Getting the kids out

Suzie Harrison

El Morro Elementary School teachers Kathy Vick and Mary Blanton said

they remembered what happened during the fire in 1993 as if it were

yesterday.

They both had a perfect attendance with 30 or more kids in their

classrooms but noticed that their energy level was different. Blanton

was seven months pregnant, which didn’t make things any easier.

“We could see the smoke coming toward us, it was the Santa Ana

conditions,” Vick said. “Our secretary at the time, her husband was a

fireman on duty -- and a student in my class, her mother was in

charge of transportation. She called to see if we needed to have the

buses sent. It was a little before 1 p.m. at lunch time.”

They could see the fire coming closer through El Moro Canyon.

“It came to the fence line and burned to where the trash was,”

Vick said. “Parents were coming. We went to the high school; that was

the evacuation point.”

Blanton said that one of the hard things is that they couldn’t use

their cell phones, they weren’t working, and so they really had no

contact in that regard. They saw that the fire was in Newport Beach

behind Turtle Rock around the Cleveland National Forest and then in

Laguna Beach.

“Parents were having trouble getting through town, though some

parents got here before we evacuated,” Blanton said.

She said it added a bit of stress to the situation with a couple

of them yelling for their children and screaming that there was a

fire before the evacuation had been executed. But she said the

children fortunately remained calm.

“We put our students on the bus and told them we would meet them

at the high school,” Blanton said. “It was very smooth at the high

school gym.”

Blanton said she was hoarse from telling stories to keep the

children occupied while they waited at the high school for their

parents.

Vick’s class had pet mice. She said all the children grabbed them

before getting on the bus, some of them in their containers while

others held them in their hands.

“They talked to the mice to calm them,” Vick said.

The teachers recalled that one student was so stressed that he

held tightly onto his mouse talking to it and when his mother came

she had to release his grip. He didn’t realize that he had squeezed

the mouse to death.

“We watched the propane tanks blow up like rockets,” Vick said.

“Thank God the kids were gone.”

They said that everything looked so different and that the canyon

looked like a moonscape. It was so dark that it looked like night.

“I came back to my room and it had become the headquarters for the

Red Cross, there was food, cots, a truck outside,” Blanton said. “I

had to show my ID to get in.”

Other schools didn’t fare as well as El Morro, two thirds of the

classrooms at Thurston Middle School burned as well as the

continuation school at the high school.

School went back into session the following Monday at El Morro.

“The district brought in psychological help for the students,”

Blanton said. “It was wonderful.”

They were appreciative that during such a tragedy everyone came

together, which they said, is the nature of those who live in Laguna.