Today marks the 10 year anniversary of the 2003 Cedar Fire. The Cedar Fire remains the largest single wildfire in California state history. The Cedar Fire burned 280,278 acres, 2,820 buildings (including 2,232 homes), and killed 15 people including one firefighter. I lived through this. I may not have been close enough to be directly impacted by the fire, but everyone in the entire city had their own story to tell. We were all effected by this... This is my personal account of the 2003 Firestorm. It was a late Saturday afternoon in San Diego country. Two hunters were lost in the woods, south of Ramona. One guy decided to create a fire to signal rescuers with. However, in the middle of our drought and a dry Santa Ana wind storm, that hunter lost control of his signal fire, and it soon began to spread. The initial call of a fire came in at 5:37pm. By 7:00pm, I was at work in Carlsbad, California. Carlsbad is an upper class coastal community north of San Diego. I was just a short drive from the beach. The mountains were miles and miles away to the east. I didnt notice any smoke, going to work, but it was getting dark too. Although I had been through a wildfire that did effect us in 2001, we lived out in the country at the time. I never imagined that I would still have to pay close attention to fire news now that we were back in a city setting. I dont remember what I did at work that night, but I think that I was following the news out of LA. There was a massive wildfire up in their foothills and mountains. I watched Live feeds from LA news sources, inbetween watching security cameras and doing rounds. Tim contacted me, at one point, and said that he was driving up to the Riverside area to pick up a friend of ours. They were not in any danger, but our friend had just got done helping another friend evacuate the Lake Arrowhead area. We wanted to bring him down to San Diego to get him away from the LA wildfires and to relax for a bit. They arrived back in Vista just before I was due to get off work at 7:00am. They offered to come pick me up and then everyone would crash out before hanging out the next day. The sun was coming up. I saw smoke. Where I sat faced east. Even though you cant see the mountains, you could look that direction, and as the sun was coming up, I saw a dark column of smoke rising up at the horizon. I knew it was a wildfire. I had seen a few from a distance, but this looked big. It was starting to fill that portion of the sky. Tim picked me up from work and I was, at first, excited about what I was seeing. It was the fascination of just how big it was seeming to get and how close it was. Now I didnt care about the wildfires in LA. We seemed to have our own to worry about! In truth, I wasnt that worried. I thought our wildfire would pale in comparison to what was going on in LA and that we would get ours under control. Still, I wanted to continue to follow the news and to see where exactly this new fire was. Tim and our friend were not as excited, to say the least. Acting like native Californians, they didnt see the smoke as that big of a deal. To be honest, they were also just plain exhausted too. They wanted to get back to the apartment and to crash out. They were tired. Even though I had worked a full 12 hour shift, I was now wide awake. I stared at that widening column of smoke all the way home. Both guys crashed out. I stayed up. I turned on the TV and, sure enough, Breaking News was covering the local fire. I was worried they would be focused on LA, since that was the bigger story at the time, but our news was all over what was happening locally. It turned out, I had no idea just how big this new fire already was. One of the things that first struck me was that the news coverage was coming from I-15 and Pomerado Road. This is a major juncture near the start of San Diego proper. It was miles and miles to our south. The key thing though, this was not out in the country. This was right at the start of the city. This was San Diego... and the fire was right there. I was a little confused. The smoke I was seeing was straight to our east, not south or south east. Theres no way the fire moved that fast. Maybe there were two fires? Nope. This was just... one... big... fire. As soon as I started to grasp the size of the fire, I was a bit spooked. Ill be honest. I mean, the fire had reached town already. It was only 10:00am, I didnt remember hearing about a fire the night before, and here was a massive wildfire jumping the 15 freeway and burning into San Diego proper. I kept checking out the window too. Looking east and now starting to look directly overhead, smoke was starting to fill the otherwise clear blue sky. Our apartments in Vista were in the Shadowridge community. There were a lot of trees surrounding our apartment complex and a lot of hillsides that could burn. I started to get worried. I woke both guys up and told them that they needed to know the situation in San Diego was becoming just as bad, if not worse, than what was going on in LA. They were too tired to care and just wanted to sleep some more. Im sure they said something along the lines of, Well, wake us up with we need to evacuate. Otherwise... I felt bad for waking them up, but looking at the pictures on TV, the situation appeared to get worse and worse. Having lived in San Diego a number of years now, I recognized parts of town. I knew the freeways, I knew the communities, and had been out to the mountains and the country. I recognized almost every shot the news was showing us. Some places, yeah, not too surprising to see the fire reach there. Other places, though... The fire jumped WHAT freeway?! WHO is being evacuated?! Are you kidding me?! As Ive told people before, this was no small fire in a canyon somewhere. This was a massive fire that was burning INTO town. You sorta expect that fire fighters will keep the fire at bay and prevent it from crossing certain locations, certain multi-lane freeways close to town. When I was SEEING flames on BOTH sides of the freeway and homes burning IN town... I just couldnt believe this was really happening. I dont remember sleeping. If I did, I may have briefly napped. Eventually, they guys woke up in the afternoon. Now rested, they tuned in with me and got caught up on the incredible news of what was happening to OUR town now. We still seemed to be okay, but the entire sky was covered by smoke now. It was a brownish gray, so it just looked like low clouds, but it was all smoke. Ash was coming down and starting to cover things outside. We went for a drive. Certain freeways were closed, due to the fire, so we jumped on roads leading north and came back down the I-15 by Escondido. We didnt want to get too close to the closures, but we wanted to drive by the I-15 and the 78 to see what we could see. We didnt see any active fire, but we knew that were we close as we approached Escondido from the north. Looking left, the clouds seemed to steam up over the hills and mountains. We knew the fire wasnt far behind that. We returned home and I continued to monitor the news. There continued to be unbelievable reports of things coming in that I just couldnt believe. One of the weirdest news reports that came in was of a plane crash. Apparently, a pilot didnt want to risk his plane being destroyed by the fire, so he took off with it as the fire got close. The airport had already been evacuated, so he did this all on his own and without permission. The control tower was not manned. Due to the extreme weather conditions, his plane could not get enough lift. Shortly after take off, the airplane nosed down and crashed into a freeway. It hit the center divide and caught fire. He was able to walk away from the crash. Thankfully, no cars were on the freeway either. The freeway had just been shut down, due to the fire. The only vehicles on the freeway were fire trucks, responding to the fire. Now they had to turn around for a plane crash. I couldnt imagine what was going through their minds. As night feel, the fires raged, and there didnt seem to be any hope for any community that was on the verge of the massively growing fire. It was reaching epic proportions. To go from one side of the fire, it would literally take you an hour or more, driving at freeway speed, to reach the back end of this fire in the mountains. The acreage, the land that this fire covered, was just incredible. I never imagined that a wildfire could ever get this big. I knew by this point that we had to be seeing a once in a lifetime event. In this day and age, though, I just didnt know it was possible. I was shocked that it could get that out of control and burn seemingly everything in the country. People were being evacuated from their homes, going to nearby evacuation centers, and then being evacuated from those as the fire grew. A majority of people headed all the way to Mission Valley, to take refuge in QualComm, the big sports stadium there. Meanwhile, reports were coming in that not just homes, but entire neighborhood and communities were being lost. Lives were being lost. The smoke outside was getting thicker. The ash was coming down more. You can see the white specks in front of your eyes and you knew that you were breathing that in. Everyone had to start covering their mouth with a dust mask or something, not just near the fire, but all over town. I remember going to bed listening to the police scanner. I heard fire fighters trying to make a stand in Santee. I shook my head at how much the police scanner sounded more like a war was going on. In the following days, the entire city was becoming exhausted. No one got any sleep. With the risk of new fires popping up, flare ups, and just more of the unknown happening, everyone was trying to keep tabs on the fire conditions as best as we could. We were still okay, where we were at in Vista. They fire ended up not coming anywhere near us. However, the smoke from these fires was all over everyone. The smoke was visible from space. The Santa Ana winds blew it all sideways, straight over the entire city, and out to sea. Everything was brown. The sky seemed like it would never be blue again. You could smell the fire everywhere. Whether you were inside or outside, it smelled like a fireplace everywhere you went. Ash was everywhere. I returned to work and had to wear a dust mask whenever I stepped outside to do security rounds. I was in Carlsbad, by the coast, nowhere near any of the fires, but days later you could still see the ash falling right in front of your face. Some employees had evacuated to work. Some were very close to the fire and were directly impacted by it... Familiar parks and mountains had been turned into a virtual moonscape. Where there should have been a forest of trees and rolling hills of green plants... was now a barren scorched earth. Everything was black, gray, and white. There was no color at all. There were burned sticks, that used to be tree trunks, sticking out of the ground. Some of those trunks were still smoldering with hot embers even days later. There was a place that a friend used to live, near Santee, off of Wildcat Canyon Road. We used to go out to his place to visit up until 2000. He had a small house on a hill with a detached garage/workshop and a dog kennel. His place overlooked Lakeside to the south and the El Capitan mountain to the east. Gone. The fire went right through there. Everything that was there is now gone. Only the foundations remained after the fire. Thankfully, our friend had already moved with his dogs long before the fire happened, but Im sure his place was still there up until the Cedar Fire. It seemed to last forever and any news update seemed to only be depressing, but by November 3rd, we were given the news that the Santa Ana winds had long subsided, and that fire fighters had finally got the fire under control. It shouldnt grow any bigger. It was contained. It actually took until December 5th before the Cedar Fire was officially out. I will never forget this fire. I was extremely lucky not to be in the fires path, but I lived here in San Diego, and everyone was effected. I believe everyones lives was changed by this fire. I believe we are all more acutely aware of the danger any fire poses, even if its miles and miles away. Its taught all of us, here in Southern California, just how powerful Santa Ana winds can be, and just how fast any fire can grow. This Firestorm was just that. It became a storm of fire. It was like we were hit by a fire hurricane. We were all helpless, too. Theres no climbing on your roof and fighting a 50 foot wall of flame with just a garden hose, especially when that 50 foot wall of flame stretches miles in either direction. Fire fighters cant even stand in front of it and stop it, not with Santa Ana winds pushing it. As you can do is stand aside, under those extreme conditions, and fire it from the side as it passes. You can attack it from the air, but only during the day. I thought we would never see another wildfire like that again. I thought it was a once-in-a-100-year type of fire. San Diego recovered, slowly. Life moved on. The news moved on and I became a bit frustrated. I didnt believe the rest of the nation really knew what happened here. This was huge! I felt the attitude of just another fire, when this was the largest in state history. Everyone in town was effected by it, one way or another. Ill admit this started a bit of anxiety with me when it comes to wildfires. I began to monitor them more closely. I really wanted to know when Santa Ana winds were blowing again. I never wanted to be surprised by another fire. The next time, it could be us thats right on the edge of the fire line. I wanted to make sure I knew what was going on. But... I tried to convince myself that something this big would never happen again. At least, not during my life time, and probably not in San Diego, again, at least. I was wrong. In 2017, I will make a post about the 10 year anniversary of the Witch Creek fire, San Diegos other major fire storm. The Witch Creek fire, by itself, did not surpass the size of the Cedar Fire, but if you combined all the other fires that were burning in the county at the time, it did. This fire sent me packing. We actually received a reverse 9-1-1 call to evacuate during this fire. We ended up being okay, but Ill post this story later. For now, I leave you with these photos that I collected from the internet of the 2003 Cedar Fire. I really wish someone would do a full movie documentary of this fire and the 2007 Witch Creek Fire. There are so many stories to tell, so many videos and images, its worth it. Its a story that needs to be told. The rest of the nation needs to know what happened here. As I remember, my thoughts are also with the people of Australia right now. They know exactly what we went through because they are going through it as you read this post. Stay safe and stay informed. I feel for you guys...
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 19:52:41 +0000
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