Sauteed vegetables, clean bathrooms, but no wi-fi

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At the Del Mar Fairgrounds and Race Track in north San Diego County, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived late Monday to talk to elderly residents sleeping in one of the buildings after being evacuated from fire areas.

By 11 p.m., 1,000 military-style cots arrived from nearby Camp Pendleton, enough for anyone who wanted one. By Tuesday morning, 160 National Guardsmen were on hand to help the estimated 1,500 to 2,000 San Diego residents taking refuge in two buildings at the fairgrounds.

Indeed, there were so many people offering to volunteer and help evacuees that by this morning racetrack officials were begging the media to put out the word that no more volunteers were needed.

This afternoon, a line of cars a block long idled outside the grandstand building as their drivers waited to drop off donations that filled their vehicles. The racetrack’s secretary, deluged by calls from people offering help, answered the phone all morning, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t need any more volunteers.’

And employees of the Villa Rancho Bernardo nursing home, who had brought more than 200 frail elderly residents to the facility Monday, were loading them into ambulances to take them to several convalescent facilities in Orange County that had space and were out of harm’s way.

At the fairgrounds, people arrived from wealthy and poorer parts of northern San Diego. All said that hotels and motels were booked for 50 miles around.

In the grandstand building, designated for refugees with pets, one man sat next to a regal Irish wolfhound. A woman had a parrot perched on a chair. Others had brought a pet snake, a rat and a chinchilla.

Many said they received ‘reverse 911 calls’ telling them it was mandatory to leave their homes. One 62-year-woman, who declined to be named, said she was unemployed as a minimum-wage horse groomer, and had no insurance on her home. She had arrived in dusty jeans in her 1983 Chevy pickup with her two barn cats, Itzi and Nuisance, her thoroughbred horse, her sister, who works at a thrift store, and her 92-year-old mother.

Stay-at-home mother C.J. Ellerby, 37, said it was a ‘little scary’ to wake up and get a reverse 911 call telling her to evacuate from her $160,000 mobile home in Escondido. She had already received a recorded call at 5:30 a.m. Monday that her son’s Escondido school was closed because of the fires. Ellerby could think of only one hotel in the area that allowed dogs, and it was booked. The nearest available hotel was in Orange County.

‘You can’t love a pet and leave it behind. That’s not right,’ she said. It would be hard to afford a hotel room for more than a couple of nights on the salary of her husband, who makes industrial pumps. ‘It would have been a financial thing to go to a hotel,’ she said.

So she and her husband and two children, ages 5 and 3, and their two dogs, a golden retriever mix named Ranger and a pitbull great dane mix named Hazel, headed to the fairgrounds Monday morning. They took little more than three days of clothing, and the hard drive of their computer.

‘Compared to Katrina, this is very well organized. Katrina was a joke,’ said Ellerby, a stout woman in pink flip flops. She said that with a hurricane, New Orleans knew days in advance that a potentially devastating storm was coming. ‘You don’t get a warning with a fire. You just don’t.’

Things had gone so much smoother in San Diego than in New Orleans, in part because people could pack up their cars and go, Ellerby said. Her family had been given cots to sleep on at the racetrack and whatever food and water they needed. A volunteer passed by to offer toothpaste and tooth brushes.

‘The help of everyone has been incredible,’ said Andrea Brass, 57, from Del Mar Highlands, who evacuated with her mother, Sylvia, 83, and her companion, Abraham Secemski, 84. Andrea Brass, wearing a necklace with three diamond solitaires, said she took her jewelry, sterling silver, papers, photographs and mink coat. They had called motels, but all within 50 miles were booked. A sheriff’s deputy had directed them to the racetrack.

They decided to leave the racetrack this afternoon because of her mother’s lung conditions. They were taking her to a nephew’s home in San Pedro to get away from the bad air. The track was clean: volunteers cleaned the bathrooms several times Monday night, leaving them sparkling, Andrea said.

Throughout the night, doctors and nurses consoled a few Alzheimer’s patients who shouted out in the darkness, or became belligerant -- elderly residents from Villa Rancho Bernardo skilled nursing home who were confused. One nurse consoled a confused elderly man who kept saying, ‘I have to go to the university!’

‘The volunteers were unbelievable. They couldn’t feed you enough’ Brass said, adding that she was constantly offered snacks, water and medical help, including oxygen tanks for her mother. In the evening, everyone got a dinner with chicken and sautéed vegetables. ‘It’s a nightmare because houses are burning. Here I couldn’t ask for a safer, better place.’

The biggest complaint: There was no wi-fi so that people could use their laptops to look at Google Earth and see if their house was still standing.

-- Sonia Nazario