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Sunday, October 28, 2007

California’s Wildfires - A Dressage Barn Flees the Inferno
By Kathy Beal for DressageDaily.com

A Second Close Call

Adrenaline kept us going. Tuesday night at 11:30 p.m., we awoke to the awful sound of the sheriffs’ bullhorns blaring the mandatory evacuation notice for the Bonsall area. I will never forget the feeling of panic and fear I felt at that moment. Wonderful friends, Cathy and Norm Vinson, had let us stay at their home a few doors down from Fair Winds. However, from there, we still had several steps to make it to the barn and horses. We had parked the trailers, with ramps down, right next to the stalls, but we still had to get there to put them in. Those moments seemed an eternity to me. Once there, again our conferencing and telephone communications led us to stay put rather than try to move the fifteen horses. We called friends Kelly Phillips and Cynthia Laporte, who brought us more trailers in the middle of the night just in case we decided to leave. We stayed awake with the horses through the night, hoping that our decision was a wise one.

On Wednesday, we felt we had survived the worst of it. At 2:40 in the afternoon, literally out of nowhere, we saw flames on the hills to the west. Apparently the Camp Pendleton Fire had jumped toward the Vandergrift Gate near the I-5 close to us. Fifty acres fueled these blazes. All the horses that had been evacuated to Camp Pendleton were now being evacuated out. These included the REINS handicapped riding program horses. Amazingly, with military planes and manpower, this fire was extinguished within an hour. We again made it through the night. By Thursday, we felt that perhaps, we could soon go home. Some of the areas in Fallbrook were deemed safe to reenter. Ours was not, so we spent the day trailering friends’ horses back to Bonsall. That gave us the chance to see the damage from the fires, which included blackened hills on either side of the I-15 freeway.