Bill Trok, pastor of Ridgeview Church and the members of his church have been named this year’s Newsmakers of the Year by The Roadrunner newspaper.
This autumn after the wildfires, when we encountered those whose lives were fatefully imprinted by that catastrophe, we met survivor after survivor who testified how people from the medium-sized Ridgeview Church showed up en masse to clean up the ashes and twisted metal, to provide aid and comfort, RVs and other places to live to people who sometimes escaped from their homes five minutes before they exploded into flames.
“Doing this kind of thing is sort of in our DNA as a group,” Pastor Trok told The Roadrunner this week.
He took out a paper towel upon which a Cuca Ranch resident who lost his home in the early hours of the Poomacha Fire wrote the church a note of gratitude. It said, in part, “I wish that every person that I met or meet in my life were at least a little bit as nice (and full of love) as all of you are at the Ridgeview Church.”
Church members seem to follow Pastor Trok’s philosophy of good works: “I’m a big believer that faith needs to be lived out. The ideals Christ taught needs to have wheels put on them. It’s more actions and intentions than philosophy,” he says.
The church was just as active in responding to the Paradise fire four years ago. Then they helped clean up 60% of the burned areas. They ran a construction company for six months after the blaze funded with about $100,000 in cash donations and fielded 500 volunteers.
After Hurricane Katrina the church sent six teams to Pas Christian, Mississippi to do clean up and provide meals “We help the people in our church area but we also help the people in the greater area,” said the pastor.
This time the needs after the fire were different, although once again they were mainly cleaning and housing.
“Some great groups showed up, such as the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams [profiled in the Dec. 12, 2007 edition]. They were doing such a great job that we focused on the non-reservation areas. Most of the area where we worked was Cuca and South Grade and the Guejito,” Trok said.
On the first normal weekend after the fires, the first weekend in November, Ridgeview sent its people out to assess the damage.
It cancelled its scheduled men’s retreat just as it had four years previously for the Paradise Fire.
“We had seventy-five men and women show up. Many of them were from other churches in Valley Center, including Horizon,” recalls Pastor Trok.
“I told them, ‘It’s all about being situational. You have to be situationally aware as you go the sites. Are the people receptive? Do they want help? Be sensitive to their emotions and needs.’
“There will be some groups that will spend the whole day with some people while others will move from place to place.”
Ridgeview’s team functioned that day as sort of a volunteer FEMA, but far more effective and without the bureaucracy.
“We were trying to care for the whole person,” says Pastor Trok.
“The truth is when these fires happen sometimes peoples’ lives are already burned. The fire comes through and reveals people that were in need already. Our role with them might be different from someone who is fully insured. Everything depends on the situation.”
Ridgeview’s people often found burned places that the County didn’t know about.
“We try to connect them to resources that are available such as FEMA and the Salvation Army. We try to coach them and convince them that it’s important to get involved in that process,” said Pastor Trok.
“The people we are helping are primarily land owners out in these areas I described. We are helping them by saving them money on clean up and helping them to get their lives rebuilt.
“Every situation is unique,” he said.
The way the church tackles the problem is to get the relief work going. To organize and sustain it from a management point of view, then enlist the help of people from outside the community.
“We have had volunteers come up from churches in Long Beach and churches in San Diego and received financial aid from these folks to pay for bins and equipment and providing RVs for people who lost homes,” said Trok.
“What typically happens is that you get a group of individuals who emotionally connect with a homeowner. We had a situation behind Lake Wohlford where some of our folks went to help a guy. They worked with him for a day and decided to follow it through. They took off two days from work and got equipment and in a couple of days the place was cleaned up.”
Now, two months after the fires, they find themselves at a transition point.
Currently Pastor Trok is meeting with a group of pastors from Escondido, some of them connected with Rebuild Escondido.
They are assessing long-term what it will it take to help the severely underinsured and the uninsured with the rebuild process.
“We have a will to go forward and do what we can to assist them if that is what they want from us,” said Trok.
The group has some money to provide for these efforts and they are looking for grants.
“There is a will to help our neighbors and treat them as we would want to be treated,” he said.
On Sundays anywhere from 250-300 members attend Ridgeview. It’s not a large church. They don’t have a lot of money or a lot of people. But they pack a big punch.
“We’re very proud of our people. They get it. It’s not about playing the church. It’s about being the church and being in the world,” said Trok, who added, “One of the things you hope is that as a church that people would notice if you ceased to exist. You don’t do these things to be noticed, but it’s nice when you are,” said Trok.
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You can make donations to Ridgeview’s fire relief efforts through their Web site: www.rc4u.org/
Jan. 5 is the deadline for young women interested in competing for the title of Miss Valley Center.
The 2008 Miss Valley Center Pageant, the 41st, will be held Saturday March 1 at the Maxine Theater.
Miss VC serves as an ambassador of the community throughout the San Diego area, gains the admiration of fellow residents and has the opportunity to win over $3,500 in scholarships, cash, and prizes.
Entries for the pageant are available from VC High School, Mimi’s Nails, Video Playhouse, or call Debra Jockinsen, the pageant director.
You can mail your entries to the Valley Center Pageant Association, POB 2177, Valley Center, CA 92082-2177.
Orientation will be on Jan. 5, at noon, at Ann’s School of Dance. It is mandatory that each contestant attend.
Contestants must be 17 years of age and no older than 25 by May 1, at least a junior at an accredited high school, never married or pregnant and of high moral character.
The pageant includes opportunities for personal growth, scholarship funds, many prizes and experiences that last a lifetime. Brittany Byler, Miss VC 2007, has spent her reign attending many high profile community and charitable events throughout San Diego.
The Miss Valley Center Pageant is produced by the Valley Center Pageant Assn., a non-profit organization, committed to providing opportunities for the education and personal growth for young women in Valley Center.
Donation of goods, services and education funds help improve the program. For more information, contact VCPA President Debra Jockinsen at 751-1051.
Two factors kept the Paradise Mountain area of Valley Center from being burned in the wildfires of October-November: so much of the area had burned four years earlier, combined with a fuel management program on the 22,000 acre Rancho Guejito that stopped three separate but converging fires in their tracks.
Rancho Guejito, the last undeveloped Mexican land grant remaining in California was first hit by the Guejito Fire, which started in the San Pasqual Valley independently of the Witch Fire, which was the first of the October fires to get started.
The Guejito Fire jumped Hwy 78 in the early morning hours of Monday, Oct. 22, the day after the Witch Fire started in Santa Ysabel. It eventually burned into the Witch Fire at Lake Hodges.
The Witch Fire came up San Pasqual Valley and onto the Guejito Ranch on the east.
Then the Poomacha fire, which started early Tuesday, Oct. 23, burned down into the Witch Fire on the Guejito Ranch from north to south.
According to Cal Fire Battalion Chief Kevin O’Leary, “Because of the fuel modification that they have on the ranch, the fire basically went out when it hit the ranch.”
When the fire didn’t just go out it transformed from a raging inferno into a slow burning grass fire. Many thousands of mature oak trees did not burn as they did elsewhere in the county.
Such slow fires have kept fuel down in this area since time immemorial, certainly long before men first arrived.
According to O’Leary, “Since 2003 we have been working together with the ranch. The goal was to try to burn a large portion of the ranch to get some of the larger fuels out.”
They were stymied by environmental regulations.
However they hired a biologist in 2003 who worked with the ranch owners to reduce fuels in areas that would spread fire off the ranch.
They put in herds of a specialized type of cattle that eats brush and grass. They ringed the cattle around the oak trees removing fuels. They fenced off the drainages and kept the cattle out of environmentally sensitive riparian habitat around the actual streams. But on the slopes going into the drainages they allowed the cattle.
“If you look at where the fires hit you can see that the fire stopped at those areas,” says O’Leary.
“If the Guejito Ranch looked like the rest of the property surrounding it I would estimate we would have lost two hundred homes,” he added.
During the wildfires Cal Fire crews from all over the state were serving here. “Northern California crews wanted to know what management practices we kept in place,” said O’Leary.
The east side of Hellhole Canyon burned as it had four years previously, but the fact that there wasn’t as much fuel this time contributed to keeping the 2007 fire from getting into the Paradise Mountain area.
“It was a combination of that and the management practices at Guejito that kept Paradise Mountain from being affected. You could see where it swept around the non-treated areas.”
One area that always seems to burn, and which burned again was the Crown Hill area that goes straight off Old Guejito Road. This is where the Jauregui family lost several homes.
As with every fire there are lessons to be learned from these last ones.
“Fire is a part of the ecosystem. We have to have fire and this type of management if we want to keep devastating fires from destroying structures,” said O’Leary.
“We have to work hand in hand with environmentalists that want to protect the land. I believe that what Guejito Ranch has done was to protect that ranch, the Valley Center area and the wildlife there. You can already see significant wildlife coming back,” he said.
One method of reducing fuel that has been very successful in several areas is using goats.
“Goat management is an up and coming method of reducing fuels without destroying the roots system so it grows back without erosion. They eat it right down to the ground,” noted O’Leary.
Goats have been used on parts of Palomar Mountain and on the north side of Daley Ranch on several properties.
“We find that it’s a really great method of reducing your fuels. You can rent the goats out and corral them in the areas you want to consume and then move to another area. It works better than burning or chipping,” he said.
The Rancho Guejito is one of the most remarkable pieces of land in the state. Among the original 800 Mexican land grant ranchos, it is the only rancho still intact in its original shape with no development.
The fire management strategy was formed after the 2003 fires when they observed that in areas where grazing and brush clearing had taken place, that the fires burned low and not as hot.
According to a report prepared by the ranch, “As a result of these observations, the Rancho Guejito increased its range management budget and activities to see if the ‘Guejito Effect’ could be expanded.”
This wasn’t a radical concept since the rancho has been a cattle ranch since 1848. What was new was using the cattle for fuel management.
According to the report: “This was made possible by the new construction of dozens of miles of wildlife friendly cross-fencing. These fences were built by back breaking labor in even the most remote areas at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The purpose of this cross-fencing was to allow the movement of grazing cattle to areas where the vegetation posed the greatest fire danger. Except for inaccessible high mountain tops, no portion of the ranch was left ungrazed.”
The report takes a dig at some environmental “sacred cows,” (our term, not theirs) by noting, “It has been observed that fencing off areas, calling them environmental preserves and doing little else to reduce growth of brush will inevitably create areas of high fire danger. These areas can spawn unnaturally destructive firestorms which will kill everything that cannot fly away or dig deep underground.”
A group of Valley Center residents are working to found a local fire safe council—and they need your participation.
They will hold a series of classes beginning in January entitled “Living With Wildfire.”
Although Jim Courter, and the dozen or so others working to form the council are also members of the local CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) they see the Fire Safe Council as a separate entity. It will also likely consist of a different group of people.
The VC Fire Protection District is giving the infant organization moral support.
In his report to the board at the December meeting Fire Marshal George Lucia said that he has heard a real interest from neighborhoods in having such councils.
“A fire safe council is something that will help Valley Center in educating people and mitigating fire dangers,” said Lucia.
Courter told The Roadrunner that his group has been meeting with representatives of the San Diego County Fire Safe Council.
“We are using them as a resource to get our own started,” he said. The larger organization sponsors community groups under its umbrella. Once the Greater Valley Center organization is formed it will sponsor perhaps as many as a dozen neighborhood fire safe councils, said Courter.
The focus of fire safe councils is fire prevention. They do things like sponsor brush clearances, community wide chipping programs, and obtain grant money to hire contractors to chip brush, or assemble work crews to clear land where the property owner might not have money to clear it himself.
The four “Living With Wildfire” classes will be presented by instructors from the San Diego Natural History Museum.
“The focus is to make communities fire safe without bulldozing them,” says Courter, “through selective clearing, fire resistant vegetation, so that the natural environment isn’t trashed and you don’t require a lot of water to maintain a fire safe perimeter.”
Although we are just now hearing about the organization, the folks forming the Fire Safe Council have been meeting for 18 months, in between CERT activities, and, of course, the most recent spate of wildfires.
They took a break for the holidays and will begin holding organization meetings soon—to be announced.
“We got the CERT team going and now we have the time to get this other thing going,” Courter says. Grant funding is available from state and federal sources. “We will work on the grant funding and disburse it to the lower echelon groups,” he said.
If you are interested in becoming a part of the organization, contact Courter by e-mail at vcfsc@earthlink.net or call him at 760-715-7523.
As 2007 ended farmers braced for 30% cuts in the water that will be delivered to them and the VC Municipal Water District prepared to carry out those cuts.
The mandatory 30% cuts in what they used last year went into effect on Jan. 1, 2008.
Gen. Mgr. Gary Arant told The Roadrunner that the district’s employees were ready to carry out the program:
“We are almost through December and all of our meters have been read for the January water bills, the first month for the program. We continue to talk to growers and answer their questions and work with them on grouping meters or reallocating monthly allotments,” said Arant.
The rains in December were timely from the standpoint of helping growers to prepare for the cuts.
“Our water deliveries were relatively low and we expect that many growers were able to accumulate usage credits to help them in future months. Also, though we are tracking usage over the monthly allotments for January and February billings (December/January usage), we won't actually assess the financial penalty on any existing over-usage until the water bills which come out in March to give our growers a period to transition into the program,” said Arant.
District employees have been very busy. They have talked to literally hundreds of growers.
“With the hard work of our Finance Department, we are as on top of this situation as we can be given the circumstances. Though this is very difficult for our growers, the vast majority of the people we have dealt with understand the situation and want to do their best to meet the thirty percent reduction target and still survive as a grower. We really want that too!” said Arant.
Although mandatory cuts are only in effect for farmers, residential and commercial customers are also being asked to voluntarily cut their usage by 10 percent.
The Valley Roadrunner
P.O.B. 1529, Valley Center, CA 92082
Tel. 760.749.1112 Fax 760.749.1688
Website: www.valleycenter.com
Email: editor@valleycenter.com
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