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Second-degree of hell in Hell Creek Canyon

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Eastern fringe of Valley Center, San Diego County:

Along Hell Creek Road, in Hell Creek Canyon, Randy Cauble woke up to his own personal hell Wednesday.

Asleep inside an aluminum Airstream trailer, Cauble was awakened to find that the Poomacha fire had crested Mt. Rodriguez just across the tight canyon, and was heading his way. He already spent Monday and Tuesday watching the Witches fire threaten his home.

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But that’s only half the reason he defied an evacuation order to stay and try to protect his property.

In 2003, the Cedar fire took the home that once stood on the same ground where he is building a dream retirement home for himself and his wife. And there was no way he was going to relive that nightmare.

‘I still get emotional about it,’ he said, his voice quaking. ‘The past three days have been filled with so much adrenaline, I haven’t had time to think about it.’

Cauble and his wife, Laurie, bought the original home five months before the Cedar fire struck. Laurie wanted it because it looked out on Mt. Rodriguez, her favorite view.

It was a large ranch with a wraparound porch, all built with wood. The woman who sold it to them was head of the local Arborist Society, so the grounds were flush with a meadow of plants and trees of all kinds.

It didn’t stand a chance in a fire.

Cauble, an original owner of the Blue Cafe in Long Beach and other restaurants but now retired, has spent about three years building the new home, with plans to finish it by Christmas.

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The modern glass home is a clear reflection of the lessons he learned from Cedar, fortified with stone and stucco and surrounded on all sides with a foundation wall of cinder blocks.

Cauble brought in a tractor to clear out a lot of the brush and brambles that somehow didn’t burn the first time around.

‘This is a fire-resistant house,’ he said.’

Still, he wasn’t taking any chances when news of the Witch fire broke Sunday. He left in the middle of a dinner party in Long Beach, promising his wife he wouldn’t stay ‘if there was even 1% chance I could get myself killed.’

When he arrived home, he and some other guys in the neighborhood decided to take turns keeping watch, in four-hour shifts.

That first night, a neighbor’s wind gauge registered gusts of up to 120 mph, he said.

‘That thing was rocking so much,’ he said, pointing to the Airstream. ‘It was like sleeping in a boat during a perfect storm.’

Cauble, who estimates he got about 8 hours of sleep in three days, said the experience was full of frantic and surreal moments too intense to articulate -- and no day was worse than Wednesday.

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It was about 5 a.m. when he got up to see spot fires burning everywhere on Mt. Rodriguez.

He turned on all the sprinklers and laid out his hoses. The fire and smoke reached the dry bed of Hell Creek just down the slope of his backyard.

Fire crews began arriving, and Cauble went to a neighbor’s home while they worked on the small fires near his property.

He returned once the crews thought they got the last of the hot spots.

But flareups continued while the firefighters turned to building a break along nearby Santee Road, to keep the Poomachi and Witch fires from merging.

‘Tell them I could use some help down here putting out some fires,’ he said nervously during a cellphone conversation with a reporter (me).

‘It’s still bad in some spots,’ he added. ‘My log pile is about to go up. They’ll probably see it.’

It was almost 2 p.m. Cauble was wearing yellow fireman’s pants, and a mask over his stubbly jaw.

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His good friend Lindsay Allison, who lives about 20 miles west, was on his way to help Cauble fix the irrigation system circling his property.

By the time Allison arrived, some firefighters had returned. The biggest flareups were burning 10 to 20 feet high at the foot of Cauble’s driveway.

‘We’re going to watch and see if we can let this one burn itself out,’ a crewman told him.

It did, about 20 minutes later.

‘What a day,’ Cauble said to Allison. ‘What a helluva day.’

But there were still hot spots smoldering, and they needed to be put out before dark.

‘We gotta knock ‘em down,’ Allison warned. ‘They’ll burn for days if you don’t.’

-- Christine Hanley

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