if he wants to stamp my plans “Will not protect,” that’s fine, because he wasn’t there to protect it anyhow so I don’t have any problem with that.  We’ll just do like we did before, we’ll just leave and let it burn down, we’ll fight the insurance company and we’ll rebuild again.  It seems like that’s the course of nature.  So don’t sit up there with all your mightiness and think you’re going to do this, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do this, when it comes down to doing something, do it.  You’ve got a contract, we have a, you have a contract with us, we have a contract with you, protect us, don’t take the money and don’t do anything, I’d be embarrassed to do that, they’d have my license.  Thank you.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you.  Edgar.

 

Edgar:  Edgar, I live at [Mussey Grade Road].  The best place, the best way to get into my place is going on Fernbrook Lane so I think of myself as living on Fernbrook Lane but my official address is the other.  Those two talks that we heard were so powerful, weren’t they?  And I don’t have anything comparable to say, my house, I will say this, I live on a hill and I can see pretty far away and there had been a couple of major fires in the past where a lot of fire trucks and police people came up there and used that as an observation point and I didn’t see anything up there, from there, that contradicts things that have been said the last three days of here so I don’t have anything to add there.  I partly wanted to talk to lend my support to all these things that I’ve been hearing.  This is kind of interesting… (end of tape)

 

…He went out to the San Diego Country Estates and he helped a couple of people evacuate their homes and so on like that so I mean you could get around rather well pretty late is my point and then he finally came home about 2:30 or so and down Mussey Grade Road and we left about 8:00 or 8:30 that next morning and went down Mussey Grade Road so I don’t know, I’m a little bit puzzled by why there was so much difficulty getting down there.  I can’t think of any times or anything that conflicts with what’s been said.  It all makes sense.  Thank you very much.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you very much.

 

Unknown Speaker:  (Inaudible).

 

Edgar:  Yeah I went down the Mussey Grade Road way.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Edgar:  Yeah, yeah.  I did say Sunday, I did mean Saturday, thank you.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Edgar:  Well we’re not sure but I think around 8:00 or 8:30 that morning and the fire at that moment was about, literally you could step it off about 30 feet from our house and it was burning our storage areas and garage and so on.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Edgar:  I’m not sure, I remember when I left, you mean the little, you mean on Mussey Grade Road, oh I didn’t see any problems on Mussey Grade Road.

 

Diane Conklin:  Was the fire along the side of the road?

 

Edgar:  No, no.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Edgar:  No, no.

 

Diane Conklin:  So we’re not talking about…(Inaudible).

 

Edgar:  Mussey Grade Road from where I enter it on…

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Edgar:  Right, right.  Thank you.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you very much, Frank.

 

Frank:  I’m Frank; I live on [SDCE].  I’m one of the fortunate ones, I didn’t loose my house but despite that I have some pictures of the time the fire started so I’ll give these to you, so I have about four of these particular ones.  It was about 5:30 that I actually saw the fire when my wife actually said, I was watching TV and she said, “there’s a fire out there,” and I went out there and my neighbor he said that he had reported the fire about a quarter to 5:00 to CDF so again I’m kind of confirming some of the time frames that you guys have. 

 

Unknown Speaker:  (Inaudible).

 

Frank:  Yes, here I zoomed in with a zoom lens, we’re fairly high up and we sat and saw that fire during that time.  I got to watch the fire pretty much…

 

Unknown Speaker: (Inaudible)

 

Frank:  When you look at the picture you can see which way the winds blowing, it’s blowing west to east so that means that the Santa Ana hadn’t kicked in so it was about 5:30 when I took the picture.

 

Audience:  (Several people speaking at once).

 

Frank:  Unfortunately not, I don’t have that in my camera and this is zooming it in, of course now you’re going to have a little bit less light when you’re zooming in on it so I’ll give these pictures to you.  We watched the fire come down the hill just like some people already talked about.  Moved down to the river and then moved around towards the south end and about 9:30.  10:00 I could feel the wind starting to shift a little bit and again about 12:00 I thought maybe I should go ahead and get some sleep because I don’t know what’s going to happen so my daughter lives two blocks from me, got woke up, 3:00 I got woke up and started putting the stuff in the car and there is a mountain behind our house and I’m not too familiar with the names of some of these mountains, it just roared up the mountain like a freight train, 3:00 in the morning I left and went to Santee and in my opinion the fire is, they’ve been fighting these fires for 30 years, the CDF had and you’d think they would learn some lessons here, there’s a recipe for these fires, you need Santa Ana, hot temperatures and dry brush.  Now you can’t tell me that people don’t know these things exist, and there’s a lingo for these fires, you got an hour to three hours to fight the fire, if you don’t fight the fire it’s gone and CDF didn’t try to fight the fires so I blame CDF for not making the attempt and if they had failed, okay it’s going to be this way and when the fire gets out of control, like it is, you can have all the equipment from the United States here trying to fight the fire four, five, ten hours later, you’re not going to put it out, these fires are not to break, it’s too late, you can’t fight a fire that’s forty-five miles wide or whatever it turned out to be, it has to burn itself out so getting the fire department to get more equipment is really not the answer, prevention is the answer.  We got technology that can look at cigarettes from space and identify the cigarette on the ground.  Come on we’re not in the age that we can’t detect fires so prevention is one of the things, identifying the fires in a certain time frame and getting the fire addressed, if you loose it at that time at least you tried it so, they didn’t try it so they failed.  Thank you.

 

Bob Krysak:  I have a question; you said your neighbor had indicated that he called CDF at 4:45?

 

Frank:  That’s correct.

 

Bob Krysak:  Is it CDF or 911?

 

Frank:  No CDF because my neighbor, my other neighbor dialed 911, he was at the end of the Estates, one gentleman said that he had notified the fire department at that point, he was there, came up to the house and he sat there and said, “look at the fire out there,” and I said, “what time did you call,” he said “about 5:45,” and I took the pictures about 5:30.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you.  Gilbert.

 

Gilbert:  I’d like to thank you for pronouncing my name right.  My name is Gilbert, I live at  [San Pasqual Valley] Road down by the Wild Animal Park now.  I’m a twenty-four year police officer with the City of San Diego and me and my family rented a house at [Fernbrook] for the last eleven years.  [].  Most people know it better as behind Kitty & Ira’s Café.  There are two other houses back there besides ours and my house was against the southern ridge.  The ridge was heavily overgrown with brush and it was largely wilderness all the way back to Kimball Valley, that’s why I moved out there, that’s what I liked about it, I also knew that I was in a dangerous area for fires but I accepted that risk eleven years ago when I moved out there.  I had cleared the brush around our house but I had only about twenty feet of clearance in the back, in the back yard, and then the property after that was somebody else’s.  Our story began on Saturday evening October 25^th.  It was my wife’s birthday and we went down to Lakeside for dinner, we came home around 9:30 PM and as we drove through the pass at Mt. Woodson we could look out across the Ramona Valley and we could see the fire then, and it appeared to be way over on the other side of Ramona and we weren’t too alarmed because it didn’t look that big and we were used to seeing those kinds of things over the years.  In fact we even decided to drive toward it to get a better look just for fun but I changed my mind when I remembered that I had to go to work the next morning so we got home at 11:00 PM.  Everything in our area, down on Mussey Grade, seemed to be normal at that time and we went to bed.  I got up for work at approximately 3:45 AM and was just starting to get ready when my friend who lives down the road about a hundred yards, lives down Mussey Grade about 100 yards called me and said that they were kicking us out of here, that the fire was coming up the canyon. I told him that he must be mistaken, that the fire was way over on the other side of Ramona and he said, “no, it’s here and it’s coming up the canyon right now.”  So I went out on my back porch and I looked at the sky and my heart sank.  I looked at the sky and it was so red and it looked like it was ready to come over the ridge right at that moment, it was just incredible.  The wind was blowing quite strong at that time and it was very warm.  There seemed to be something more to it than just a normal Santa Ana wind and heat.  It seemed to me that the fire was just over the ridge and it suddenly came to me that we were going to loose our home.  I got the wife and kids up and we quickly began to pack things.  For every passing minute it seemed like things got worse, as far as the weather conditions were concerned.  We filled up my truck and two small cars with what we could and we had about an hour to get packed, I know a lot of people had way less than that.  During that time I did not hear one siren or one loud speaker warning us that we had to evacuate and at the time I wondered why because I had been through this a couple of times before.  I’m sure all of you remember the Barona Fire and a couple of other ones and we got woke up at 1:00 in the morning and told to get ready to go and at that time…

 

Bob Krysak:  By who?

 

Gilbert:  By the sheriffs department and by the fire department.

 

Unknown Speaker:  (Inaudible).

 

Gilbert:  Yes, that was once before, yeah but this time there was nobody, I didn’t hear anybody, I didn’t see anybody.  Once we were packed up it seemed like there was a little time left to grab something or do something to protect our property but I knew that there would be a lot of fire rigs coming down Mussey Grade and I wanted to get out of the way, I didn’t want to be blocking anybody, everybody knows Mussey Grade is one way in and one way out so I felt it was my responsibility to get out of the area so that they could do their job.  All the way up Mussey Grade I looked for fire engines going the other way and I saw none, I heard a sheriffs deputy on a PA system earlier, a few minutes earlier but I didn’t see any other law enforcements, any other law enforcement vehicles while driving up Mussey Grade or south on Highway 67.  Highway 67 was blocked off at Poway Road and you could see that it was covered in smoke south of that location.  We drove down into Poway and then we, my wife and I became separated, we were in different vehicles, she drove up onto Scripps Poway Parkway and then followed that out to I-15.  I stayed on Poway Road and continued driving west out to 15.  My wife saw the fire racing across the wilderness area that’s south of Scripps Poway Parkway, she saw it racing across towards Scripps Ranch and she told me that it seemed to her that it was pacing her, that it was keeping track, it was keeping pace with her, that’s how fast it was moving.  When I got onto Highway 15 I started south and I saw thick smoke drifting across the highway but no fire, I thought that the smoke was from the Ramona Fire.  We got down to my mother in laws house in San Diego and I left my wife and kids there.  I then went to work at the northeastern division sub station up in Rancho Bernardo and Penasquitos and when I walked into the locker room a sergeant told me to hurry up and get dressed and get out there, that Scripps Ranch was starting to burn and I told him, you got to be crazy, the fire is up in Ramona and he said, “no, it’s here in Scripps Ranch.”  So I got dressed and I went out there and I worked the Scripps Ranch Fire for the rest of the day.  I conducted evacuations, I directed traffic, I maintained perimeter security and I even fought some fires with garden hoses.  I knew deep down inside that my house was gone but I kept hoping that some miracle might have occurred and my house was saved.  Late Monday night I secured from duty and was able to get back into the Mussey Grade area.  The further down Mussey Grade I drove, the more hopeless I felt.  I was heartbroken as to what happened to our beautiful valley.  When I turned onto Ronan Drive I immediately saw the worst, our house was gone as was our neighbors house across the street.  My other neighbors’ house incredibly hardly had a scratch.  It was one of the worst things I ever had to do, tell my wife and daughters that their home was gone and all of the possessions were gone.  I know my story is not much different from anybody else’s here; there are a couple of points that I’d like to make though.  I’m not looking for a pound of flesh from anybody, but I feel that the system failed us terribly for some reason and I want some answers, I want some accountability for what happened here only to establish one went wrong and to come up with ways to fix it.  I in no way blame any firefighter for what happened, I consider them all heroes and I thank them for the courageous fight that they put up for all of us.  I do feel that the upper management of the various fire and disaster services failed us.  They failed to plan adequately for a crisis like this and then they failed to respond fast enough.  I think many of their policies are ineffective and in some cases are down right stupid.  Deciding to wait for a fire that is too far away to burn down to the road where fire rigs are standing by makes no sense to me.  Wildfires burn in many directions at once and while the fire may be put out when it finally reaches the road, the other end of the fire is now farther away and ten times bigger.  The no night flight policy may be a good policy in general but there are always exceptions to rules and a few good router drops in the very beginning stood a very good chance of stopping this whole thing.  Somebody should have made a command decision to override that policy and let the drops occur.  Last of all I feel that when help is offered from outside sources such as the military, it should be accepted rather than be refused for some lame reason such as not having the proper training.  Pilots that are trained to provide close combat support in the face of hostile anti aircraft fire seem capable of dropping water on wildfires to me.  And I hope that people in the upper management positions of these various fire and disaster services can hear these criticisms and accept them in a positive manner in which they are offered.  And that’s pretty much all I have to say.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you.

 

Kit Kessinger:  Thank you.

 

Bob Krysak:  Hanna and Hank.

 

Hanna:  I’m going to start before the fire but I’ll give my name, my name is Hanna and this is my husband Hank.  We live at [Fernbrook].  A few months before the fire I got a letter from the Ramona Water District regarding weeds along my road, actually they said it was on my property, to take care of it and my husband had been out and weed whacked all of our property and we’re thinking where’s the weeds because we don’t have, we have dirt everywhere, where’s the weeds?  So we get another letter, so I call and I say, “okay, would you please come out and show me where I need to cut.”  So the fire district came out…

 

Bob Krysak:  Let me stop you right there.

 

Hanna:  Yes sir.

 

Bob Krysak:  Is the letter from the district or from fire protection services?

 

Hanna:  District. 

 

Bob Krysak:  For Ramona Water District there is a form letter first and then a follow up letter, it’s important.  I think it’s from the fire protection services, which is a company at the water district, has contact with.

Hanna:  Okay, I couldn’t tell you because it burned up in the fire.  Got to laugh.  Okay so they came out and they said no, Hank you don’t, they actually told me, I think you were gone, I said, if not you, it’s the county responsibility and I said oh yeah right so they said that they would personally notify the county to come out and take care of it.  This is two to three months prior to the fire.

 

Hank:  What is was was all the brush along Fernbrook, I’ve been there twelve years and maybe twice they’ve come cleared the brush back which it’s a county maintained road but it’s the brush that scrapes your cars.  I’ve seen YYYY and he comes with his clippers and trims the road himself.

 

Hanna:  He’s not able to; he’s 80 something years old.  Anyway that’s prior to the fire.  So we did what we were supposed to do, okay that morning, oh boy, we changed our clocks like everybody else early because I go to church but my cat Zechariah is a house cat and he decided it was time for me to get up because it’s usually 3:15, well it was 2:15 and he kept meowing and meowing and I thought Zechariah, I’m not getting up go away and I sat up and we had our window open above our bed and I could smell smoke and we knew about Camp Pendleton a couple of days prior so I thought oh it’s just Camp Pendleton, don’t worry about it so I kept smelling it and smelling it and about 3:00 my sister called and said Carla had called her, there was a fire in Country Estates, just be prepared because we’ve been through this drill before so we said okay.  And so we got up and made some coffee and just kind of set around for awhile and about 4:30, 5:00 we were outside, he went down to his cousins who lives the first house on Fernbrook on the left side, we’re the first house on the right side, we’re on the west side he’s on the east side, okay so he went and got his cousin up and also he woke up a neighbor up in a trailer down the road letting him know that they be ready.  About 4:30 or 5:00 a CHP came down with his little speaker thing and flashing his light, spotlight, and he said, “be ready to evacuate,” that was his exact words and he went on his way.  So we had just built a…

 

Bob Krysak:  Did he do it over a loudspeaker?

 

Hanna:  Yes sir and we went up to the car and talked to him.

 

Hank:  It was over a PA system.

 

Hanna:  We had our gate already open, we were in the process of moving vehicles and so we said okay we are, we’re getting ready and so Hank pulled out two or three vehicles, we had a lot of vehicles, like fifteen, you know, we saved three that’s good.

 

Bob Krysak:  How many can you drive at one time?

 

Hank:  That’s what happens when you don’t have any children.

 

Hanna:  So anyway, we got the big Dodge truck in the yard and we got the, by then the outside cats were already gone, we had two outside so they were gone so we got cousin HHHH over and said let’s just have coffee and we’ll sit down on our back deck and watch the fire, so we did.  We sat on our back deck over looking the creek and were watching Kimball Valley, it was about 5:30, quarter to 6:00 we heard this big popping, propane tanks going off, then we heard this big roar and I’ve been through tornadoes so that’s what it sounded like to me was a tornado coming up.

 

Hank:  It sounded like a jet engine to me.

 

Hanna:  Big loud noise and the smoke came and the smell came and so we knew something was weird so I ran out front and we had everything packed that we thought we should take and the animals were ready to go and I ran to the front and as I looked, got to be south from my house, I could see flames coming this way, I could actually see them through the trees at that time.  My brother-in-law had just come down and went down to the lake and turned around and was high tailing it really fast and joined with wisdom and turned around in front of our house and said, “let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”  By the time we turned off of Fernbrook and onto Mussey Grade, about 6:30 or so, we’re just estimating, there was a forty foot wall of flames on our right and it was coming up on the east side of the road.  Right, and by the time we got out, we had given his cousin, we got his cousins dog and we gave him keys to one of our vehicles and said, “HHHH, get out,” no HHHH stayed another hour after we left, he got in the car and by the time he got to our z-car he couldn’t go out the way we went, he had to go through the creek which is another issue, I’ll get to.

Bob Krysak:  What time was that?

 

Hanna:  That was probably about an hour after we left, we left around 6:30 so I’m saying about 7:30, that’s just a rough estimate.

 

Hank:  This is information coming from cousin HHHH, he went to Kitty and Ira’s and then he tried walking back in to survey the situation and got about to IIII’s swimming pool where Danny’s Fishing Village used to be, looking for his house and my house and just saw a wall of flames, turned around and started running back and he had sandals on and he looses one of his sandals and as he’s running back towards Kitty and Ira’s the flames were catching up with him on the west side of Fernbrook.

 

Hanna:  So we got out and we went to the school and then cousin HHHH got to our church, we ended up at the school and it was so crowded that we went to our church for safety and letting the dogs and stuff loose and HHHH got there at 10:30 and that’s when we knew our house was already gone.

 

Bob Krysak:  How did you know that?  Because he told you, he had witnessed it?  What time did your house burn?

 

Hanna:  Well we left at 6:30, he left at 7:30 so when he walked back in, by that time it was already, we had a lot of stuff to burn though.

 

Hank:  As Fernbrook goes, we’re probably two of the first houses on Fernbrook.

 

Hanna:  That went.

 

Bob Krysak:  So the firestorm took your house, the initial first?

 

Hanna:  Oh yes, oh yes.  We lost everything we owned, sheds, trailers, fifteen vehicles, we lost one of our cats Bootsie, he didn’t come home, 19 days later we did have one cat that did come home.  Asked how did we prepare, well a few years ago, we’ve been through several of the few fires since we’ve been there and we got a video from our insurance company several years ago so we’ve been trying to like, whenever we do wood, we have a wood burner on the outside of our fence, we have the ice plant, even though we had a lot of stuff it was away from the house…

 

Hank:  There was an issue of clearing the creek because from the corner of my house I could spit into the creek and as far as clearance, if you do too much to the creek then you get in trouble with Fish and Game.

 

Hanna:  So we can’t do anything there as far as that clearing but we did everything we thought that we should do as far as protecting ours.  It’s said, could you have stayed?  Well we couldn’t have stayed because it was coming too fast for us to do anything to protect anybody in our neighborhood, we didn’t have that much of a warning.  Before we always had better warning to get out.

 

Hank:  We’ve always seen fire crews come down.

 

Hanna:  They used to station at Kitty and Ira’s in fact, all their equipment, and fight the fires but this time we didn’t have any.  The only thing I was told, and I’m really hurt, I know I’ve been lied to, one of the firemen was out, because we had a propane problem and I looked him right in the eye, this guy drives a truck for Ramona Fire Department, I need to find out how it is because it would be record of who the first truck was, and here’s what he told me personally, face to face, eye to eye, and I don’t know the time frame because I haven’t been to other meetings but Diane, you’ll know, he said, he was the first fire truck on Mussey Grade and when he got to Salvation Army he could not go any further because fire was on both sides of the road, well I keep hearing these stories that the fire wasn’t there so why did he look me in the eye, because I asked him tell me, did you guys come to Mussey Grade?  He looked me right in the eye and called me by my first name, he said, “Hanna, I was the first truck on the scene and I knew we couldn’t go any further; it was a danger to my men.”  I said well I wouldn’t want any men’s lives lost through this but I also don’t want to be storied to.

 

Bob Krysak:  Did he say what time he got there?

 

Hanna:  No.

Hank:  What I’m thinking is as it came up through it must have also, according to the gentleman who lost his beautiful house, that log house right, the fire must have came from two different directions.

 

Unknown Speaker:  (Inaudible).

 

Hank:  Right, so that’s probably that.  Thank you very much.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you.

 

Diane Conklin:  I’d like to ask you a few questions.  (Inaudible).

 

Bob Krysak:  Possibly not.

 

Hanna:  Carla’s.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  Yes, that was one thing that when we got to church that day the pastor said how do you want us to pray about this fire and I said well my sister just sold her house which there’s a trailer park between my sisters house and mine, the three houses in the middle of the road survived.

 

Hank:  The other side, Fernbrook was totally devastated; our side of Fernbrook and it’s right in the middle of Fernbrook.

 

Hanna:  Three houses plus a trailer.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  Yes and also Darcy’s trailer, no Mike and policeman, Joanne and Darcy’s trailer.

 

Hank:  And Harry’s.

 

Hanna:  And then Harry on the other side of the road.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  And Pierce’s.  Five yes ma’am.

 

Diane Conklin:  That’s before (Inaudible).

Hanna:  Yes ma’am.

 

Diane Conklin:  So we’re talking about fire coming up, so five houses very close to your house survived, (Inaudible), because you weren’t there to observe it.

 

Hanna:  Just HHHH saying, when he looked back, came back through walking and he got to the pool he couldn’t go any further, it was just like an inferno, the embers and everything.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hank:  No.

 

Hanna:  No ma’am.

 

Diane Conklin:  And then finally did you ever hear other people (Inaudible)…

 

Hank:  Yes.

 

Hanna:  Yes.  In the afternoon and that really threw me because I know that at Hank’s at that meeting is where I found that out, at the meeting where Diane Jacob was there.  Right, that’s when I found out they were that late, I didn’t realize that earlier though.

 

Hank:  One thing I saw last night, I kind of, it flashed in my head was that JJJJ stayed and fought the fire and that was kind of directly above those, Ida’s house, KKKK’s house and if he made some kind of headway there maybe it protected that little section from not burning, Joanne’s house. 

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hank:  Sure.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  He was the first truck, he told me he was the first Ramona truck to respond.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  A few weeks ago I had a neighbor that pulled a propane tank into the road and left it and it was smelling and I was concerned so I called Hazmat and they said that’s dangerous so they came out, the fire department, and he’s the one that told me that day.

 

Diane Conklin: (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  Probably Dye Road, that’s usually the one that responds to us.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  I know what he looks like, a young man, he drove the truck, that’s all I could tell you, I didn’t ask his name.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Hanna:  No I didn’t, I didn’t clarify the time, I just know he said he was the first truck on the scene.  He didn’t say, he said he was the first truck.

 

Bob Krysak:  You had indicated that was between 4:30 and 5:00 AM, that’s when the chip came down, other than that…

 

Hank:  Right at the last moment when all, when she saw the flames and everyone was, the street was backing up with horse trailers down Mussey Grade, right at the very last moment the second CHP came through and said, “Get out, get out now.” 

 

Bob Krysak:  And that’s the only official presence you saw?

 

Hank:  Right.

 

Bob Krysak:  Thank you.  Isaac, and I can’t read the last name because you scribbled it.

 

Isaac:  I’m the person you’re going to love to hate.

 

Bob Krysak:  I don’t hate anybody.

 

Isaac:  Well, before I read my statement I just want to say one thing, the initial fire was the United States Forest Service fire, so if you want to blame anybody on any initial commands that were made it was the United States Forest Service that was making that.

 

Bob Krysak:  Isaac, can you, just for the tape, give your address and spell your last name?

 

Isaac:  Yes, my name is Isaac

[]

 

Isaac:  I know I write, and my address is [Dos Picos Park Road] 

 

Bob Krysak:  All right, thank you.

 

Isaac:  I would like to read my statement and then if anybody has questions I’d be more than happy to answer it.  Just to let you know, clarify on tape, that initial fire was the U.S. Forest Service fire.  My name is Isaac.  I have lived with my family off of Dos Picos Park Road…

 

Bob Krysak:  Let’s listen people, give him the courtesy.  Thank you.

 

Isaac:  My name is Isaac.  I have lived with my family off of Dos Picos Park Road for the past eighteen years.  I am speaking before this review board as a resident that was affected by this fire.  No, my house did not burn.  I stayed as my family evacuated to do what I could for my home and my neighbors if the fire jumped Dos Picos or Mussey Grade Roads.  I did this with confidence since I am a retired fire fighter after serving the City of Poway for twenty-one years.  I also knew that my fellow fighter, fellow fire fighters would be facing conditions that you only see once in a career and response equipment to our area might be slim, if at all due to five major fires burning in Southern California prior to October 25, three major fires in San Diego County starting on October 25, 26 and numerous other fires throughout the state.  These fires were driven by weather and drought conditions, some of these were started by arsonists.  These were totally unpredictable firestorms that started and traveled in any direction they wanted to.  Departments were being pushed to their maximum level of operation. Many companies responded to the fires north of San Diego prior to October 25 under the state Mutual Aid System, call back up personnel by many agencies in San Diego County to staff extra equipment was put into effect.  You see due to things such as Prop 13, politicians not wanting to take responsibility for fire protection in this county and citizens, tax payers, not wanting to pay the money for adequate fire protection, the Mutual Aid System is a must because no one agency is able to handle major wild land fires by themselves.  For example, take Ramona, I pay $189.00 per year for fire protection, I’m sure most every other resident pays close to this, some more, some less.  Industry driven taxes is a minimum.  The Water Board contracts with CDF for our fire protection, that’s three stations with three engines, one rescue truck and two paramedic units.  Eleven fire fighters per shift, two on each engine, the recommended standard is four, one on the rescue and two on each medic unit.  According to the National Fire Protection Agency, one fire fighter per every 1000 citizens is recommended, that leaves Ramona at least fourteen extra fire fighters per shift short.  The aircraft, wild land engines, Mt. Woodson Station, hand crews and additional CDF resources are no charge to us due to board contracting with CDF, other cities have to pay CDF for this.  People say that CDF breeched their contract of fire protection during the Cedar Fire.  If you live within the Ramona Municipal Water District boundaries, you only pay for what is in those three stations.  These short-handed fire fighters performed their job in an extraordinary manner while fighting the Cedar Fire in Ramona.  Remember, all those other fires going on at the same time, remember that crews and equipment still have to remain at stations to handle other calls while these fires are going on, heart attacks, structure fires and during the Cedar Fire beginning, San Marcos had a multi-million dollar industrial building burn.  See how quickly the resources disappeared?  Our Ramona fire fighters are well trained and perform tasks that most departments do with full staffing.  They performed above and beyond the call of duty when the Cedar Fire entered Ramona with minimal help from other agencies, they attempted to reach all areas affected by the fires in Ramona, no fire related deaths in Ramona and countless homes saved.  I really feel bad for everybody that lost a home in Ramona but I can assure you that even if you had a fire engine parked at every home you still would have lost property and more.  I know that these fire fighters worked as hard as they could to save lives and property.  I know many of these brave men and women, my son was on Engine 82 which is out of Dye Road on call back for CDF when the fire hit Country Estates, he worked many sleepless hours that night and the following week covering their district and other areas of Ramona.  They saved many homes and lost homes too.  Talk to a twenty two year old fire fighter who started with Ramona as a sixteen year old who has been to more major fires than I did in twenty-one years and you would know that this was not easy.  They tried to save every home they could even in conditions beyond belief.  They did not have the resources to do more, they wanted to do more but couldn’t and it pains him and every other fire fighter still.  I feel if anyone had breached a contract, it’s the citizens for not saying to the board that we want more protection for us and our fire fighters and we are willing to pay for it.  I know people are upset but you have to remember that this fire was beyond anyone’s control.  Command tried to put resources in areas of greatest need, but too little resources and a fire moving in all directions driven by Santa Ana and fire created winds was too much.  Fires create their own wind that go above and beyond what the Santa Ana does.  We can continue to point blame and be angry or we can look for solutions, you look at that amount of acres burned, lives lost and home burned and you get angry. Think of the lives saved and the amount of homes saved also.  Demand the county form a department for all unincorporated areas that is well staffed, trained and equipped, demand the removal of dead trees and vegetation, take responsibility for your home and follow the state laws to make it fire safe.  Tell the board we want the contract with CDF to increase and we are willing to pay more, it is time to take responsibility to make things better.  Thank you.

 

Bob Krysak: Is that your only copy of your statement?

 

Isaac:  You can have it if you like.

 

Bob Krysak:  I can’t write that fast, thank you.

Diane Conklin:  I’d like to ask a couple of questions, first of all (inaudible).

 

Isaac:  You did, thank you.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Isaac:  Fire engines attempted to get down Mussey Grade, I know individuals who did and because of the fire blowing across the road at the time they were being sent to there was just too unbearable for them.

 

Diane Conklin:  (Inaudible).

 

Bob Krysak:  This isn’t a courtroom Diane but you can ask questions.

 

Isaac:  No I couldn’t tell you but I could tell you this, since I’m a retired fire fighter and my twenty two year old son is putting his life on the line I listen to a scanner and I can tell you that when this fire started, the initial dispatch was approximately twenty five engines, several hand crews, bull dozers and several overhead to try to get to this fire to put it out.  Astria was first on the scene by picking up the stranded hiker who started the fire with the flare gun, but that has never been established, that’s by the United States Forest Service, there are reasons why air craft is not allowed to fly after a certain time period, I’ve been on fire lines when an S2 air tanker was dropping beyond the dark hour and it’s pretty scary.  I’