During a scene in the upcoming Valley Center Community Theater production of It’s a Wonderful Life, Harry, the brother of the main character, George Bailey, shows up at a pivotal moment.
He is a decorated WWII hero who has come home to be honored for his heroism—but chooses that moment to honor his brother.
In a piece of inspired casting the part of the returning soldier will be played by Jay West, who is himself a returning Marine, although he emphasizes that he is NOT a war hero, just back from the Persian Gulf.
Major Jay West is stationed at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Installations West.
“It’s my children and my family who wanted me to be in the play,” he told The Roadrunner. “I take an interest in doing something with the girls [daughters Taylor and Laine are both in the show.] And I really like the people in the cast,” says West.
Taylor, as the newspaper girl gets to announce Harry’s return,(played by her dad Jay) from the war, just a few weeks after her real dad came home.
West has been involved with previous VCCT shows. He was stage manager for last spring’s The King and I.
During the recent wildfires, West was still in Qatar, on the Persian Gulf, scanning the news anxiously for information as to whether the community of Valley Center and his wife, Trina, had been evacuated or not. Now that he has returned he has jumped into the part of Harry Bailey with verve and enthusiasm.
He joins a cast that is in part motivated by a goal to present a holiday gift to a community that will help reaffirm values that we all learned during the wildfires: the importance of family, how much we rely on our neighbors and that life is, after all its tribulations and troubles, wonderful.
This year, and this time of year, that message is perhaps a bit more appropriate than in other years. This holiday season Valley Center residents are more sensitive than most to what they have lost and what’s important.
It’s a large cast, including many adults and children. It includes J.J. Rowley as George Bailey, who, driven to despair when his savings and loan company “loses” $8,000 (this is right after WWII, when that amount was pretty big) contemplates suicide and comes to face to face with his guardian angel, Clarence Oddbody (played by Kim Taylor), who confronts him with his life and shows how the world would have been different if George Bailey had never lived.
Rowley is playing the part immortalized by Jimmy Stewart 60 years ago, but the play is an adaptation of that magical story, not a slavish reproduction of it.
The show is directed by Marsi Carr, well known to local residents as a beloved music teacher.
The show will run Friday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 8 at 7 p.m. with a matinee at 3 p.m. and Sunday, Dec. 9 at 3 p.m.
Tickets are general admission seating. Adult tickets are $18 and kids under 10 are $15. There will be a special matinee price of $12 for all seats.
Regular price tickets are available online at www.maxine.vcpusd.net.
Or you can obtain them from members of the cast.
The VC water board Monday officially adopted 30% cuts for 20,000 acres of ag users, beginning in January.
For farmers who think they can use their normal amount of water and just pay high fines, Gen. Mgr. Gary Arant had a stern message: “This is not about paying penalties, this is about saving water. We cannot have people just making the decision to pay the fine. Ultimately if we have someone who is recalcitrant we will come to the board and recommend termination of service.”
The ordinance adopted Monday is officially called the “Interim ag water program supply reduction implementation plan.”
Note: This program does not apply to residential users, although it is expected that they too may get cuts next year—just not as severe.
It applies to ag users who take a discount for water and in return are subject to interruptions and cuts.
Residents unsure about its provisions can learn more at a public workshop-scheduled to provide the chance to hear about the supply reduction and ask questions.
It will be held at the Maxine Theater, Valley Center High School, on Nov. 26, 6–8 p.m.
Arant stressed over and over that the district will get a certain amount of water and that it CAN’T go over that allotment without incurring severe penalties, including having its supplies cut even further next year.
The supply is based upon water usage between July 2006 and June 2007. Thirty percent has been cut from that base.
Growers can go over and under allotments from month to month, but there will be a strict accounting at the end of six months.
Ag customers who left the program before Dec. 31 2006 are not part of the 30% cuts.
Ag customers who entered the program after Jan. 1, 2007 have the option to leave the program.
The district’s billing format has been changed to reflect the allocation for the specific month and the amount of usage over and under the monthly allocation.
Bills will tell ag customers what next months’ allocation is.
Usage under the allocation will be a usage credit to offset over usage in future months.
Water usage over the allocation will be billed at a penalty rate of $1,482 per acre-foot or $3.40 /HCF.
The normal rate is $664/AF and $1.53 /HCF.
The Penalty rate is $818/AF and $1.87/ HCF.
Farmers will be given the first two months of the year to get used to the program without penalty. However, their usage in those months will be taken into account later on. So there’s no point in overusing in January and February, because it will still catch up with you in March.
Penalties paid can be regained with conservation in future months of the initial program.
Penalties not earned back at the end of the first 12-month program cannot be earned back in a subsequent year.
Accounts under the same ownership may be grouped into one master account. As such all penalties, flow restrictions, will apply to all meters in the group.
After March 2008 accounts exceeding the allocation and usage credits by 10% for two consecutive billing periods will receive a notice of possible flow restriction.
Continued usage beyond 10% of the monthly allocation will result in a 50% flow restriction, additional fines and/or termination of service.
Customers will be charged time and material for installation and removal of flow restriction.
There is an appeal process for growers who think that they are being treated unfairly.
However, the cold equations of supply apply.
“We have 27,850 acre feet that has to last us twelve months,” noted Arant. “The Metropolitan Water District [the big agency that sells water to all of Southern California] is not making any allowances. We are left with that amount of water.”
The Red Cross shelter at Bell Gardens closed Thursday, a day earlier than it had informed temporary residents it would close.
The Red Cross issued a statement Nov. 15 that read: “The last remaining American Red Cross shelter at Bell Gardens (30841 Cole Grade Rd.) in Valley Center will close Friday, Nov. 16th, at 10 a.m. All of the residents remaining in the shelter have been provided alternate housing through partner agencies or have received the resources for a long-term housing solution through the American Red Cross or FEMA. Among the agencies working with the Red Cross are Mission San Antonio Catholic Church and Paradise Community Services, both of which worked to secure long-term housing for many of the families.”
The announcement thanked Bell Gardens, the schools and churches for allowing their facilities to be used as shelters and noted that it had operated 21 shelters in the county during the wildfires and hosted 16,000 overnight stays. “Nearly 4,000 volunteers who assisted during the response served more than 250,000 meals to clients and emergency workers and provided assistance to more than 1,800 families who were affected by the fires.”
At 5 p.m. on Thursday Ginny Martineau-Davis picked up four more loads of laundry of the victims and checked on the accumulation of about ten families (53 people) as she did every day.
She planned to bring the laundry back the next day, as she had every morning. But this time they would need their things before they got to move.
The children would be settled in school on Friday as their parents worked on relocating. This was perfect since there were class parties and the children would get to play with their friends as everyone prepared for Thanksgiving break.
To their surprise they started to receive calls late Thursday night from crying evacuees.
The Red Cross closed the center at about 7 p.m. Thursday evening without notifying the community, or the evacuees.
Davis still had laundry (some of it from Red Cross workers) and no way of finding the families it belonged to.
The children were not at the schools. Not in their classes at their Thanksgiving parties. Many evacuees had no transportation. The community members had planned transportation for them for Friday.
They learned from crying evacuees that the Red Cross had given them bus tokens and hotel vouchers. The nearest hotels are in Escondido.
“This is par for the course,” said Pastor Bill Trok of Ridgeview Church, who has worked fire survivors ever since the fires.
“We had an army of volunteers working with evacuees and met every need when called. But, communication with the Red Cross was sometimes difficult. There was always a different volunteer and no one seemed to be planning their next move.
“Our church served dinner on a Sunday. The next day, the Red Cross called at 5:30 p.m. and asked if we were bringing food that night. It’s not a problem. Everyone pulled together to get things done. It’s just that the communication and planning was …. On Tuesday I stopped by at 7:30 p.m. and the evacuees still had not been fed.”
Communication was also lacking between the Red Cross and the community.
So, how did it happen that the evacuees were kicked out Thursday instead of Friday as planned? That was decided at the San Diego headquarters by District Manager Andy McKeller.
“We were going to close it on Friday morning anyway, so Operations Management at the national office thought it might as well be closed Thursday night,” he said. “Wouldn’t the people rather be in beds in a hotel rather than another night on cots?”
Client Caseworkers set up a table to process the families late on Thursday. No calls were made to local volunteers.
McKeller added that meals were decided on for the evacuees by the site managers.
“The site managers of Mass Care assess their needs each day and call them in to headquarters in Rancho Bernardo only if meals are needed. Then we send meals to them.”
No debriefing meeting with the Red Cross is planned, but McKeller is open to any meeting the community wants to have.
Shawneen Burdick of VC has been a trained Red Cross worker since the 2003 fires.
Both she and Pastor Tom Lindley decided then that better training and communication with the Red Cross was needed.
“People should not point fingers at what was not done. They should ask themselves what have they done?” said Burdick.
“We set up several trainings to be Red Cross DAT (Disaster Action Team) members and no one showed up. We were trained in both DAT and as a shelter team, but when the fires hit this time, there were not enough Red Cross workers trained within Valley Center to establish our own shelter without out of state Red Cross help—they couldn’t set one up at the high school until they were able to deploy volunteers.”
But with our new Reverse 911 evacuation system, those that were trained were evacuated!
Burdick was in Oceanside. Because the high school shelter was generated by community response, no Red Cross volunteers were deployed to VC.
When the Red Cross finally arrived, the workers were from all over the country—Wisconsin, Minnesota, Maine, and West Virginia.
“They are dedicated volunteers that give up two weeks of their time with their own families to come help us,” says Burdick.
“One woman was an RN and she never left the shelter to go stay at the hotel that they had set up for her because several evacuees were in labor … and she wouldn’t leave their sides. How many of us did that? These volunteers are to be applauded!”
Although this was the first time the entire town faced a mandatory evacuation, it won’t be the last.
Patricia Davis, a volunteer with the Red Cross who served as liaison for the Witch Fire, says that rural areas such as VC and Julian must think outside the box when it comes to providing evacuation relief.
“These communities are always going to be prime spots for the fires to burn, but difficult locations to get to,” she said.
Fire can sever supply lines, and with mass mandatory evacuations, it is difficult for volunteers from the outside to get in to help.
When multiple fires are burning, as is often the case in Southern California, the Red Cross will be spread thin and will deploy workers from all over the country. That will take days.
“In Julian,” Davis says, “they have established a Red Cross Shelter Team that includes a trailer full of cots, tents, medical supplies, and necessary items that stays on site in Julian ready to go whenever they need it.”
That way, when mega fire rage and close routes into Julian the supplies are already there.
That also required training enough townspeople to staff the shelter team. One or two can’t do it.
Davis adds that when the Red Cross establishes an Evacuation Center it takes liability for everyone there. They need enough trained volunteers to feel comfortable taking on that liability.
“That’s the kind of thing that the community of Valley Center needs to decide if it is willing to do and plan for,” says Davis. “The local community needs to make a plan for Emergency Shelter Response and a plan for a community led Long Term Recovery Committee. The Red Cross can help with tools.”
If the local residents do the relief work, there will be better communication and understanding of local needs. They will also already be on site to help from the first day.
While some say we need more Red Cross workers from VC, others don’t want the Red Cross completely in charge of our relief efforts if we can’t establish clear lines of communication so evacuees aren’t dumped out of a shelter prematurely.
Many don’t realize that the Qualcomm Stadium shelter was not a designated Red Cross Shelter, but a community shelter where the Red Cross was present along with other organizations.
Pastor Bill Trok led teams of volunteers from Valley Center to Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina and saw first hand that it was often organizations like Operation Blessing and Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) that helped victims there. Those organizations were among the many that sent relief supplies to Qualcomm Stadium.
Coordinating efforts brings its own problems. For example, as Valleyites asked local Wal-Mart stores, Target and Legoland for donations for friends who lost homes, they were told that large quantities of gift cards and passes had been given to the Red Cross to distribute.
When questioned, the local Red Cross site did not give one gift card or pass to VC survivors.
McKeller said they never received such donations.
“We would have been tracking such a large donation very closely. We have no record of any donations from Target, Wal-Mart or Legoland.”
The Target and Wal-Mart Web pages each say they donated $1 million to the Red Cross for wild fire relief, but do not say they were gift cards to be given directly to victims.
The Red Cross in Washington DC says that Target offered gift cards, but it had no mechanism to distribute them to the intended victims. Instead it issued ID cards that victims could show at their local Target stores, and Target was left to create a mechanism to distribute gift cards directly. To date, the Red Cross doesn’t know if Target did that.
VC Fire Chief Kevin O’Leary is already in debrief meetings with the Red Cross and various key players, including Patricia Davis, liaison for the Red Cross.
Davis requested direct contact with him and bypassed red tape by directly communicating with the VC fire department.
“In my opinion, Patricia and the San Diego Red Cross are the best in the nation to work with,” said O’Leary. “But, the key is the community has to plan to take care of itself for the first seventy-two hours.
“One thing we have learned is we can’t assume others like the Red Cross will be able to come help us. We need to be prepared ourselves. Patricia Davis has had success getting Julian ready for that, and suggested Valley Center do the same after the 2003 fires.”
O’Leary says meetings will be held in January both to plan for future mega fires, and for community input on how everything went this time.
“We want to hear from people about everything from how the Reverse 911 worked to the shelters.”
They found room to improve the Emergency Response phase. But, they still need input on improving communication and cooperation in the community during an extended evacuation.
“This can’t happen to the kids again,” said Davis. “Those kids go through so much during evacuation, losing their homes and all their things. They need something stable like going to school, seeing their friends, having class parties for Thanksgiving. We are the adults and need to get a plan in place so this doesn’t happen again.”
They say that lightning doesn’t strike twice. But the Aguirre family of Rincon has the unhappy distinction of having their home burn to the ground twice in four years.
What adds a bitter irony to this statistic is that they were living in different Indian reservations when their homes burned—although they burned almost exactly four years apart to the day on Oct. 23.
In October of 2003 Fred and Barbara Aguirre and their daughter, Leea were living in a modular house on the San Pasqual Reservation near Canal Road.
“When the fire hit we were given 15 minutes to evacuate,” recalls Mrs. Aguirre.
The fire started early on a Sunday morning. The family went to Escondido to stay with friends. They found out Monday that their home had burned.
“We were gung ho to move back and reestablish our home because our insurance was kind to us,” she recalls.
They bought a brand new modular home and reestablished themselves in the San Pasqual Reservation, although a year later they decided to move to Rincon Reservation off Paradise Creek Lane, about three quarters of a mile from Harrah’s Rincon Casino.
Fire struck again fours later, to the day.
The Poomacha fire began on a Tuesday morning. The Aguirres had already left Monday.
“I had a feeling,” she recalls. “Ramona was on fire again. So was Palomar and Pauma and we were in the middle of that.
“None of us slept on Sunday night. I packed all the things I would need.”
They caravaned out of Rincon that morning. They drove to Escondido to friends.
They checked in about the status of their home with Jack Musick of Rincon’s security force.
“Tuesday morning Musick called us and told us that our house had gone,” she said.
That exact same spot had burned four years ago in the Paradise fire.
The first time their house burned they lost everything.
The second time they got all of their important photos and papers and her daughter got most of their clothes.
“You don’t assume, or even think that your house will go again. It’s like someone said, ‘Lightning struck you twice,’ ” says Mrs. Aguirre.
“The things that are lost are just things and you realize it, but they were my things. Everyone said ‘You got out safe and your child and husband safe.’ Yes, I’m fortunate that I did get out safe. All my female friends say ‘Oh you get to go shopping again!’ Well, I didn’t want to go shopping in the first place. I had what I wanted.”
Friends and her husband’s workplace, John Laing Homes, have provided them with most of things they need.
“They have been very good to us. They let him take three weeks off work,” she says.
The family is giving itself six months to see what pans out.
“We don’t want to go back. We’ve decided that Valley Center is not the place we want to settle. It doesn’t work,” she says.
“We’re in Escondido right now, near San Marcos. It’s a friendly place because everything is close by. We’re going to settle there for six months and then decide what we want to do.”
They will possibly leave the state. Possibly move to Oregon, where her daughter and grandson live.
“I don’t think we will stay in San Diego county. It’s just too hard.
“I’ve made a lot of friends here. They cared about us but couldn’t protect us from the fire. We will still be friends when we leave.”
Santa Ana winds are predicted again for the Thanksgiving weekend and firefighters are positioning resources to possible battle another fast-moving wildfire.
The State of California is pre-positioning resources in Southern California in preparation of extreme fire danger due to predicted Santa Ana winds. Weather forecasters are predicting very low humidity accompanied by widespread gusty Santa Ana winds across Southern California Wednesday morning through Thursday and possibly more strong winds over the weekend.
“The forecasts indicate weather conditions could be similar to the winds from late-October,” said Chief Ruben Grijalva, director of Cal Fire. “Extremely gusty Santa Ana winds just increase the chance of a single spark becoming a major fire due to the dry vegetation in Southern California.”
In response to these anticipated conditions, Cal Fire is pre-positioning hundreds of additional firefighters, fire engines, fire crews, and aircraft to respond to any new wildfires. Cal Fire and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services are coordinating with its partners including the United States Forest Service and local fire departments throughout the state.
These resources are in addition to the normal staffing for this time of year and will be positioned across San Diego, Orange, Riverside, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Ventura, San Luis Obispo, and Kern counties.
“This pre-position of fire resources is something we do whenever a Red Flag Warning is issued or severe fire weather is expected in the state,” Grijalva said. “We move our resources up and down the state wherever there is a need.”
Optimists Walt McDaniels and Larry Patten light the smoker in preparation for the Optimist Club annual Thanksgiving Smoked Hams sale. The Optimist Club also sells smoked hams for Christmas and Easter.
The Valley Roadrunner
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