“I’ve seen some exciting stuff, but not like this for a while,” he said. “Do I miss it? No.”Īli Taranto and her husband, Tim, own a house in the neighborhood. They saw news about the fire on a neighborhood Facebook page and drove from Winslow, where she works as a nurse about an hour away, to check on the 5-acre (2-hectare) property.Īli Taranto drove past the neighborhood’s namesake Girls Ranch property, once a home for troubled girls, and saw parts of the white fence melted to the ground. She checked on her neighbor, Marianne Leftwich, who said she was fine. But Taranto didn’t hear from her for about an hour. Then, Leftwich’s daughter called to say her mother was stuck in her house. Taranto alerted emergency responders, she said, but dispatch told her she’d probably get to Leftwich before they could.
Taranto found the woman semi-conscious and gasping for air, in need ofhelp to evacuate, Taranto said. “Thank God I got there and got her out in time.” “As a community in an emergency like this, all the systems were totally overwhelmed,” Taranto said. Taranto took Leftwich’s dogs to a kennel, then returned to rescue a goat and a cow she saw roaming around nearby. Other than some burned grass and brush, Taranto’s property was unscathed. Harriet Young’s house overlooks the neighborhood. She hired an arborist last year to remove dead trees and cut low-lying branches as a fire-prevention measure. She had pinkish gravel laid on the long driveway and around the front of her house. Young believes it saved the home she and her late husband built in the 1990s. The wildfire burned all around it, sparing the house and the invasive olive trees that her daughter wished hadn’t survived.