Facts About the 2003 Cedar Fire
DID REXFORD CAUSE A FIRE TRUCK TO BE STATIONED BY HER HOUSE THE MORNING OF THE CEDAR FIRE?
This charge appears in a Union Tribune article quoting Poway Safety Services Co-coordinator Mark Sanchez, so it must be true, right? Wrong! The story doesn’t square with the provable facts on any point.
“..Betty Rexford called our makeshift emergency office that morning, hysterical about a grass fire that had burned through her neighborhood,” Sanchez is quoted. “She was concerned that it may come back. One of my chiefs sent a fire truck over there to check it out. When they got there, they went to Betty. She came out to meet them and was hysterical. But the fire had already burned through.”
Sanchez wasn’t in Poway the morning of the Cedar Fire; he was in a regional command post in East County. If indeed he said this, it comes of something he heard second or third hand, six years ago, in 2003. And he needs that excuse. In fact, Betty left Poway at 7:30 am the morning of the Cedar fire on city business and didn’t return till noon. Unless the alleged hysterical encounters with firemen happened before that time, they didn’t happen, because Betty wasn’t here. Neither was the fire. At 7 am, the fire was still in Ramona. It didn’t reach Betty’s neighborhood, Creek Road and Beeler, until four hours later, and it never did “burn through.” It was stopped by Creek and Beeler residents, who battled it alone, in the late afternoon and evening, in a roaring Santa Anna wind. Three neighbors have written letters describing this and attesting that no fire trucks came to help them during the day.
The Recall website, with its anonymous quotes, is equally at odds with the facts. “There was joking in the EOC that morning. “When some asked, ‘where’s the fire chief, the answer was, He’s down at Rexford’s holding Betty’s hand’.” Again, this is colorful fiction. There was no fire, no fire chief and no Betty at Rexford’s the morning of the Cedar Fire.
And the fire was no “grass fire”. To dismiss it that way smacks of an agenda. It was the same wind-driven inferno in Beeler canyon as in all the other neighborhoods it ravaged. It burned the woods in the canyon bottom and the chaparral on the sides. It destroyed two of Betty’s neighbors’ houses. It burned an avocado grove. It burned new landscaping and ancient eucalyptus. After the Sheriff evacuated the residents, one man sneaked back through the creek bed to free his animals. The sheriff’s deputes chased him down and arrested him, but then let him go.
The Recall troops, on their website imply (but don’t actually say) that they have fire department logs that show calls from Betty to the command center that morning. They don’t. They have the same logs Betty has. There are no calls from Betty recorded, “hysterical” or otherwise. There is no record of a fire truck going to Creek or Beeler during that day. They show the first fire truck arriving at night, at 9 pm, when the Armageddon was pretty much over, at least in Poway, and, as Sanchez admits, trucks were going around mopping up and putting out flare-ups.
Where was Betty the morning of the cedar fire? She had been scheduled to fly to Portland at 10 am, to represent Poway at a conference. When she woke about 6 am, there was smoke in the eastern sky. Wondering whether to cancel her trip, she phoned Penny Riley, the Acting City Manager. Since it was too early to reach her at work, Betty called her at home. (Each councilperson has a list of the city department heads and their work and home numbers for emergencies such as this.) Riley advised her to go, since the fire, at that time, was too far away to seem a danger, so Betty departed for the airport at 7:30 am, Then, just as she reached the gate to board the plane, her husband called and said the sheriff was evacuating Creek Road.
Betty hurried to get her car from park and ride and headed back to Poway to help her husband pack. Betty’s bag, however, was already on the plane and it went on to Portland, where a Poway City employee, also there for the conference, saw it going round on the carousel, spotted the Poway logo and then Betty’s name on the tag, and picked it up and brought it back.
The police had closed 1-15, because the fire was blowing across the (12-lane) freeway, so Betty had to make her way home via 1-5, in a horrendous area-wide traffic jam. She arrived about noon, to find the canyon filed with smoke, the flames already at Creek and Beeler, and her neighbors clustered behind a police barricade, pleading to be allowed back in to save their homes. The sheriff did not let them return until last afternoon.
On the way home, Betty had phoned Penny Riley a second time, to report that she had cancelled her trip. This time she was evacuating her own home in Garden Road. This call and the previous call to Riley’s home seem to have been morphed into the claim, on the Recall website, that Betty called the “emergency Operations Center, a number inaccessible to the public.”
Penny Riley was wearing two hats that day. She was Acting City Manager, and thus the person Betty had to notify- about canceling her trip, but she was also Acting Emergency Operations Chief. Betty claims she never asked Riley for a fire engine, and this makes sense. At 6 am, the time of the first call, there was no reason to ask. She and Riley both assumed the distant fire posed no threat (otherwise, would Betty have gone to the airport?) For the second call, about 10 am she knew the fire was coming, but assumed –wouldn’t you—that, since the police were there, they had called for a fire crew. And when she reached Creek Road, she found that Mayor Cafagna had called and had been told there was no truck available.
By 9 pm, the first recorded fire truck visit, Betty and her husband and most of their exhausted neighbors were sleeping, fully dressed in case the sheriff called, and wearing whatever dust masks they could come up with against the choking black soot. Those neighbors who stayed up report flare-ups throughout the night.
The recall website says “the EOC repeatedly called a fire chief and insisted he send a fire truck to Betty’s house.” Someone did call for a fire truck, but not for Betty’s house. It was Mayor Cafagnia, who was visiting the burning neighborhoods. He saw the house of one of Betty’s neighbors disappear in smoke and flames and called someone trying to get a fire engine. He was told none was available. The Mayor himself could not call forth a fire truck on that terrible day.
Lynnette Perkes
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TO: Betty Rexford
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