Tenth anniversary of the Gavilan fire in Fallbrook

I will never forget the day when I watched Dorothy Roth’s chimney come down. It had stood defiantly for years while Roth battled her insurance company over the slimmest of bad timing in the days before the 2002 Gavilan fire in Fallbrook. On the 10-year anniversary, I had the chance to sit down with Roth —- a familiar interview —- and discuss her new home: Smaller, but as close to fireproof as a house can be.

This brought home one of the best parts about staying in one community as a journalist, rather than following the jobs around the country. (Although, admittedly, vast numbers of journalists have no choice; I count myself blessed to have stayed rooted in Fallbrook, my hometown.) That is, I owned this story. I helped friends move furniture out of their house that day as the smoke advanced, and I was there to chronicle Roth’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to secure that insurance check. When a local contractor pulled the chimney over with a chain, her defeat was symbolically complete.

I also had the opportunity to take this photo, which is one of my favorite of the year so far, and ran above the fold on A-1, if memory serves.

FALLBROOK: 10 years on, Gavilan fire survivors still mourn ‘the irreplaceables’

By Tom Pfingsten —- For the North County Times

It was during the church hours on a sleepy Sunday morning 10 years ago that Fallbrook suffered the scars of its first major wildfire —- million-dollar homes reduced to thousand-dollar cleanup bills, the trauma of flames licking at homeowners’ heels or engulfing their cars as they fled.

The pain of loss lingers still, residents said last week.

Pictures. Antiques. Heirlooms.

Financial data, clothing, artwork, avocado groves, luxury sedans, mothballed wedding dresses, teddy bears and a thousand other irreplaceable things that people forgot or couldn’t carry out.

In the days after the February 2002 Gavilan fire, hundreds of people were mourning pets and possessions en masse for the first time in the town’s history, and the insurance headaches were just beginning. For some, they never really resolved.

When the ash settled, the Gavilan blaze had burned 5,763 acres, caused $25 million in damage, consumed 43 houses, and exposed the point of Fallbrook’s vulnerability that would be driven home five years later by the catastrophic Rice fire, which injured five firefighters and destroyed 206 homes.

That morning, smoke billowed fast and hot over a series of steep ridges on the town’s northern frontier. The flames advanced 100 feet per minute on a sprawling settlement of houses amid acres of dry brush, the type of neighborhood that fire chiefs call a “wildland-urban interface.”

In other words, the most dangerous place to be during a raging wildfire.

On the eve of Gavilan’s 10th anniversary Thursday night, couples were out walking under a signature San Diego County sunset in what has reclaimed its place as one of Fallbrook’s most peaceful and scenic neighborhoods.

But scars remained, like the lot on the northwest corner of Santa Margarita and Hilbert drives —- still empty, both entrances of what must have been a splendid driveway chained off.

A few doors down, Jim Churchyard and Alberta Parker were enjoying a glass of wine on the front patio of the house they rebuilt from the same blueprints as the one that the Gavilan fire took from them.

“I moved one wall 9 inches,” said Parker of her duplicate home, recalling the day when she carried her original blueprints —- smelling to high heaven of smoke —- into a Temecula printer’s office for replication.

Parker is especially proud of her cabinets —- sturdy oak drawers and doors that she made by hand in the couple’s garage. (She made the first set, too.)

Next week, Churchyard will turn 77 and Parker will turn 82, but neither losing nor rebuilding has slowed them down.

“It was beautiful before,” Parker said. “It’s beautiful now.”

Read the rest of the story at www.nctimes.com.