Defying evacuation order in wildfire: brave, foolhardy or both?

LOWER LAKE, Lake County — In virtually every wildfire in California lately, there has been a brave soul with a garden hose and too much chutzpah who defies evacuation orders and takes a stand against the towering flames. “We were pretty much the only people,” said John, who lives with his father, Gary, on Second Street, and who did not want to use their last names for fear of reprisals after they defied an evacuation order, which was blasted over a loudspeaker on Second Street for all to hear. The heroics were, at best, ill advised, according to fire officials, who point out that most people who die in fires are individuals who think they know more than the experts. “A lot of people who have made it through fires before and were fine start to think they are going to be OK in every fire, but they don’t understand fire behavior,” said Daniel Berlant, the spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The four people who died in Lake County’s Valley Fire last year did not evacuate when the order came and appeared to have been trapped when flames shut off escape routes. The reasons for not leaving a home threatened by flames vary widely, but fire officials say a failure to grasp the danger is often part of the problem Brent Wolfe, 54, who owns Wolfe Ranch Quail, ignored evacuation orders during the Wragg Fire in Napa and Solano counties last year in an attempt to save the 12,000 quail he raises on his property. Scott Binion and his sister Erika Binion braved a mushroom cloud of flame during the same fire in an effort to preserve “20 years of memories” on their 2,000-acre cattle ranch in Pleasant Valley. The worst-case scenario happened five years ago in Australia, when 175 people failed to evacuate during a fire and then panicked when the flames rolled in, all crowding onto a road, where they were consumed by flames as they waited in gridlock traffic.