Permanent markers and borrowed trailers: How hundreds of horses, cows escaped Creek Fire
Margo Ortiz wrote her phone number on the sides of her three horses and their hooves in permanent marker.
As her family prepared to evacuate its Pine Ridge home and a friend with a horse trailer hadn’t come yet, Ortiz thought about the Camp Fire in Paradise in northern California in 2018. That wildfire swept in so fast it killed 85 people.
“If it got bad, I was just gonna let ‘em loose, let ‘em run, and they’ll take care of themselves,” she said of horses Gidget, Cowboy and Pocha (short for Pocahontas).
Residents are still evacuating as the Creek Fire northeast of Fresno continues to spread, with more than 166,000 acres already burned and the fire at zero percent containment.
In the days since it ignited, hundreds of horses, cows, sheep, goats and pigs have been trucked down the hill to safety.
When families scrambled to gather their belongings, many faced an extra layer of anxiety about what to do with their large animals. They don’t fit in the backseat of a car, and many in the foothills and mountains don’t own trailers to move them.
“It’s just a very hard decision. You’re stressed and you just love your pets so much,” said Leslie Harris, who was managing a temporary shelter with 80 horses and 60 cows at the Clovis Rodeo grounds.
Opening the gates and letting them run free is a last resort, done with hopes that the owners will somehow reunite with their pets when the danger has passed.
Most of the time, it doesn’t come to that.
Evacuating horses, cows
The nonprofit Central California Disaster Team connects animal owners to people with trailers. Their help sometimes comes after owners have made multiple phone calls to acquaintances and desperate pleas for help on social media.
More commonly, neighbors who own horse trailers help each other out, said Jeff Kermode, the disaster team’s public information officer and retired police chief of Tehachapi.
“There’s a lot of private evacuations going on,” he said. “Somebody with a trailer hauls somebody’s horses to somebody’s ranch.”
Multiple temporary shelters have also been set up in and around Fresno.
The disaster team is housing more than 300 small animals like cats and dogs (plus one garter snake) at a Clovis middle school.
In addition to the shelter at the rodeo grounds where Gidget, Cowboy and Pocha are staying, the group is also running a shelter at the Fresno Fairgrounds. There, 575 horses, cows, chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, and rabbits are fed and cared for by volunteers.
The shelters rely on donations of feed and equipment. One person donated 515 bales of hay recently.
They’ve been so inundated with donations in recent days that they have everything they need. Instead, they’re hoping people will donate money at the organization’s website so they can restock supplies for the next disaster.
Is their house safe?
The Ortiz family spent days worrying about their home on Peterson Road, not too far from Cressman’s General Store, a landmark 116-year-old business on Highway 168 that was destroyed by fire.
They evacuated the horses twice. The first time, a neighbor took them to a property in the Burrough Valley area. The truck’s brakes gave out at the tail end of the trip.
Then the fire spread and the family was told they needed find another way to evacuate the horses again. The sheriff’s department eventually helped haul the them to Clovis.
Meanwhile, the family left its chickens and ducks behind on the property.
Unable to go back into the evacuation zone, they worried about their animals and their house, especially after hearing that some houses on their road had burned.
But they didn’t have to worry about their horses, Margo’s husband Chris Ortiz said.
“It’s a load off your mind because you’re thinking about your house, and you don’t have to worry about your horses, but you can come visit them every day,” he said.
The family have been staying at a Fresno hotel and on Wednesday brought 8-year-old granddaughter Marla, (who lives with them along with her three siblings) to visit the horses.
And they finally got good news. A neighbor who is a firefighter working in the area sent them a picture of their home – still standing, untouched by fire.
Margo Ortiz “broke down” a little when she got that picture, but was relieved, she said, as her granddaughter pet the horses and her husband mucked out the pen they were in.
“My wife’s really happy today,” Chris Ortiz said. “The last couple days she’s been a wreck. This is the only thing that makes her happy.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2020 at 12:51 PM with the headline "Permanent markers and borrowed trailers: How hundreds of horses, cows escaped Creek Fire."
