Thomas Fire rips through Los Padres communities in Ventura County, destroying homes

Brian Haase drove away from his Camino Cielo home Wednesday night as fire crested a ridge and started coming down the hill.
He had just finished the house six months earlier, and he and his family have lived there for about a year.
He knew wildfires would be a risk in the small community tucked into mountains in Los Padres National Forest.
“I told my kids, ‘One day, it will come.’ There’s no way. You don’t build a house in this type of environment and not expect it to happen,” Haase said Friday.
But then, the Thomas Fire hit the same year they moved in.
“I didn’t think that was going to happen,” he said.
When the fire reached the home late Wednesday, flames barreled down from multiple directions, making it too dangerous to try to defend, Haase said.
“It was too much of an inferno on all sides,” he said.
Haase’s house and barn stayed standing. He had left sprinklers running on the roof and thought that might have helped.
But some of his neighbors had huge losses.
Just up the road, a house and barn burned to the ground. Several others farther down the hill also were gone. On Friday, piles of soot, burnt metal and smoldering wood sat next to skeletons of vehicles and blackened foundations.
Haase left about 8 p.m. Wednesday after the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office had come around recommending that people leave.
Down the road, the Bells decided to go, too.
“When we pulled out, I pointed up and saw the flames coming over the ridge right here,” said Bryan Bell, who lives there near the home of his parents, Judy and Carl Bell.
“We thought we were just being evacuated and we’d be back,” Judy Bell said. She and her husband bought the house on the property in 2004.
They had packed some clothes, photos and a few important things and emptied the small safe – “some jewelry and stuff I don’t wear,” Judy Bell said with a laugh. “But we didn’t take everything we should have taken.”
On Friday, she looked around at a foot of powdery, white ash where her house used to stand.
There was no sign of the antiques or furniture she had collected over the years. “It was so hot,” Judy said. “I’m sure there isn’t anything.”
The day after the fire blew through, one of her sons was nearby helping people get horses out of the area and went to check on things.
“He was just crying on the phone,” she said of when he told her the news.
The Bells had bought the house and remodeled it. A deck was finished the day before the fire swept through.
“This is crazy, Mom,” Bryan Bell said as he stood on the side of what used to be a home. A recently added small stone wall looked relatively unscathed.
Maybe they’ll build the next one out of rock, his mom told him.
On Wednesday night, Judy and Carl Bell got the last room left at the La Quinta in Ventura after leaving, she said. The hotel was filled with other evacuees.
For the past two days, their phones haven’t stopped ringing. People have offered up empty homes to the couple. Friends offered to drive a motorhome over from Arizona.
It helps, she said of the support.
“We were going to spend the rest of our lives here,” she said. And then quickly added, “We still will. We’re going to rebuild.”
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Source: Oc Register