Harmony fire left haunting memories, prompted stricter building codes

Harmony fire left haunting memories, prompted stricter building codes

By: NED RANDOLPH – NC Times Staff Writer

NORTH COUNTY —- Ten years ago today, a fire that began inauspiciously at the intersection of Harmony Grove and Elfin Forest roads on the western edge of Escondido burned its way toward the coast and through the lives of many North County residents.

The Harmony fire, as it was named by the Harmony Grove Fire Department, in 24 hours consumed 8,600 acres, or four square miles, and 100 homes. It killed one man who was trapped in his car, and left area residents with an indelible feeling of vulnerability.

Stoked by Santa Ana winds on that hot October afternoon, the fast-moving flames and clouds of black smoke billowed westward, painting the sky red and casting a smoky pall over the region.

The flames quickly consumed dry, brittle brush along with homes in the hilly areas of Elfin Forest and Harmony Grove, and within hours had crossed over the Cerra de las Posas ridgeline to the north and hopped across Rancho Santa Fe Road to the southeast.

Today, nearly all of the homes that were destroyed have been rebuilt. But the fire stands as a benchmark for a region that at the time had never faced such devastation.

As a result of the Harmony fire, cities such as Carlsbad and San Marcos passed stricter fire codes for new construction. As well, county officials have widened surface streets for emergency access and invested money in infrastructure and emergency communications.

And with much of the area that burned now densely populated, such as parts of Carlsbad and the San Elijo Hills area in San Marcos, they say the region is better equipped today to prevent a similar catastrophe.

“As the city has continued to develop, the infrastructure has progressed incredibly,” said San Marcos fire Chief Todd Newman.

The widening of Mission Road, San Marcos Boulevard and Rancho Santa Fe allows emergency vehicles better access and provides more evacuation routes for residents, he said. And soon, San Marcos will have a fourth fire station at the top of San Elijo Hills, where Twin Oaks Valley Road will be connected in March to San Elijo Road.

The beginning

The Harmony fire started at 2 p.m. Monday, Oct. 21, 1996. Designated “suspicious,” the source of the fire has never been determined. Within an hour it engulfed the rural community of Elfin Forest and marched in a westward wall towards Encinitas, Carlsbad and northwest to Lake San Marcos.

It blazed through the rugged, then-undeveloped areas south of the Cerra de las Posas ridgeline in San Marcos, topped the ridgeline and burned north into residential areas. It crossed Rancho Santa Fe Road to burn subdivisions in Carlsbad and Encinitas.

Police and fire officials evacuated as many as 3,000 people —- first from Elfin Forest and Harmony Grove and by 6 p.m., when the fire jumped Box Canyon and burned into La Costa, residents of Carlsbad were told to leave their homes.

Evacuees clogged Rancho Santa Fe Road and took shelter at San Marcos High School, which itself was evacuated to San Marcos Junior High School. Other shelters were set up at Corky Smith Gymnasium, San Dieguito Academy, Rancho Santa Fe Middle School and Stage Coach Park.

And while more than 650 firefighters descended on the blaze, they were hampered by Santa Ana wind gusts as high as 45 mph that grounded air tankers. As well, other fires burning in the Los Angeles area at the time diverted state resources requested by North County fire officials.

Stricter standards

By Monday night, the fire had destroyed 31 homes in the Elfin Forest area, and 61 homes in Carlsbad including six apartments and 30 houses in the La Costa neighborhood that borders Box Canyon, a deep ravine of protected wild land habitat.

Four homes were lost in the Discovery Hills neighborhood of San Marcos, which borders the east side of Lake San Marcos, and four homes burned in Encinitas, according to the County’s Office of Emergency Services.

Reports over the years have cited up to 120 homes destroyed, which may be attributed to fires burning north of San Diego.

“There was a lot of confusion,” said John Lachman, of the Office of Emergency Services. “There was more than just the Harmony Grove fire.”

Many homes were victims of burning embers —- some reported as far away as Interstate 5 —- that landed on wooden shake-shingle roofs or in attic vents and eaves.

Today, fire codes in developed areas that abut wild land in unincorporated parts of the county and in cities such as Carlsbad and San Marcos, require non-combustible materials for new home construction and renovations.

Roof tiles must be asphalt, concrete or slate. Exposed wall surfaces, attic eaves and patio decks must be covered by non-combustible materials such as stucco. And vegetation within a 100-foot to 150-foot radius of a home must be trimmed and maintained.

Each city has its own fire prevention ordinances, and the county Department of Planning and Land Use regulates unincorporated areas.

“We don’t really allow shake shingles anywhere,” said Newman. “If we were dealing with a developer who wanted to build next to the wild land area, the homes would require boxed eaves with stucco, fire-resistant materials, dual-paned windows —- those types of things we’d be looking for.”

In Carlsbad, for example, all roof shingles must be made of non-combustible material, said building Inspector Pat Kelly.

“When they come in for a roof permit from the city, they have to choose another product (from shake) that’s non-combustible,” said Kelly. “There are plenty to choose, like tile, or asphalt fiberglass singles, which are non-combustible.”

In urban wild land interface zones, Carlsbad’s fire marshal determines the risk factor and requirements for parcels.

“We changed the standards for how buildings get built in those interface zones,” he said.

And in county areas, a fire code passed in 2001 and later updated in 2004 after the Cedar and Paradise fires, requires a 100-foot perimeter of clearing around homes in the wild land interface area, as well as being built with non-combustible materials, said senior structural engineer Clay Westling.

“We divided up areas into basic and enhanced as far as fire-resistant construction requirements,” he said. “It used to be that if you had 100 feet of fuel modification, you didn’t have to have fire-resistant construction. Now even with fuel modification, there are some basic things that you have to have.”

More people

About half of the acreage burned in the Harmony fire was in southern San Marcos, which was then largely overgrown, dry chaparral. Today, that area is called San Elijo Hills and is home to 5,400 people and growing.

Developers have graded more than 1,000 acres and covered them with streets, condominiums, row houses and dense subdivisions.

Ironically, San Elijo Hills, like many master-planned communities, was built as a fire break, and may aid in fire prevention, said Newman.

Water mains to serve the development also give firefighters access to 7.5 million gallons of water reserve and “hundreds” of fire hydrants in an area that otherwise would be fire fodder, said San Elijo project manager Curt Noland.

Developers of San Elijo Hills have deliberately added non-native vegetation with more water irrigation as a fire buffer.

“Whereas before you had just unlimited, unbroken native vegetation from Elfin Forest all the way to San Marcos proper, you now have a master-planned community in the way,” Noland said.

“San Elijo acts to a degree as a fire break between the southern boundary of (the) city of San Marcos to the rest of the city,” Noland said.

Westling, the senior engineer with the county Office of Planning and Land Use, said that point is debatable. But, he added, a housing community surrounded by a clearing of fire buffers and built with new construction is more fire resistant “than a bunch of homes in and amidst (dry brush).”

“If a new development is built according to new codes with proper fire breaks, fuel modifications and construction materials, that development will form a fire break for older developments on the other side of it,” Westling said.

Clearing brush

Many of the homes that burned, even in the dense neighborhoods of La Costa, were built in the 1950s and ’60s with wooden shake-shingle rooftops and wooden siding, or they were right up against the native chaparral vegetation.

The response in many cases has been to completely clear out the chaparral, which may save an immediate structure, but can also do long-term damage to the area’s ecosystem and water sheds, according to one local chaparral expert.

“People have a tendency to think that native vegetation is the enemy,” said Rick Halsey, director of the Chaparral Institute in Escondido. “It’s not.”

The increasing number of urban-style developments such as San Elijo, coupled with ordinances that call for clearing away native vegetation, is depleting native chaparral which is giving way to grassy weeds that are even more flammable, he said.

“The grass is much more flammable than the chaparral,” he said, adding that the thinned chaparral is being overwhelmed by the increasing number of fires.

“When you replace the native landscaping with concrete and houses that are right up against the wild lands, you have a fire that burns off whatever is left,” he said.

The long-term result is still unclear, but Halsey said he worries it will lead to flooding and drainage problems.

“When you have plants that are adapted to a particular climate and environment, they allow for a natural flow of water into systems. Removing them causes massive flooding, run-off, and serious drainage and pollution problems,” Halsey said.

Building homes next to wild lands creates risk for another reason —- firefighters can’t do perimeter control because they’re trying to protect a growing number of houses, he said.

“It prevents firefighters from managing fire itself,” he said.

Prevention

Generally, firefighters try to get ahead of a fire by anticipating its pathway and managing it, said Nona Barker, who is a volunteer at the Elfin Forest Fire Department.

“There’s never enough firefighters to put out all the fires. What happens now is because we have so many homes and so many people, we’re trying to put a truck at every house and trying to save that house,” said Barker, who is organizing events commemorating the blaze this month at the fire station on Elfin Forest Boulevard.

She said some residents are still traumatized by what happened 10 years ago. But those who are new to the area have to be educated in fire prevention.

“It’s not a question of if it will happen again, but when,” she said.

Barker also acknowledged the San Elijo fire break. Open fields by the elementary school there could be utilized as a safety zone for residents, she said.

But, she added, “it will be scary over there when a fire comes through again.”

“Homes really are well built now. In the future, I think they will be better built,” she said. “We know that anything will burn in an oven, but you try to make them as oven safe as possible.”

Barker was one of the first responders to the Harmony fire, and remembers the congested roads and panic of the residents of the Elfin Forest community who were ordered to evacuate.

As the winds shifted and the fire jumped Elfin Forest Road, Barker said she violated her own rule and panicked at the thought of her 10-year-old son who was home alone.

Well-acquainted with basic rules, her son packed a bag, closed the blinds and filled the water bowls of their animals. He was picked up by the fire chief’s 16-year-old son, who had just received his driver’s license, Barker said.

“You teach them what to do. While he was waiting and figuring out this would get pretty bad, he had covered the haystack up, closed interior doors of the house, shut the wood blinds,” she said. “He got my pack, which is my purse.”

He also took a picture off the wall of him and his mother just after he was born, Barker said.

“He had it with him in the pack. He also took his baseball cards,” she said.

Looking forward

While the roads have improved, Barker notes that there are many more people living in the area, which could cause the same kind of panic if they ever have to evacuate again.

“The big issue for all of San Diego County is the roads and the number of people on the roads trying to escape,” she said. “I think it will be very scary. And my hope is that an orderly evacuation would happen.”

Westling notes that many of today’s changes in building standards and road improvements were in place three years ago when the Paradise and Cedar fires erupted in October 2003. The fires burned an area the size of Rhode Island, destroyed 2,400 homes, and killed 24 people.

“Those fires proved that the (ordinance) works,” Westling said. “Most of the homes that burned were older and not built under the new codes.”

Of the 15,000 homes that existed in the Paradise-Cedar fire area, 2,137 homes were destroyed, a loss rate of 14 percent, Westling said. Of all the homes, 400 were built under the stricter codes and only 17 of those were destroyed, a 4 percent loss rate, he said.

“That kind of shows that new homes did perform better,” he said.

Response from the community

Saving the animals

Elfin Forest resident Jeff Trejo, 31, said his family turned their home into a virtual animal shelter after rescuing horses, dogs and cats from neighbors’ homes.

“The roads were blocked off, so a lot of people couldn’t evacuate themselves,” said Trejo, whose family’s home is off Elfin Glen, where Elfin Forest meets Harmony Grove. “Once we noticed our house was fine, we started to worry about our neighbors. We tried to evacuate as many animals as possible.”

Trejo said his family sheltered the animals for two days.

“We were fortunate because most of our close neighbors were untouched,” he said, although he knew many people affected by the fire, including his friend’s parents, whose house burned in La Costa.

Concern for residents

“I was always watching the ridges to see if the fire would cross over to this side,” said Larry Carpenter, 53, as he sat recently at the Old California Coffee Shop in San Marcos.

Carpenter said that while he was not close enough to the fire to be concerned about his Vista home, he was concerned about the people who lived in the neighborhoods being affected by the fire.

Blaze ‘opened people’s eyes’

Escondido residents Bernie and Collette Trembly noted that the Harmony fire was the first fire in the immediate area to cause substantial residential damage.

“I have a business on Rancho Santa Fe Road and what I remember most is how it appeared to be a random strike,” said Bernie Trembly, as he spoke at a coffee house in San Marcos. “There’d be a house, and then nothing.”

Bernie Trembly said as a result of the fire, the couple replaced their wooden “shake” shingle roof.

“It really opened a lot of people’s eyes to the danger of shake roofs,” he said. “I thought, ‘We better do something.’”

Collette Trembly recalled the extent of the fire’s devastation.

“It’s amazing how quickly everything can disappear … how fast fire can travel since everything is dry around here,” she said.

Worst ever seen

Samuel Ethridge, 73, said he remembers the black smoke and red sky that day, as he watched from his home near Lake Hodges, off Via Rancho Parkway in Escondido.

“I was thinking, ‘By God, I’m glad the wind is not blowing back this way,’” said Ethridge, who has lived in the area for 35 years and said the Harmony fire was one of the worst he’s ever seen.

As Ethridge browsed through goods outside Lowes in the Creekside Marketplace in San Marcos recently, he recalled the ferocity of the Santa Ana winds and the number of roads that had to be blocked off because of the fire.

“It just kept burning,” he said. “The wind was blowing so fast and hard … it burned all the way toward the ocean.”

Fled with valuables

“It was pretty frightening,” said Joaquin Valdez, 32, who said he was living at home and attending Palomar College at the time of the fire. “You could see the smoke from behind the mountain. The whole ridgeline was on fire.”

Valdez recalls packing up his valuables, including photo albums, at 4 a.m. the night of the fire.

“My mother was flipping out, loading up all these boxes into our cars,” he said. “We wanted to be prepared in case we had to evacuate to San Marcos High School.”

Valdez said a change in the wind helped spare the family’s home on Poppy Road in Discovery Hills and they did not have to evacuate.

“It was amazing to see the amount of work firefighters actually do,” he said.

House still standing

Petra Jakawich, an Elfin Forest resident, said she and her family had just moved to the area from Indiana two months prior to the fire.

While she lived through tornadoes and thunderstorms, Jakawich said she was terrified of her first wildfire experience.

“It almost felt like there was no place to hide,” said Jakawich, whose 13-year-old daughter, Brianna, nodded in agreement.

Brianna, who was 3 at the time, said she saw a plume of smoke out her window as she and friend were playing with a kitchen set.

“I told my mom right away,” she said.

Jakawich said it was fairly easy for her family to grab all their important papers and evacuate, since they had not fully unpacked yet, but she had no idea where to go.

Just as she was out the door, Jakawich said her phone rang. It was the mother of one of her son’s friends from school, who invited the family to stay with them, even though they barely knew one another.

Jakawich said she and her husband returned the next day without the kids to find that their house was still standing.

“It was very eerie,” said Jakawich. “Across the road it looked like the moon —- it was grey with ashes and burnt stumps everywhere. In the other direction, it looked as normal as could be.”

Scene called ’scary’

Vista resident Shirley Broman, 47, had just moved to the area from Long Beach and recalls seeing the hills on fire in the distance.

“To actually see the fire on the horizon was really scary,” said Broman, as she sat outside the Starbucks on Knoll Road in San Marcos.

– Compiled by Noelle Ibrahim, staff writer