TRIAL BY FIRE

“It was a very long, 48-hour day,” sighs Ron Merkord as he describes the terrifying Piru and Simi fires that ripped through the Santa Clara Valley and his 120-acre ranch during Southern California’s catastrophic late-October fires. The dangerous combination of Santa Ana winds and extremely low humidity that killed 22 people, torched 740,000 acres, and destroyed more than 3,500 homes didn’t spare the Merkords or their wildlife refuge.

But in part because they were well prepared, Wolves-N-Wildlife escaped relatively unscathed. “All the animals are safe; all the structures are safe,” Ron reported a few days after a wall of fire burned through the area in eastern Ventura County. “Everything else was burned to the ground.”

What saved them? By Ron’s estimation, a combination of luck and good preparation. The ranch’s water tanks stood full and ready to feed plenty of available water hoses, which were used to spray down buildings. Perhaps most critical was the buffer zone of cleared brush and undergrowth surrounding buildings and enclosures. Still, the flames came unnervingly close. “It burned right down to the edge of the buffer area,” Ron says. “Everything around us is charred, all of the hillsides for thousands and thousands of acres.”

Ahead of time, Ron and his wife, Lisa, had conducted numerous fire drills, planned for evacuations, and stored up lots and lots of water.

Wolves-N-Wildlife owner Ron Merkord battles a fast-moving wildfire at his ranch near Ventura, California.

When the fire danger was declared extremely high on Saturday, October 25, Lisa packed up baby Jacob, as well as the family dogs, house cats, and parrot and drove to the safety of a relative’s home.

Conditions deteriorated rapidly throughout the day. “Since I had seen the fire coming, I just got ready for it,” recalls Ron, who was joined by some 25 volunteers on the fire lines. By 1:30 a.m. Sunday, firefighters had advised them to evacuate. Ron and the fire brigade decided to stay, concluding that they could protect themselves and the animal brood, which includes a Siberian tiger, a black bear, and five gray wolves. “I said, ‘I’ve got 100,000 gallons of water in tanks; I’ve got good fire clearance; I’m staying.’”

Some of the animals were moved down the hillside into safer areas, and overall they remained calm in the chaos, says Ron. Buddha the bear sat in his water tub and watched the flames race by. Raja the tiger “just kind of looked around and watched the hillsides go up in smoke.” The fire raced through the property about 2:30 a.m., bypassing the critical areas.

During a four-hour period, a city of Ventura fire truck and its firefighters stood by and sprayed water.
Although the normally green hillsides and nearby mountains were left denuded and charred, and a prized 100-year-old walnut tree was lost, many of the trees that Ron had planted during the past decade survived. This he attributes to good fire-management practices such as brush removal.
By late Sunday afternoon, the inferno had pushed on, leaving the Merkords to catch their breath and consider themselves extremely fortunate.

As Ron sees it, the fires are a reminder of the normal, inevitable cycle of burning and regrowth that sustain the chaparral landscape. “Fire is one of the things that needs to happen every few years. The simple fact that we have put in houses in wild areas and expect the land not to burn, that just shows how we’ve disturbed nature’s cycle.”

—Rhonda Hillbery