Canadians in California brave wildfire threat

Jim Holt
For CanWest News Service


Thursday, October 25, 2007


SANTA CLARITA, Calif. -- Canadian Anne Marie McKinley says she would trade a "fire day" for a "snow day" anytime.

McKinley, a teacher and mother of two who grew up outside Toronto but moved to the U.S. and married an American, came here more than 10 years ago when local schools hired dozens of Canadian teachers.

"I would take a snow day over these fires any day," she said, referring to the cancellation of classes because of the threat of wildfires.

Since Sunday, raging wildfires have burned more than 35,000 hectares in the valley nestled between two mountain ridges of the Angeles National Forest. At least 32 structures here have been destroyed, including 15 homes.

When many Canadian expats think of wind, they remember the freezing northwestern gales of home. Now they also worry about the Santa Ana winds that, every fall, blow hot and dry through canyons to the Pacific Ocean.

"I felt so scared and sad for all the people who lost their homes, said McKinley, who was forced from her house in a mandatory evacuation of the neighbourhood.

"We got out an hour before they (Santa Clarita sheriff's deputies) came down our street and told everyone to leave. They were telling us: 'You need to leave your house. Bring your important belongings. We're evacuating the neighbourhood for the fire.'"

Packing her Canadian passport, green card, marriage licence and Disneyland season's pass, McKinley told her daughters, "We're going to stay with Aunt Jenny and it might be a sleepover."

For many of the more than 15,000 displaced people in Santa Clarita, it was a sleepover of two and even three nights. Some stayed at evacuation shelters set up by the Red Cross in local high schools.

Like McKinley, Trisha Fossa was a Canadian teacher hired a decade ago to come to California. She too married an American and stayed. Now she sells real estate and has carved out a niche dealing with other expatriate Canadians.

"I have two listings for homes for people who were evacuated Sunday," said Fossa, who grew up in Newmarket, Ont. "I had an open house and went over there, but I felt immediately threatened when I looked outside from their house and saw a glow of flame."

The mother of three said her own family upgraded from a wooden house that, during the last rash of wildfires, was in real danger.

"We washed our roof to keep it wet," Fossa recalls, "but when we moved here I had to explain to the kids that we didn't have to do that. They said, 'We're like the three little pigs and we're in a much better house now.'"

Keitha Roth moved here with her husband, Michael, from Montreal in 1998. By their front steps, the Maple Leaf flies next the Stars and Stripes. Both flags were horizontal for two days in the intense Santa Ana winds.

"The most frightening thing for me was the thought of some spark or ember floating airborne and landing on my roof. That was my biggest concern," Roth said.

Even so, she insisted the fires would not force her back to Montreal.

"This is an expected thing in California," she acknowledged