Thomas Fire Ventura County

[Mike_The_Grad]

My name is Mike Moraga, I live about 2 miles away from where the Thomas Fire started in Santa Paula,CA. The fire is named after Thomas Aquinas College, a private Roman-Catholic Liberal Arts college with about 350 students enrolled. The fire began around 6:30 P.M. PST on Monday 12/4/2017. The fire originated in close proximity to the college, we are still unsure if it began on the college grounds or not.The fire had grown from 25 acres to nearly 30,000 acres in a matter of about 3 hours.
I was not home at the time of the fires beginning. I was about 11 miles away in the city of Ventura visiting a close friend who has been in i.c.u. since Friday 12/1/2017. He was found unconscious with life threatening injuries in front of a private religious elementary school in the city of Ventura that Friday. Currently there are no witnesses, no explanation, and no Idea who or what happened to him. He has internal organ damage, a fractured skull, and a fractured arm. He is the only person that knows what happened and has just regained consciousness this morning. I will know more tomorrow.
After I left the hospital I went to visit another close friend who resides in Ventura also. It was then that I had learned about the fire that was burning just a few miles from my home. Having not heard directly from my family I figured it was probably something small and was being handled by our already prepared local Santa Paula Fire Dept. This was around 9:00 P.M.
About 11:30 P.M. the power went out while I was still in Ventura at my buddy's house. Didn't bother us much as we already had a couple beers. I walked outside to see the extent of the power outage when I noticed a bright orange glow in the sky above a very close hillside.(about 100 yds. away)
Not 15 minutes later we heard bullhorns and saw red flashing lights coming down the street. We were being mandatory evacuated. My buddy and his fiancee gathered the 2 kids ages 5 and 3, and jumped into their car and split. I jumped into my truck and followed them. We made it about 100 yds. When it was deadstopped from every person in the neighborhood and that side of the city doing the same thing. He lives about a mile and a half from the only freeway in or out of that side of town. It took me 45 minutes to reach the freeway. During that time i witnessed what can happen to people when they are scared. People yelling, arguing, honking horns, and only thinking of themselves. I chose not to add to the chaos and instead waved people on ahead of myself and let others get that extra foot of space they were so adamant about getting. I received lots of dirty looks because of this. I was driving my 1972 C10 LWB with a fresh rebuilt bored out 350 with a comp cam kit, headers and 3" Super 40 Flowmaster dual exhaust. I do not have my horn connected currently as I dont see a need for it. A quick blip of the go fast pedal seems to get me pretty well noticed by anyone within a block. Suddenly people were not so quick to fill the dead space in front or behind me. This allowed me to wave people on that I had noticed were not being allowed to enter the flow of traffic.

We all met up at my friends work about 3 miles away which coincidentally was the evacuation shelter site. He works at the fairgrounds in Ventura and has a key for every door in the place. He set up his family in the fully stocked warehouse and settled in. I finally found out that the flames coming over the top of the hillside were from the same fire that started 11 miles away in Santa Paula. It took less than 5 hours for the fire to cover this distance.

I then received a phone call from my family stating that we were now being mandatory evacuated. So I jumped back in my truck and set out for home. There was hardly another vehicle on the freeway leading me home. There is about a 5 mile stretch of highway that parallels the foothills between the two cities. I could see fire and flames along the entire ridgeline between the two cities. I arrived home to what I can best compare to as a scene from an apocalyptic-action movie. The neighborhood was surrounded on all sides by fire. The flames were just a couple of hundred feet away from my backyard. Half of the neighbors were already gone. The ones left were the ones that I know very well and were just minutes away from leaving themselves. My brother met me at home and we gathered what we considered to be important at that moment in time. Water, T.P., sleeping bags, flashlights, batteries, and our firearms and ammo. Not because we felt that we were going to need them but because we didnt know when or if we were coming back and who would be around ransacking the neighborhood.
I pulled out of my driveway at 4:00 A.M. on Tuesday 12/5. As I got in my truck I looked at the hillside just a few hundred feet behind my house and could see the flames licking the bottom of a high tension wire electrical tower, these lines are directly over my home. It was enough to convince me that leaving was the right thing to do.

My family and some of our neighbors met up at the main shopping center in town. During this entire time the winds were whipping and gusts were estimated at over 60 M.PH. they were blowing my truck all over the road. We sat in the parking lot until sunrise and then some. My brother navigated his way back up to the house about 6 hours after we left. The fire was even closer to our home and the smoke was so thick there was practically zero visibility. He immediately returned to the shopping center. I live in another city aside from my family about 30 miles away. There was no fire there so i headed home to get some rest. My family decided to stay and wait it out. They were able to return home late that evening. Luckily our home was fine and so was our entire neighborhood. Power was out until yesterday. The fire is still uncontained as of friday 12/8. Here are some known facts as of the time of me typing this. Around 30,000 have been evacuated.