By Teri Figueroa
Smoke stretched from the backcountry to the beach. Ash fluttered like snow. Authorities warned the devastating fires could reach the coast. Everyone was in disbelief.
It’s been 20 years now, but the 2003 firestorms, led by the deadly Cedar fire, remain part of San Diego County’s collective consciousness.
The Cedar fire, followed quickly by the deadly Paradise fire and the Otay fire, held the region under siege for days.
At the time, the Cedar fire was largest wildfire in California’s recorded history. When the firestorm was over, 13 percent of San Diego County had burned.
It started late in the afternoon, east of Ramona. Small initially. Then around midnight, the Santa Ana winds hit.
As San Diego County slept, the monster grew, burning 29 miles in 10 hours. At one point, according to one report, it moved an astonishing average of 2 acres every second.
The next morning it roared into Scripps Ranch. It jumped Interstate 15. It swept across Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.
For several hours, flights were delayed, diverted or canceled. Within days, tens of thousands of utility customers were in the dark. Several schools shut down.
A Chargers-Broncos “Monday Night Football” game had been scheduled to be played at Qualcomm Stadium two days after the fire started. But the parking lot had become an evacuation site, and smoke choked the region. The NFL moved the game to Arizona.
It wasn’t just San Diego County on fire. With a dozen large fires raging — including the Old fire in the San Bernardino Mountains — and reports that some were suspected to be arson, it felt like all of Southern California was under attack.
A state commission called the simultaneous blazes the “2003 Fire Siege” and said at the time it was “the most devastating wild land/urban interface fire disaster in California’s history.”
Two decades later, the Cedar fire still ranks high in Cal Fire’s listings of the state’s most notable wildfires.
It is now ranked as the fourth most destructive wildfire in the state, with 2,820 structures burned. It’s the ninth largest, with 273,246 acres scorched.
And it’s the sixth deadliest. Fifteen people were killed.
Eight of them died on a single street in the first hours of the fire. Days later, a Northern California firefighter died when flames overran a Julian-area home.
To the north, the Paradise fire in Valley Center killed two.
‘I felt very small’
The Cedar fire started when a novice hunter — lost and without water — set a signal fire in the brush that carpeted the Kessler Flats area of the Cleveland National Forest. It was late in the afternoon of Oct. 25, 2003. Fueled by brittle chest-high vegetation and propelled by hot, dry winds, the flames raced west.
Hours later, the fire roared toward Barona Resort & Casino, where 2,000 people were ordered to stay inside. It swept across Strange Way, off Wildcat Canyon Road, where it killed eight people — some trying to evacuate, some sheltering in their homes — and kept going.
About 1:30 a.m., as that fire was staring down Barona, authorities in North County got the first reports of another large fire near Valley Center. Within an hour, the Paradise fire roared to 500 acres.
And by 7 a.m., the Otay fire started to burn in South County.
Colin Stowell is now chief of the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. Twenty years ago, he was training to be a strike team leader when he was sent to Scripps Ranch.
“For me, it was really personal because I grew up in Scripps Ranch as a kid, since I was 5 years old,” he said. “To see some of those homes friends (had) lived in — I played in their front yards — to watch those houses go as they did, like matchboxes, it was hard to stay focused on what my job was and what my duties were as I looked around the neighborhood where I grew up.”
He remembers chaos. Fleeing residents. Overwhelmed firefighters. Embers and relentless 50 mph winds. No matter how much fire hose Stowell and crewmates pulled, no matter how much water they sprayed, nothing made a difference.
“That was probably one of the first times I felt very small in comparison to what the magnitude of that fire that was going through,” Stowell said.
The fire jumped Interstate 15 at Miramar. This wasn’t some backcountry blaze, a problem way out east. This had reached the middle of San Diego. Authorities warned a shocked public that the fire could run all the way to the coast.
‘I couldn’t move’
In North County, people scrambled to flee the Paradise fire, which felt like it came out of nowhere in the middle of the night.
The Roach family scrambled to get out of their Valley Center home. They opened the front door to find their wraparound porch already burning.
They and their house guests went out another way, clambered into a few different cars and tried to leave. But they lost each other in the smoke and fire on the driveway and the roads.
Lori and John Roach, fleeing in their pickup, made it out of the flames and finally pulled over. He had to lean back and kick open the driver’s door just to get out; it had warped in the fire.
Lori froze. “I just stood in the middle of the street like I couldn’t move, and everything around me seemed like it was moving slowly.” Her body swayed in the whoosh of a passing firetruck. A tornado of fire swirled in a field to her left. “But I couldn’t move.”
Son Jason, 22, and daughter Allyson, 20, somehow made their way out of the fire. She’s still astonished that they did. Jason suffered a few burns; Allyson was burned over 80 percent of her body.
But youngest daughter Ashleigh died in a car. She was 16.
That same morning, Scripps Ranch resident Ginger Colletto, her husband and infant son were on a trip to the Bay Area when her father called: “I’m sorry,” he said.
He explained there was an out-of-control fire, and it was bearing down on her neighborhood, headed toward her street.
“You start thinking, ‘No. No way. We’ll be fine,’ ” Colletto recalls. They were not fine. Their house would burn.
The Cedar fire marched west before winds changed on the third day — the same day the Colletto family flew home. As they reached San Diego, everyone on board was quiet. Colletto couldn’t see the ground — the sky was brown with smoke — but “you could smell it in the airplane. It smelled like a bomb,” she said.
Air quality readings soared beyond what instruments were designed to measure, the North County Times reported. Schools, courts and businesses closed. People with breathing problems flooded doctor’s offices and hospitals, the paper reported.
The weather change pushed the fire east — headed toward the Cornette family’s home near Julian. Dad was a career firefighter on the front lines. When it came time to evacuate, mom and sons — Mike, then 17, and Cody, then 12 — packed up the place.
Cody Cornette grabbed his baseball glove, his collectible cards and his sixth-grade homework. He remembers so many neighbors in trailers fleeing, firefighting equipment on the roadsides and “absolute chaos.”
Looking up toward Julian as they fled to the desert, he saw black smoke columns lining the sky. The boy was convinced his whole town was gone.
When Cody returned a few days later, he saw downed power lines, leveled homes still smoldering and roads missing chunks of asphalt. The toxic smell lasted weeks.
Their home survived. Their grandparents’ home did not. Neither did Cody’s teacher’s. Nor did those of several classmates.
‘We found each other’
In the months that followed, Colletto started attending community meetings in Scripps Ranch. There, she met four other women who — like her — lost their homes in the fire. Each was also mother to an infant when the fire hit.
“We found each other and started hanging out together because we could all really identify with exactly where we were in life,” Colletto said.
Two years after the fire, each of the five women gave birth again — to daughters. As the years passed, the five “fire babies” of Scripps Ranch grew up together. Every year, their moms lined them up on the same couch, in the same order, and took a picture.
The “fire babies” are 18 years old and college freshmen now. And they still take that annual picture.
“Truly out of the ashes came some huge blessings,” she said. “You look at all of the wonderful things that have happened since then and a lot of that comes out of the friendships that we established.”
The Roaches rebuilt on their Valley Center property. Both their surviving children still live in inland North County.
Lori and John Roach are grandparents now, seven times over. Lori Roach is reminded of Ashleigh in those children. Sometimes she sees it in a movement, sometimes she hears it in a voice.
“For us as a family, we have been incredibly blessed with friends, with lots of love, with family growth,” she said. “And our focus has remained on love and the positives. You have to keep focused on the positives.”
Their healing came through faith. “It was through our faith in God that we were able to become whole and find our path forward,” she said.
Twenty years later, brothers Cody and Mike Cornette still live in East County. They know the danger Santa Anas and bone-dry grass can bring.
“This part of the year, your hair stands up,” Cody said. “I will always feel that, that weird vibe, that fear.”
Fire still rules their lives.
Weeks after the Cedar fire, older brother Mike joined what was then the Julian Volunteer Fire Department’s Explorer Program for teenagers. He’s now a Cal Fire battalion chief.
And Cody, who’d made sure to save his baseball glove all those years ago, also joined Cal Fire. He’s now a firefighter.
Staff writer Karen Kucher
contributed to this report.
teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com
A9 Firefighting methods have improved greatly in the county since the 2003 firestorm.
A10 Networks of weather stations and cameras give firefighters rapid access to data.
coming tomorrow
The city of San Diego overhauled building and growth standards after the Cedar fire devastation, but was it enough?