Family loses home to July wildfire
REDDING, CALIF. — To residents, the fire tornado shown on the news in the early days of California's Carr Fire was a terrifying component of that blaze.
To 1998 Knoch High School graduate Becky (Neubert) Dominguez, it was the unexpected tempest that destroyed everything she owned.
Dominguez moved to Redding four years ago with her husband and baby in tow, and chose a home near the Sacramento River where the chances of suffering a wildfire were pegged at eight in 100.
“Our flood risk was higher than our fire risk, and we're not even in a flood zone,” Dominguez said Monday from her job as director of development at the Shasta Family YMCA in Redding.
Dominguez explained that she and her young family, which includes husband, Benjamin, daughter, Selah, and son, Rowan, were on vacation in the British Virgin Islands on July 26, when they got a call from the friends who were house sitting for them.
At the time, the family knew the Carr fire, which had started 10 to 13 miles from their subdivision at Whiskeytown Lake, was burning but not threatening their neighborhood.
That day over the phone, friends told her there was a possibility of evacuation, but Dominguez still didn't panic. She knew Cal Fire employees, for safety reasons, frequently evacuated neighborhoods where the power would be shut down during fire events.
“I didn't think it was that serious,” Dominguez said.
The family went to bed that night enjoying their time in tropical paradise. At home, utter chaos was breaking out.
Dominguez said the house sitters took the family's dogs for a walk along the Sacramento River.
“They said it was very eerie, because there was a glow in the distance,” Dominguez said. “Then people started running up and saying 'The fire has jumped the river! Run!' People were running around and screaming.”
Dominguez' friends hightailed it back to the subdivision, which was in the direct path of the raging fire. Firefighters drove up and down the subdivision's streets with bullhorns, shouting “Get out now! Get out now!” Dominguez said.
“It happened so quickly that the first responders were not in a position to save the structures at that point,” she said. “They were just trying to save lives.”
The house sitters hastily put the Dominguezes' dogs in the car and evacuated immediately as the flames descended on the neighborhood.
The infamous fire tornado that appeared on social media and evening news reports — which developed from a fire so powerful that it formed its own ecosystem — barreled straight through the subdivision, destroying the Dominguez home and car in minutes.
In addition to being comprised of flames, the strange twister behaved like a traditional F-3 tornado, blowing off her neighbors' roofs and uprooting trees as well as heaving the foundation on the Dominguez home.
The fire tornado was also extremely fast moving.“My neighbors thought they were going to burn in their cars because the fire was so close to them,” Dominguez said.Her friends and dogs managed to escape to their own home on the east side of Redding, where the fire did not jump the river.The next day, a neighbor's son snuck back into the closed-off neighborhood before the National Guard arrived and managed to snap a photo of the Dominguez property.The neighbors called the family to tell them all their possessions were gone.“It was disbelief, thinking 'Oh my gosh, what does this mean? Is this possible?'” Dominguez said.She initially turned down the offer of a text message that included a photo of the property, then asked the neighbor to go ahead and send it.“My car was exploded in the driveway,” Dominguez said. “The windshield was melted onto the dashboard and there was nothing left but the frame.”In true tornado fashion, the fire destroyed the house and car, but left the playground structure standing.The family returned several days later and stayed in Sacramento for a night, until they could decide where to go.The Rotary Club Dominguez belongs to lined up a few rental houses for the family to look at, and they chose one at the untouched opposite end of the subdivision before making the journey to their former home.“We took friends and family to be with us when we saw the house for the first time,” Dominguez said. “We didn't take the kids along.”After the initial shock of seeing her home in ashes, Dominguez called upon her church's Global Response Team, which usually deploys to earthquakes and hurricanes in other countries.“They never expected that they would deploy in our own community,” she said.The team, clad in special suits and respirators, began the process of “ashing out,” which means shoveling a home's ashes into a sifting box in the hopes of finding small valuables.Dominguez said the team recovered only a few small Christmas ornaments and a pottery mug made by her husband's sister before she became disabled.“Really, nothing survived,” she said.It was determined that the fire reached about 2,000 degrees at the Dominguez property, as brass items were melted but cast iron did not.While they still own the property, the family signed rights to it over to the city of Redding so they could access the plot for demolition and removal of toxic substances.The military homeowners insurance the family carried, because Ben's father is a Vietnam War veteran, responded within 24 hours of the neighborhood being reopened, and gave the family cash for immediate needs.“Now, I'm back at work and we're trying to piece together a house,” Dominguez said. “We're shopping every day.”
Naturally, the Dominguez' first priority is their children and any trauma they might experience from the fire's results.“We are trying to be present and make sure the kids have our attention and emotional energy,” Dominguez said.The family will rebuild on their property, which is being cleaned up quickly so rain doesn't wash toxic effluence into the river.Dominguez does not worry about another wildfire.“It was a ridiculous environmental fluke,” she said of the fire tornado. “It just came and touched certain things and left.”She said 30 to 40 percent of the homes in Redding were destroyed, which amounts to about 40,000 residents being displaced.All of Dominguez' Butler County relatives reached out to support her family after the fire, and she is sure many will travel west when the rebuild begins.“My poor Granny is having heart trouble because she is so worried,” Dominguez said.Like any father, Luke Neubert, who now lives in Florida, is sick about the fire but glad his daughter and her family are safe.“The rest we can replace over time,” Neubert said. “God is good.”When Neubert heard about the fire on the news, he called Dominguez, but her cell phone reception was spotty in the British Virgin Islands.“Then she texted and said 'There's a good chance the house is gone,'” he recalled. “That's all she said.”When he finally talked to his daughter, she confirmed that her home had quickly gone up in flames. He said she instructed the house sitters to grab a few important papers and a violin in addition to the dogs before fleeing.Neubert said he will miss visiting the three-bedroom, two-bath home taken by the blaze. He said Ben Dominguez had just finished building a pergola in the back yard. It was a victim of the fire as well.“She knows she was really blessed and protected from (the fire),” Neubert said. “She didn't have to see it and the kids didn't have to see it.”There was no discussion about the Dominguez family moving to Pennsylvania, where the green environment does not support wildfires of the kind ravaging California.“I said 'If you need to come home, sure, and if you need to build a new house, I'll come and help you,'” Neubert said. “She's very intelligent, and she's old enough to make her own decisions.”He said the entire extended family is glad to have the wildfire and its effect on Dominguez behind them.“It's something you don't see in Western Pennsylvania, that's for sure,” he said.Family members have set up a GoFundMe page for the Dominguez family, which can be viewed by visiting www.gofundme.com and searching “Ben and Becky Dominguez.”
