‘Get! Get! Get!’ How a Camp Fire survivor escaped another California inferno with his family

Kurt Balasek reluctantly lay on the couch about 11 p.m. It was a strategically uncomfortable spot where he would wake up often and have a view of the hills.

A couple of ridges over, western winds were fanning a wildfire racing in the hills northwest of Vacaville. Balasek, 57, had built his stucco home with a tile roof and defensible space about 15 years ago to stand against these kinds of fires. He’d carved a road-sized trench into the hills to use as a fire-break around the house he shares with his wife Connie Balasek, and 88-year-old father, Jerry Balasek.

He didn’t get any sleep. By 11:30 p.m., a sheriff’s deputy arrived on Quail Canyon Road with bad news. Balasek woke up Connie and Jerry and stepped outside to grab a duffle bag. That’s when he saw the flames had crowned the ridge and were about one-third of the way down the hill.

“They were rolling,” he said.

Balasek turned to Connie and Jerry. “Get! Get! Get!”

In the hours and days that followed, the LNU Lightning Complex Fire would grow into a 350,000-acre behemoth ranking among the largest in California history. It has so far obliterated hundreds of homes and burned lasting memories into the minds of people who’ve grown used to fires in the area.

And it would be deja vu for Jerry Balasek, who had the “whirling, strange kind of feeling” two years ago, when he fled Paradise as fire approached the town.

“There’s a wind that precedes a fire that’s quite different than any other kind of wind,” he said. “I’ve only experienced it twice: Once in Paradise. And once the other night.”

The Balasek home is at the end of Quail Canyon Road, off Pleasants Valley Road, where the family ranch for which the road is named has stood for nearly 150 years. The Pleasants settled the valley in the mid-19th century, and the ranch and Victorian-style home is a landmark added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.

Smaller homes, ranches and horse pastures dotted both sides of the Quail Canyon as the road twists and climbs three miles from the valley. Balasek has tended to a grove of olive trees at the end for about a decade. He’s won gold medals in olive oil tasting competitions and sold at farmer’s markets, but now he mostly just gives the oil away to friends and family.

Most of the people who live down Quail Canyon are older, said Balasek, who works at an engineering consultant firm in West Sacramento. Some neighbors have moved in more recently, but many have roots in the region dating decades.

“You move out into the country and your nearest neighbor is a quarter-mile away, but you know everyone for 5 miles around,” he said. “You have to rely on these people.”

‘Petrified’

As his family piled into separate cars last Tuesday night and navigated the steep driveway’s twists and turns, Kurt Balasek armed himself with three hoses.

It was stupid, he admits now. Connie says she was “petrified.”

But he was confident he’d taken the steps over the years to fend off a fire, even with the absence of emergency crews that had been completely overrun by the magnitude of Northern California’s fires.

Grass fires can be easier to contend with than those in places with trees, or dense brush because the light and flashy fuels don’t burn as long. It can be more difficult for them to spread to homes or other structures. But grass fires can move rapidly and can be unpredictable, which is why experts want people to heed evacuation warnings.

“I do remember a gut-wrenching feeling in my stomach when the first spot fires came off the main fire and spotted on my property,” Kurt said.

“Here we go,” he remembered thinking. “We’re starting now.”

From one spot to another, he doused the flames before they found footholds in what little dried grass he hadn’t scrubbed to dirt in the preceding months. Flames raced toward the house. He kept spraying.

Then the winds shifted to the north and shoved the fire back on itself and away from his home. Local firefighters arrived about 10 minutes later and they, too, urged him to leave. When he said he wouldn’t, Kurt said they looked around, told him to patrol the property every 15 minutes and immediately snuff any spot fires.

“It was really good advice,” he said.

“It doesn’t have to be a big conflagration to take the house,” he remembered them telling him. “More often, it’s just a little fire.”

As Kurt Balasek burned through his water supply, the fire spread through Quail Canyon, blackening all directions of Balasek’s home by morning.

He wouldn’t learn until later Wednesday morning what happened as his family fled down the hill.

‘Nothing left in Paradise’

A longtime teacher and retired principal for Paradise High School, the father, Jerry Balasek, was anchored in the community when the Camp Fire came through in November 2018. Under a black sky, he made his way through the logjam of anxious residents fleeing toward Chico.

The Camp Fire destroyed his home. Jerry escaped with only the clothes on his back and decided to move in with his son at the end of Quail Canyon Road.

“There was nothing left in Paradise then for me,” he said.

When Jerry jumped into the Toyota Tacoma and Connie into the Honda Pilot, flames were crossing the road at the bottom of the driveway and moving into the grove of olive trees. The fire nearly cut off their escape route.

Connie was following the pickup, at least in theory. She couldn’t see much through the thick smoke.

“I had no idea where he was,” she said.

“All of a sudden I just saw these horses and their eyes, just panicked,” she said.

Two horses barreled down the road, Connie said. One veered off, but the smaller one collided with Connie’s SUV. With the car still driveable, she maneuvered it down the rest of Quail Canyon and saw a fire engine up ahead. Jerry’s truck came into view. The front was also smashed in. Jerry had also crashed into a horse and likely totaled the Tacoma.

Jerry ultimately abandoned the truck and got in the SUV with Connie. They navigated the turns as flames tore across the road and eventually arrived at a friend on the area fire district board.

After a momentary sigh of relief, flames forced Jerry and Connie away again.

Later, Jerry took inventory of what he grabbed before driving down Quail Canyon. The pants he was wearing had been burned by an ember. So had three new shirts he bought after he lost everything in Paradise.

It dawned on him. Without realizing it, he must’ve left the truck window rolled down during his escape.

Two wrecked cars, ‘survivor’s remorse’

Dozens of homes and buildings were destroyed along Quail Canyon Road. On Thursday, crews from area fire districts and the nearby prisons in Vacaville were conducting damage assessments in the area as utility poles, trees and debris piled on foundations still smoldered.

The Balaseks’ house on the hill was among the few on Quail Canyon Road that wasn’t damaged.

Kurt Balasek said he has “survivor’s remorse.”

He also had a list of things to do.

With the power out, there was no way to pump water into the storage tanks. He’d have to deal with having two vehicles damaged — potentially totaled — after crashing into the horses. He had to dig a new hole for a PG&E pole.

Some of the property needed cleaning up. Some still smoldered, mostly wood chips near a patch of tomatoes on the edge of the hill. He armed himself with a shovel, like he had done a lot the past couple days, and walked into the vegetable garden.

Forty-eight hours after the firestorm, a pile of wood chips had begun burning again.

In a dry humor kind of way that often follows disasters, he made an observation out loud.

“I guess zucchini’s over for the season.”

This story was originally published August 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘Get! Get! Get!’ How a Camp Fire survivor escaped another California inferno with his family."