Fire Veers Away From School to National Forest

A brush fire that had scorched more than 130 acres in Ojai by late Wednesday night came perilously close to the Ojai Valley School earlier in the day before heading into Los Padres National Forest.

A team of firefighters was keeping watch on about six homes in Wilsie Canyon in the Upper Ojai northeast of the school, but fire officials said the houses were not directly threatened by the fire by 9 p.m.

The blaze, which fire officials believe may have been started by an arsonist, raged within 60 feet of the prep school’s chapel and dormitories, located at the end of Reeves Road.

“It is under investigation,” Joe Luna, Ventura County Fire Department spokesman, said of the fire’s suspicious origin. “We are talking to eyewitnesses.”

The 60 summer camp students at the school’s upper campus off of Highway 150 were on a field trip at Disneyland when the fire started at about 4:10 p.m. None of the three faculty members on site were injured in the blaze.

Firefighter Leonard Jenkins of the Ventura County Fire Department was taken to Ojai Valley Hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

Fire officials said two cousins, Jared Smith of Ventura and Evert Smith of Goleta, both 20, were paving asphalt on the school grounds when they saw smoke in the brush about 200 yards from the school.

The men called 911 and firefighters rushed to the scene by 4:25 p.m., to find three brush fires burning out of control.

Michael D. Hermes, the school’s president, said he was one of the first to begin fighting the flames.

“It was just a headmaster with a garden hose,” Hermes said. “Then it was two fire trucks and a headmaster and a garden hose. And it kept growing from there.”

Before the three blazes eventually merged into one bigger fire, a wall of flame raced up the side of a canyon toward several campus buildings before moving east into the forest.

By 6 p.m., more than 100 firefighters and 10 engines had swarmed to the eastern edge of the upper campus to battle the blaze, which covered the eastern outskirts of the town and the upper Ojai with ocher smoke.

As the fire cut a path through the canyon, it ruptured a 6-inch natural gas main.

A 30-foot tower of flame continued to shoot out from the pipe late Wednesday.

While firefighters in orange suits sprayed water from the ground, two helicopters and a tanker plane swooped down over hot spots and dropped water and fire retardant on the flames.

When the mercury dropped from a daytime high of 97 degrees and the wind died down, firefighters had managed to contain about 35% of the fire.

Firefighters and equipment from the U.S. Forest Service, the California Division of Forestry, San Luis Obispo and the Ventura County and Los Angeles County Fire Departments responded to the blaze.