By Matthias Gafni
Contra Costa Times
SYLMAR, Calif. — About two dozen Contra Costa firefighters spent last week fighting the devastating Creek Fire in Southern California with a particularly unusual assignment.
The strike team surrounded the Wildlife Waystation — an animal sanctuary home to more than 400 permanent animal residents, including chimpanzees, tigers, lions, leopards, bears, wolves and hyenas — to protect the animals that could not be evacuated from the encroaching Creek Fire.
“You can’t say enough about the assistance the Waystation got,” said facility spokesman Jerry Brown. “Without the firefighters, I don’t even want to go into how nasty and terrible it could’ve been. They saved the place.”
The Creek Fire, which is now nearly fully contained, destroyed 60 homes and 63 outbuildings, and damaged nearly as many. It burned more than 15,000 acres, according to Cal Fire.
The blaze started early in the morning on Dec. 5 in a valley near the sanctuary and took off that night, eventually circling the isolated 160-acre exotic animal park in the hills north of Highway 210 in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley.
“We had just tremendous wind gusts,” said Brown, who has been associated with the sanctuary since 1995. “This was as windy as I’ve ever seen it.”
About two-thirds of the animals were evacuated, however some of the larger, more difficult animals had to remain as the fire burned into the property. More than two dozen horses were killed by the fire at a ranch a mile south of the sanctuary.
Ground crews and a sole helicopter dropping water during that first night stopped the main fire and fire crews doused hot spots and flare-ups in the following days, Brown said.
“It’s a unique facility,” Contra Costa Fire Capt. George Laing said. “The firefighters didn’t want the exotic animals to suffer from the approaching wildfires.”
Contra Costa firefighter photos show lions, and a bear and tiger among the animals inside their enclosures as flames neared the facility last week.
By Thursday, some of the older evacuated animals, such as diabetic primates, returned to the facility which was soliciting donations to cover the expensive relocation costs from the fire, Brown said.
Once the animals were safe, the Contra Costa strike team was reassigned to fight the Thomas Fire in Santa Barbara County, Laing said.
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