As Big Sur wildfire grows, some residents choose to stay and fight

As Big Sur’s Timber Fire continues to crescendo, many locals have chosen to stay and fight for their homes and businesses in spite of mandatory evacuation orders.

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Kirk Gafill, owner of California icon Nepenthe, said he saw the beginnings of the fire coming over the ridgeline across Highway 1 from his family business on Sunday night. He knew right away what he was dealing with. “We’re right back into it with the fires,” he told SFGATE on Tuesday from the restaurant. 

By Monday afternoon, most of the residents on the Nepenthe property — employees at the restaurant — had evacuated the region. Others, he said, chose to stay. He estimated that about half a dozen people associated with the business, including his son and his mother, were still there to provide “support and security” to their remaining neighbors. He said they will continue to stay and help out, monitoring the blaze’s progress “until that’s not a prudent decision.”

For Gafill, staying was an easy decision. “I always look at the priority: yourself and your family, and in our case, our employees and physical properties and business and public we’re serving,” he explained. “When we have to close, it simplifies the public aspect. Then we have to ensure employees, whether they stay or evacuate, that their personal health and safety come first.”

He compared the first 72 hours of a fire in this region to “the fog of war.”

“There’s a lot of rumors and a lot of contradictory information” in that initial timeframe, he said. “Once incident management gets a hold of the situation, we get into kind of the rhythm of the event.”

As fire crews continue to arrive and the visibility shrinks around the property line, he is at once “hopeful and cautious.” He recognizes that the blaze is very active on the steep terrain just across the road from his business.

Josh Silveira, a battalion chief and public information officer for Cal Fire, underscored some of the geographic difficulties fighting the blaze. “It’s extremely rugged terrain — hilly is an understatement,” he told SFGATE on Tuesday. “I would almost call it cliffy, more than hilly — very steep, not a lot of roadway access. It’s very difficult to traverse.”

Residents staying put during a mandatory evacuation order is not unusual in California, but it is illegal. Silveira said the effort to convince people who are trying to help out in the community to leave is “a very fine line that we walk.” 

“What we do is strongly encourage them to leave, tell them if you don’t leave, you’re impeding us from doing our job,” he explained. “Our primary job is life. Once life is secured, then we can focus on property and the watershed. But it’s sometimes tough to do that when we’re worried about people.”

He acknowledged that Big Sur residents are, for the most part, an experienced bunch but added: “Protocol is protocol. We always want people to be safe. That’s the bottom line. …We understand it’s a difficult time. It’s very stressful. There’s a worry that ‘if I leave, there won’t be a home when I return.’”

For longtime Big Sur resident Marcus Foster, who lives in one of the evacuation zones, it was never a question that staying in the early moments of the blaze to help neighbors on the ridgeline in the heart of the fire footprint was the right thing to do. 

On Tuesday morning, he had been up for 36 hours straight, helping neighbors cut a fire line around their properties and dousing small sections of the fire, sometimes with garden hoses and water from storage tanks. He had also driven his tractor up and down the sometimes private dirt roads, keeping them clear of debris so fire crews and residents could continue to have access to and from their homes.

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“It’s pretty gnarly,” Foster told SFGATE. “… Nonstop 24 hours fighting, keeping it away from the houses, just up there by ourselves. We did it, we saved all the structures straight up from my house.” 

He described the fire footprint as “basically a spine that runs up the ridge in between Deetjen’s and Henry Miller Library,” where he estimates about seven or eight homes reside.

Both Foster and Nepenthe’s Gafill credited the marine layer for, at least for now, stopping the blaze in its tracks as it made its way down the ridge. “That humidity, it just stops,” Foster said. 

Foster, who previously served a dozen years as a captain for the all-volunteer Big Sur Fire department, said that staying and continuing to help his neighbors are a priority, unless a big wind event or the spread of the fire down to the west side of the highway was to take place. ”There’s nothing to worry about down on the fog on the highway,” he said. But he noted in the same breath that the fire is currently “creeping down.”

For now, he’s also helping his 18-year-old son, an active volunteer with Big Sur Fire who was one of the first up on the ridge when the blaze started Sunday night. “He was part of a volunteer crew the first night trying to catch it,” he said. “But it was too hot, and he hurt his knee. He’s got an MCL tear and a quad tear. His whole knee is shot.”

Foster said he has no plans to leave the embattled region as more neighbors continue to need help and support. “We’re doing everything, running hose lines, pumps, cutting [fire] line,” he explained, noting that he was preparing midmorning on Tuesday to head back up the ridge with his tractor to clear the roads once more. “There’s lots of debris, rocks, just gotta keep the roads clear for fire trucks.”

Nepenthe’s Gafill said this is the unspoken agreement that folks who live in Big Sur long term make with one another — to stay and be there for one another, for as long as they can. “It’s incredibly important,” he said of the community’s ability to come together during the gravest emergencies. 

“I had neighbors checking in to offer their experience, their advice, their judgments,” he continued. “We’re generally resource-rich because of the nature of our business. … I do have staff out there with neighbors helping cut fire line and taking food supplies to neighbors who are standing down on their property, but running out of supply.

“Neighbors helping neighbors,” Gafill concluded. “We see it repeated over and over and over.”