‘Everything’s gone;’ Residents of Calimesa mobile home park burned by Sandalwood fire return
Residents of the mobile home park ravaged by the Sandalwood fire last week in Calimesa were allowed to briefly return Monday, Oct. 14, to retrieve belongings and see where the deadly blaze roared through.
Waiting until midday before getting permission to head into the park they once called home, residents lined up to gain access — four at a time. They then spent time picking through what was left of their homes.
“Everything’s gone — washer, dryer, stove — my grandkids’ toys,” said Rosie Castellon, as she picked through the rubble of what was once a two-bedroom, two-bathroom mobile home in the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park she shared with her son, her daughter-in-law and two small granddaughters. “My son’s dirt bike was in the shed that was melted to nothing.”
The blaze that started Thursday when a trash truck dumped its burning load near the 10 Freeway, quickly swept through the mobile home park, fanned by the gusting Santa Ana winds, killing two people, destroying dozens of mobile homes and charring more than 1,011 acres. By Monday evening, Cal Fire/Riverside County Fire announced the Sandalwood fire had been fully contained.
Expand
It is not unusual for trash to spontaneously catch fire and the practice nationally is for trucks to dump the hot load and call the fire department, according to the National Waste and Recycling Association in Washington, D.C. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is investigating whether there is any criminal culpability.
One victim, 89-year-old Lois Arvickson, who was identified over the weekend, told her son in a phone call that she was preparing to get in her car and leave the mobile-home park when the call suddenly ended, the son said. The second victim, whose remains were found Friday, remained unidentified.
The fire and the smoke it put off forced some schools to close last week and even Monday, when Mesa View Middle School in Calimesa was closed for fire-related maintenance. The district had called in an air quality specialist to check the school as well as teams to replace air filters and conduct safety checks. The Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District said Mesa View Middle School would reopen Tuesday, Oct. 15.
As students return to some form of a routine, others like Castellon, 58, are working to figure out next steps.
“We’re just going to have to process this and move on, after we clean all of this up,” she said as she and her daughter-in-law Alexis Pennington, 25, raked through the ash “looking for anything” on Monday afternoon, as the sun shone down on the area where their home once stood.
The pair spent time in an area they believed to have been a closet where memories, including photo albums of the two little girls, one 4 years old and the other 9 months, may have been stored. Castellon came across remnants of one of her granddaughter’s ceramic tea set.
“It’s funny how the ceramic stuff is kind of unfazed,” she said, “some of the plates, when I pick them up, they were brittle and broke.”
It’s hard, Castellon said as she surveyed the ruins. “You know, just the little things. Like the front of the house in that corner is where the kids’ play area was, with the toy box … things are just starting to hit as I’m going through everything.”
The evacuation order put in place Thursday, Oct. 10, was lifted Monday morning. By noon, authorities began letting residents back into the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park.
Resident Charles Jensen said he was told residents had to sign a waiver to enter, that they’d be permitted to get items, but then would have to leave.
Jensen said he could see his home, which survived the fire, from outside a chain-link fence put up around the park.
Earlier in the day, the Riverside County Department of Public Health had said items at the park burned in the fire might generate dangerous substances. It declared the park a “public health menace.”
A later notice from the Riverside County Department of Environmental Health said that while residents could retrieve personal items, they had to leave untouched anything regarded as “fire debris,” and could not do cleanup until permits are obtained.
The evacuation order, called Thursday, affected 500 residents, most of them living at the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park, where 76 homes were destroyed.
Items burned or destroyed at the park “may yield toxic, carcinogenic or otherwise dangerous chemicals or chemical byproducts that may cause immediate and serious health risks” to people exposed to it, the county’s Department of Public Health said in its order.
An assessment team was going through the mobile home park, Riverside County Department of Environmental Health spokeswoman Dottie Merki said Monday.
“But if you think of the normal things people store in their garage or storage sheds, it could be paint, batteries, oil, etc … All these items and more can become hazardous waste when burned,” she said in an email.
The fire was reported just before 2 p.m. Thursday at Sandalwood Drive and Seventh Street, near the 10 Freeway exit ramp.
Castellon said she had just left the mobile home park Thursday afternoon to take her 4-year-old granddaughter to daycare when the fire broke out. If not for that trip, both would have been in the park when the fire rushed through. Her service dog was rescued by a cousin, she said, and the others in her family were not home at the time.
Residents could be seen throughout the community Monday afternoon sifting through the remains, looking for whatever they could find.
“I wanted to see with my own eyes that I have nothing left, “ said Carmen Ward, a seven-year resident of the park.
For Castellon, she knows the recovery will not be a quick process, but how long it takes and where she and her family end up remains in question.
She is living for now with her son in Mentone. She said her RV, which was in the mobile home park but not parked near her home had been spared, and she was able to recover it.
“Our family is broken apart right now,” she said, with her son’s family staying in Highland.
“I just want to get, when I can, out of here,” she said. “I know it’s going to take some time, but I don’t want to come back – it’s too much for me.”