Without an official response team, O.C. volunteers rescue horses from the Airport fire

When the Airport fire first ignited the dry brush of the Trabuco Canyon foothills, Orange County equestrians sprang into action.

Without an official county animal response team, volunteers were on their own.

An email alert went out on Monday within 20 minutes of the fire‘s start to a list of 150 people on trailer teams telling them to hook up their trailers and be on call to help evacuate horses to safety.

Later that afternoon, Dee Dee Friedrich and her husband drove their three-horse trailer down from Yorba Linda to a staging area at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest.

From there, Friedrich and other equestrian volunteers headed to Oak Canyon Road in Trabuco Canyon as part of rescue efforts.

“There was a big, long line of horses,” Friedrich said. “We waited for the horses to come out of the canyon, loaded them up and got them out of there.”

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In all, 154 horses were hauled to safety by volunteers on Monday. Volunteers evacuated 168 more on Tuesday.

Friedrich took dozens to Serrano Creek Ranch in Lake Forest where owner Matt Rhyl helped board them. Other rescue volunteers transferred horses to stalls at the Orange County Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa.

Friedrich returned to Saddleback Church and remained there in case the blaze jumped canyons but called it a night shortly before 10 p.m. after she was assured her volunteer services were no longer needed.

The following day, the winds shifted and the Airport fire, which was accidentally sparked by public works crews, spread toward Lake Elsinore in Riverside County, engulfing its hillsides in flames.

Rescue efforts in O.C. took a wait-and-see approach with the blaze, which, as of Thursday morning, burned through more than 23,000 acres before it started to be contained.

The Airport fire drastically increases in size as seen from Alta Laguna Park on Tuesday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

For Friedrich, who serves as president of Yorba Linda Country Riders, the Airport fire wasn’t her first time ushering horses to safety. Since 2009, she volunteered for several fire rescues as a member of the county’s Large Animal Response Team, or LART, which began in San Juan Capistrano.

But at the start of this year, San Juan Capistrano city officials withdrew the team from countywide efforts, citing a dwindling roster of volunteers and a lack of adequate resources.

City officials warned that an alternative model was “imminently necessary” and later bemoaned the county’s lack of interest in taking over the program.

After the scale back, Freidrich, Marc Hedgepeth, who trained LART volunteers until 2018, and a dozen other equestrians from around O.C. started to organize.

They formed the Orange County Animal Response Team, which counts about 250 volunteer members.

The new group signed people up for a mass email list, met with Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner and held community meetings packed with equestrians in advocating for an official county animal response program by next year.

But the Airport fire — the first major wildfire to erupt in O.C. since LART’s withdrawal — burned before that time.

The Orange County Animal Response Team was ready to mobilize the best it could.

An evacuated horse wearing protective eye gear, known as a fly mask, at Serrano Creek Ranch in Lake Forest.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

“Our volunteers were great,” Friedrich said. “The fires are coming. All we need is access and communication. We actually did pretty well with access on both days, but communication is still a problem.”

Not knowing where to turn, some residents desperately took to the Nextdoor app in affected areas like Rancho Santa Margarita and asked for horse evacuation help.

“We keep pushing for Orange County Animal Care to basically take us under their wing and let us do our work,” Friedrich said. “That’s the gap. If it’s not going to be Orange County Animal Care, then who’s it going to be?”

Under the old LART program, volunteers operated under the county’s emergency chain of command and could not began any animal evacuation efforts until a formal request was made.

Absent that organizational structure, Orange County Animal Response Team volunteers headed to staging areas without any official activation — and with quicker response times.

Once the horses being evacuated were ushered into trailers, volunteers could count on a number of familiar places to stable them.

Evacuated horses wearing protective eye masks at Serrano Creek Equestrian in Lake Forest on Thursday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

The Orange County Fair and Event Center worked with LART in the past to safely house horses and other large animals at the fairgrounds’ equestrian center. With the Airport fire, fair officials coordinated with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department for large animal evacuations and O.C. Animal Care for smaller ones.

As of Thursday morning, 92 horses were sheltered at the site.

“We continue to be a resource for the community as these emergencies progress and will do all that we can to make sure animals have safe shelter as long as needed,” said Michele Richards, OC Fair’s chief executive. “The OC Fair & Event Center is here to serve and we have the resources to help.”

According to Rhyl, 46 horses were safely stabled at Serrano Creek Ranch on Thursday morning.

“Because we’ve doing this for so long, we have personal relationships with O.C. Animal Response Team members,” said Rhyl, who is also a member. “We didn’t have any contact with the Sheriff’s Department or O.C. Animal Care. It was our personal relationship with haulers.”

For all the successful animal evacuations carried out during the fire, the Orange County Animal Response Team remains steadfast in getting an official county program on board by 2025.

“We need to have insurance,” Friedrich said. “If something happens to somebody, if a trailer crashes or a horse gets hurt, we don’t want our volunteers being sued. We need an umbrella over us that insures our volunteers.”