One year later: Hard lessons from Valley fire gird Lake County for next disaster

BOGGS MOUNTAIN - The Valley fire had already burned over four of the first firefighters on the ground that September afternoon one year ago when the growing inferno's massive smoke column tilted on its side.

An unexpected wind changed the fire's course, lifting it up from its origin here near the village of Cobb and pushing it on a path of destruction through drought-stricken forests encircling a half-dozen communities in southern Lake County.

Firefighters and deputies quick to the scene soon knew the fire was on a potentially deadly collision course with thousands of residents. They knew there was no time to dig in and make a stand. They knew they were dealing with stubborn rural denizens with stay-and-defend instincts.

“We were grabbing dogs, people were hopping on fire engines, in cop cars. It was imminent-peril rescue and evacuation,” said Todd Derum, Cal Fire division chief for Sonoma County. “It was pretty damn chaotic.”

Orders from firefighters, deputies and other first responders were shouted from pickups and announced through bullhorns with greater urgency by the hour as the firestorm gained momentum with a sound like a gigantic jet engine that sticks with survivors to this day.

“We had to jump out, knock on doors, telling people to leave their homes. Go! Go! Go!” said Andy Elliott, a British firefighter who happened to be riding with Cal fire that day.

“Fire was literally coming down the road behind us.”

From the moment it began on a Cobb-area property - as a spark, authorities say, from shoddy wiring leading to a hot tub - until firefighters declared it fully contained four weeks later, nearly everything about the Valley fire was overwhelming, according to those who experienced the blaze and fought a heroic battle to slow its spread.

Within hours, there was a flood of refugees - up to 20,000 displaced people at the fire's peak. In the days that followed there was an outpouring of aid and donations, a volume so great that Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin called it the Valley fire's “second disaster.”

And there was the grim search, block by block for bodies. Four residents are known to have died in the fire, either caught in their homes or chased down by flames while escaping their neighborhoods. A fifth person is believed to have died but his body has not been found.

The disaster exposed cracks in fire-prone Lake County's ability to manage an emergency of such scale. The county's civil grand jury lambasted the county's coordination of emergency services “in the midst of one of the largest disasters in California” as disorganized.

A year later, the county has begun to make changes to its behind-the-scenes plans for disasters. The tweaks were as simple as adding extra phone lines and assigning clear responsibilities for those handling the logistical demands that come up during emergencies. The aim is to ensure no one is caught without the equipment or instructions they need when the next emergency hits, according to Martin and several other local and state officials involved in the response to the Valley fire.

“There were lessons learned. The county had a lot of dedicated people but it lacked expertise,” Martin said.

In a bid to improve its response, the county shifted its long-embattled emergency services division back to the Sheriff's Office and hired a veteran emergency manager with wildfire experience from Ventura County.

Already, those changes are making a difference, officials say. During a recent series of wildfires that swept southern Lake County, including the 4,000-acre Clayton fire that hit Lower Lake, residents evacuated sooner and officials mustered resources more swiftly to aid those displaced by fires.

No one was seriously hurt in the Clayton fire and several elected officials said the emergency response was far better run.

“Most counties are not as prepared as they should be,” said state Sen. Mike McGuire, whose district includes Lake County. “What I will tell you is this: The Valley fire has changed me forever. The value of having a plan, being proactive and offering clear communication is something I will never forget.”

Desperate rescue requests

The Valley fire response became a rescue mission almost immediately. Within an hour of the fire's onset at 1:24 p.m., flames were racing across the flank of Boggs Mountain, where four elite firefighters from a nearby helicopter base were first into the fray. They were overtaken on a narrow ridge and badly burned before making a last-ditch deployment of their protective shelters. The packaging on two of the shelters melted in the severe heat, forcing two firefighters to share one of the cocoon-like structures.

As a spotter plane and air tankers circled overhead, hasty, on-the-ground evacuations were well underway at 2:55 p.m. when the first of more than 12,000 automated emergency calls placed through a program called CityWatch alerted people to begin leaving their homes. The fire, meanwhile was torching power poles and dropping telephone lines to the ground.

It would be another three hours before the Sheriff's Office broadcast its first countywide public evacuation warning, via the notification service Nixle. Flames had already forced thousands of people to flee from Cobb to Middletown.

Sheriff's dispatchers were swamped. Logs of the 911 phone calls during the first hours of the fire show dispatchers fielding desperate rescue requests: a man with dementia on Twin Oaks Drive in Cobb; two children trapped on Powder Horn Road in Hidden Valley Lake; a woman cornered by flames near Cobb Elementary School.

Martin said the Sheriff's Office received 120 individual requests for rescues on that first day.

In Hidden Valley Lake, a community of about 5,500 people about 8 miles east of Cobb, resident Sky Pile said he and the homeowner association security staff were on edge, waiting for word from the Sheriff's Office that they too should evacuate.

“It was very apparent we weren't going to get notified, but we needed to get people out,” Pile said.

They began banging on doors, telling people to leave. Vehicles were bumper-to-bumper, funneling out of the web of roads onto the few exits to Highway 29. An hour later, the sheriff's first evacuation order finally came via Nixle at 6:37 p.m.

Around that time, Anderson Springs resident Barbara McWilliams was on the phone with her caretaker. With advanced multiple sclerosis, the 72-year-old retired teacher relied on a walker and a wheelchair to get around. According to the caretaker, McWilliams said she was confident someone would come by if she needed to evacuate.

No one came.

CityWatch records show the emergency evacuation call rang at her home at 6:49 p.m. No one answered. Her caretaker called 911 at 7:12 p.m., asking the Sheriff's Office to check on her.

Eight minutes later, a deputy who is also a volunteer firefighter, arrived at the steel archway marking the entrance to Anderson Springs. Fallen trees and fire made it impossible to keep going.

“For him to say you can't get in there means you can't get in there,” said Martin, noting the deputy is still grief-stricken to this day.

McWilliams' body was later found curled up in the remains of the fireplace, her home burned to the ground. The body of a neighbor, Leonard Neft, was found a half-mile from his burned car, which he apparently abandoned as he tried to run from the flames.

Martin said he's gone through the reports for each confirmed or presumed fatality. The common theme: People didn't take the opportunity to get out early. Among them, the only emergency calls received were at Neft's residence and another man's business. The other phones were busy or rang without answer.

“I don't want to blame people for what happened, but we owe it to the public to understand,” Martin said.

New notification system

Lake County has purchased a new notification system that can push evacuation alerts to cellphones - the first three years paid for with a $30,000 grant from the Lake Area Rotary Club Association.

It's another tool that Martin hopes gives the county an advantage because the alerts go to anyone in the area with a cellphone, not just residents with landlines or people who have already signed up for notifications through the Nixle web-based system.

“There is not one single way to reach everyone,” Martin said.

But in the year since the fire, much of the debate about disaster notification has focused on residents' demands that fire agencies bring back warning sirens, like those decommissioned years ago that called volunteers to the fire house. A battalion chief with the South Lake County Fire Protection District, run by Cal Fire, is leading the charge to raise more than $180,000 to install seven sirens from Middletown to Cobb.

The Hidden Valley Lake homeowners association will vote this month on installing sirens there.

Liz Black, vice president of the South Lake Fire Safe Council, said the sirens would send a clear message to people that there is an emergency.

Black recalled watching the sky “violently changing colors” last Sept. 12 and hearing the Valley fire's roar from her Jerusalem Valley property. It was the fifth fire last summer that menaced her home, which managed to escape damage.

“People were like a goose and a turkey, one eye on the ground and one on the air, that's how you live,” Black said. “Everybody is very keen when they hear a helicopter go over.”

Others view sirens as impractical, with a short range and costly upkeep.

The county's new emergency services manager, Dale Carnathan, calls sirens expensive “one-trick ponies” that depend on electricity. The sound carries only as far as the next ridge, he said.

Martin acknowledged the limitations of a siren, but said he will support those who bring them into their communities.

“The bottom line is the community wants them,” Martin said.

Instead of sirens, Monica Rosenthal, a Middletown resident who is running for county supervisor, would prefer more effort be made to help one-way-in, one-way-out communities develop alternative escape routes.

“Where can you put dirt roads for use during emergencies?” Rosenthal said.

The county has already identified an alternate route out of Anderson Springs. Supervisor Rob Brown said they're designing a dirt road to get drivers between the community and Socrates Mine Road with an easement through private property. The gated route will allow vehicles to force their way through in an emergency.

Ill-prepared for deluge

Sheriff's Lt. Steve Brooks, a veteran of the department, compared the county's emergency services coordination of the Valley fire to a game of telephone where the messages get lost toward the end of the line.

When a disaster strikes, county employees are dispatched as emergency workers, and many people - including those who lost homes - showed up ready to work. But the county's emergency services program, at the time run by Marisa Chilafoe, was ill-prepared to handle the deluge of displaced residents and influx of employees responding to help.

Sen. McGuire, the Healdsburg Democrat who represents Lake County, said displaced residents were showing up at evacuation centers wholly unprepared for them. Volunteers were overwhelmed and amenities like portable toilets, showers and supplies were slow to arrive.

Lake Transit offered up buses to help evacuate, and there was a significant lag tapping that resource despite the urgent need to get people to safety, according to Brooks. Dozens of workers were milling around the county's main command area with no clue what to do. Evacuation shelters would be moved without warning or notice.

Chilafoe resigned Sept. 18, when the Valley fire was at 73,000 acres and still burning. It would burn an additional 3,000 acres before firefighters had it fully contained Oct. 15. County officials wouldn't say why she left the job, and Chilafoe's stated reasons were personal.

In its June 30 report criticizing the county's emergency response, the grand jury said the county's office of emergency services had failed to address many of its weaknesses outlined in a 2014 strategic plan developed by Chilafoe. Reached by phone, she said she's moved out of the area because of family obligations and declined to discuss the Valley fire.

The grand jury report said the department had long been in flux. Nine different county employees in three departments had managed the program since 1995. Since 2013, two people hired from outside the county to run the program resigned.

“Disaster preparedness should be done before and not while responding to a catastrophic event,” the report stated.

Before the grand jury published its findings, the county reconfigured the emergency services program under the Sheriff's Office with the April hiring of Carnathan, a Coast Guard veteran who held a similar post with the Ventura County Sheriff's Office after a decade working for the Red Cross.

‘After action' report

One of Carnathan's first tasks was to create an “after action” report evaluating how the Valley fire was handled by the county. He said the report is required by the state, and he's just begun to pull it together.

That project was set aside when the Clayton fire put another Lake County community in the middle of a firestorm. Memories of communication problems during the Valley fire were still fresh, but Martin and Brooks credited Carnathan with promoting order.

During the Clayton fire, according to McGuire, all involved in the response were far better at anticipating what was needed to aid refugees. He said he was on the phone asking for 2,000 cots, showers and bathrooms before the fire's smoke turned from white to black - before the fire hit town and started burning buildings.

“Last year you'd ask for water, and it'd never show,” Brooks said. “This year, during the Clayton fire, you only had to ask once and things got done.”

The Clayton fire was reported at 4:58 p.m. Aug. 13 and the Sheriff's Office began broadcasting evacuation orders via Nixle just 33 minutes later. Lake County Fire Protection District Chief Willie Sapeta, whose district includes Clearlake and Lower Lake, said that the difference was significant. People were evacuating before the fire hit.

“With the Valley fire, people saw what fire could do,” said Sapeta, who credited the trauma of that experience with forging a more alert and responsive citizenry and emergency response.

Losing sleep

It's the specter of the next big fire that keeps Brown, the Lake County supervisor, up at night. The nightmare blaze for him is an outbreak of flames in a tightly settled area such as Clearlake Riviera, a hillside community on the southwestern shore of Clear Lake served by narrow, switchback roads that can be death traps in a fast-moving wildfire.

Such was the case in the 1991 Oakland Hills fire, the state's deadliest and most destructive blaze.

“I lose sleep over that community burning down,” Brown said.

Nearly 22 percent of Lake County's land mass - more than 260 square miles - burned in 2015. The largest and most destructive fires burned to the south of Clear Lake.

Northshore Fire Chief Jay Beristianos said he's bracing for the day wildfire threatens communities in his district, the county's largest at 357 square miles, serving more than 10,000 residents in unincorporated communities from outside Upper Lake to Clearlake Oaks.

“Lake County always burns,” Beristianos said.

But for the past three years, amid the state's prolonged drought, wildfires here have been explosive. The Clayton fire demonstrated as much last month, though authorities said that blaze was deliberately set by an arsonist. The same Clearlake man is accused of setting 15 other fires, all of them smaller, in Lake County since last summer.

Beristianos said his district has an aggressive weed abatement program, and other agencies are considering following suit. They will cut the grass and send property owners a bill. If the bill goes unpaid, they put a lien on the property.

But they can't get to every overgrown parcel in the massive district.

Driving toward Upper Lake on a recent afternoon, Beristianos headed down a road to the spot where his crews lit a backfire and stopped an 18-acre blaze near the Old Robinson Rancheria. He pointed at homes as he drove - ones he would make a stand to protect, with cut lawns and limbed trees, and others he would pass. There, thick, golden grass reached as high as the windows.

“There's a certain amount of risk living here,” Beristianos said.

Staff Writer Randi Rossmann contributed reporting. You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been revised to accurately describe the size of an August wildfire near the Old Robinson Rancheria in Lake County. It was 18 acres, not 80 acres.