LeBaron: The Nuns Canyon Fire and the Hanly Fire’s catastrophic lessons
We coastal Californians tend to disrespect our disasters, probably because - unlike hurricanes and tornadoes - they don’t have a “season” when we can reasonably expect them. We can’t predict earthquakes, only remind ourselves that there will be another one “someday.” Floods take more than one storm to form. We can watch the river rise, inch by inch.
But in between wildfires - with no evacuation orders, no TV reporters standing in front of the flames, no front page headlines counting the thousands of acres burned - we might be tempted to forget just how quickly fires move and how much damage they can do before we get our wits about us.
We thought about this last week, with proud Mt. St. Helena shrouded in smoke from the two fires east of the Napa Valley.
Those of us who have lived here for half a century will never ever in the rest of our days pay no attention to a fire that is anywhere within three counties of our homes. It is a lesson we learned in 1964.
THAT WAS some kind of September 50 years ago, when two separate fires started on the same morning and burned out of control for six days, creating what we took to calling “Hell Week” in Sonoma County.
The first began before dawn on Saturday, Sept. 19, when a PG&E transformer blew on Al Torrieri’s ranch in Nunn’s Canyon in the mountains east of Glen Ellen. The sparks ignited brush that had not seen rain in many months, in the midst of a week of 100-degree temperatures. Instant flames, fanned by strong down-slope winds, sent the fire two ways - toward Sugar Loaf and Adobe Canyon and south to the springs area and Sonoma, burning uncontrolled through a grim weekend.
Meanwhile, in Napa County the same Saturday morning, at the southwest slope of Mount St. Helena, a deer hunter dropped a cigarette and by 10:15 a.m., there were flames behind a roadside tavern called Hanly’s, heading down the mountain to threaten the whole town of Calistoga. Forty homes northeast of town were lost and the entire town threatened with evacuation before the wind died down Monday morning. It seemed that what was now and forevermore known as the Hanly Fire could be stopped.
Meanwhile, the Nunn’s Canyon Fire had burned into Adobe Canyon, destroying permanent homes and vacation cabins as it traveled, before the drop in wind velocity early Monday.
Everybody breathed a sign of relief.
Too soon.
ON MONDAY NIGHT, the winds on the western slopes of the mountains kicked up. There are people who still find it hard to believe how fast the Hanly Fire traveled - into Knights Valley, then Franz Valley.
Mountain Home Ranch resort owner John Fouts was 17 years old in that “hell week.” He has compiled his memories of patrolling the line with the members of his Calistoga High football team and realizing the winds had changed. He writes, “All I could think of was that the fire was heading directly for the Ranch.” He rode on firetrucks and hitched with neighbors and ran the long road in. “Mom was watching the fire from the top of the hill when she saw me running home.”
With a ranch Caterpillar and a ’dozer blade, he built fire trails, got the horses from the barn and “got them running.”
There were hard choices. What to save and what to let burn. The laundry filled with linens for the summer resort season took precedent over the family home. Fouts’ account captures the drama. His 90-year-old grandfather suffered chest pains, his sister went into labor. Mountain Home lost seven buildings, but the 100-year-old resort survived.
The speed of the firestorm was, indeed, dramatic. One astonished resident of Porter Creek Road reported by phone about 9 p.m. on Monday: “The fire just passed my house heading for Santa Rosa - at 40 miles per hour!”
He wasn’t exaggerating. It burned along Mark West and Riebli roads, taking homes and ranches with it, across Wikiup and Parker Hill Road and in an unbelievably short time, appeared on the ridges above Rincon Valley and Montecito Heights (some 5,000 families in all were evacuated). It advanced along Chanate toward the County Hospital.
Santa Rosans watched in horror, watered their roofs and made plans on where the family would meet if the fire roared down from the ridges into the flatland subdivisions.
Able-bodied men, teenage boys, high school and junior college students were mobilized, handed shovels and hoes and wet sacks or instructed to help pull hose on the lines.
Every trucker in town that had a water carrier was in service. Buses and vans stood by at the hospital, ready to carry the patients to safety. That was clearly a last resort, as doctors agreed that many would die just from being moved.
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