[MarinTeams] 10/23 SoCal Fires: As stables fill, owners urged to rely on friends, family to house animals

[Kate Danaher]

Read down to paragraph with **** re: role of Ham Radios in horse
evacuation...

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20071023-9999-bn23horses.html

Owners scramble to find safe haven for horses

As stables fill, owners urged to rely on friends, family to house animals
By Elizabeth Fitzsimons,

UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
October 23, 2007

Trailers wrapped around the Del Mar Fairgrounds yesterday  morning, some
waiting as long as two hours to unload some of the thousands of horses
evacuated from ranches and backyard stables threatened by the county
wildfires.

But by 9:30 a.m., the fairgrounds' 2,400 stalls were full. Horse owners who
didn't make it had to look elsewhere: to friends and family with barns or
land, to an evacuation site in Lakeside or stables in San Juan Capistrano,
Thermal and Indio.

Much of San Diego County is horse country, home to thoroughbred breeding
ranches and countless backyard stables housing family pets. As many as
300,000 horses live in the county, and when people flee from the fires, so
do the horses.

Volunteers with trailers and law enforcement, including a team of San Diego
mounted police officers driving horse trailers, went in search of horses to
rescue.

Dianna Bonny, 44, of Olivenhain towed one of the last trailers into the
fairgrounds. But she still had 21 other horses she needed to move.

The wind was whipping ash, dust and palm fronds as Bonny pulled two horses
from their trailer and into stalls. Horses in the row stomped their feet and
threw back their heads. Some bared their teeth.

³We should have started this at 4 in the morning, but you just don't know,²
she said, shaking her head.

Nearby, word carried fast that the fairgrounds had closed.

Horse owners in Rancho Santa Fe and Olivenhain were looking for other
options: calling friends with barns or even large yards outside the
evacuation areas, or gathering horses into other paddocks and outdoor stalls
in areas away from trees and chaparral.

At El Camino del Norte near Del Dios Highway in Rancho Santa Fe, which was
ordered evacuated, about a dozen people were parked at a roadblock. Several
said they were moving horses from Rancho East, a private stables in the
neighborhood with about 60 horses. By midafternoon, only about 10 horses had
been moved off the property. The decision was made to take the rest of the
horses out of the barns and into the stables' outdoor pens.

Cardiff resident Gerri Minott said she had taken one of her horses from
Rancho East to Ride America, a horse boarding and training facility in
Carlsbad, but a race horse she owned was too high-strung to be moved. She
put that horse into a Rancho East paddock.

³Smoke just got worse and worse. We moved them out of the barns, where there
was wood, into steel-pipe pens,² she said.

Geanna Schmidt moved her horse at 5:30 a.m. and then helped others in Rancho
Santa Fe and Olivenhain. At 1:30 p.m. she had just returned from taking a
horse to a yard in Encinitas.

³We were kind of hoping we could get one more load,² she said.

At a county-operated evacuation site at the Lakeside Rodeo grounds, horses
from Jamul, Lakeside and Ramona were cataloged and photographed. Most had
owners that were accounted for. Others had been picked up wandering the
streets in burned areas.

The grounds had room for about 300 horses.

³Because the fire is all over the county, people are really scrambling,²
said Jim White, regional director of the county's Department of Animal
Services. ³We're running out of places to take horses.²

He asked that horse owners rely on friends and family, not evacuation
centers, to help them house their animals.

Thoroughbred breeders, some with farms in the eye of the Witch Creek fire,
also evacuated their animals. The Golden Eagle and Ballena Vista Farms
outside Ramona, which rank among the most prominent facilities in the state
for breeding and raising thoroughbreds, were evacuated but had escaped major
damage.

³We had taken an aggressive stance on fire prevention and it paid off,² said
Larry Mabee who, with his mother, Betty, owns and operates Golden Eagle.

³It's an island in the middle of the fire zone,² Mabee said late yesterday
morning. ³No loss of buildings, no horses or people injured.²

On Sunday, thick smoke engulfed the countryside just north and east of
Ramona along state Route 78 and flames crept over the hillsides. At one
point Mabee went to check on neighboring Ballena Vista Farm, just across
Route 78, but he couldn't see more than a few feet through the smoke. He
later found out the farm was unscathed.

In North County, the major thoroughbred facilities in Bonsall ­ San Luis Rey
Downs Training Center and Vessels Stallion Farm ­ took in horses of all
breeds and other animals.

****³We have rescue volunteers manning ham radios to guide people in through
the road closures,² owner Frank ³Scoop² Vessels said. ³Unfortunately ­ or
fortunately ­ we've done this before, and we're pretty organized and trying
to do the best we can to help our buddies.²

About 200 spaces were available yesterday afternoon at the Galway Downs
Training Center in Temecula. Four years ago when the Cedar fire struck,
Debbie Constantino was out of town at a horse show. Her three horses, taken
from her Blossom Valley home by a friend, were freed in the chaos and lost
for weeks, ending up in Granite Hills, Del Mar and Bonita.

This time, Constantino was prepared. She packed up the saddles, the feed,
the buckets. She took a Sharpie marker and wrote her cell phone number on
the horses' left front hooves.

³I can't believe this is happening again,² she said. Her nerves were getting
the best of her, and the horses sensed it.

But she and the paint horses were safe now at the Lakeside Rodeo grounds.
She patted one on the thigh; in the other hand she held an unlighted
Marlboro Light.

³I've been saying my prayers and I made sure I grabbed my Bible,² she said.
³If anything happens to the house, I know I got the important things.²