One way out: Did Lompico’s narrow escape from CZU leave it more vulnerable to the next big wildfire?

A few years ago, on his way to Loch Lomond for a fishing trip with his son, Santa Cruz County Sheriff Chris Clark drove through the small, dense mountain community of Lompico. What he saw left him gravely worried.

As he drove, Clark tried to put himself in the position of someone evacuating from a disaster — his office is responsible for overseeing evacuations, as it did during the CZU Lightning Complex fire five years ago.

Lompico has one way in and one way out. Flammable ferns dangle over the main road off a sheer canyon wall and vegetation crowds the banks of the creek on the other side. On residential streets, cars squeeze between redwoods and fences on one-way roads so steep, winding and gnarled that several corners have fish-eye mirrors to see around them. Cracks and potholes riddle the private, unmaintained roads. It leaves little room for a large group of people to all be able to evacuate quickly and easily in event of a fire, and it’s the only escape route.

“Frankly, it scared me to death,” Clark said at a fire preparedness town hall last month. “Because in my mind, I’m putting together: How am I going to get these folks out of here?”

Five years ago, the 85,500 acre-CZU fire came within 3 miles of Lompico and neighboring Zayante, largely sparing these isolated mountain communities. While residents were forced to evacuate for only a short period of time, the fire’s proximity endures in recent memory. Avoiding the fire has been a mixed blessing. It means that today, a century of dried vegetation has built up, leaving Lompico’s steep box canyon extremely vulnerable come fire season.

Lompico remains among the Santa Cruz County communities most vulnerable to wildfire. The CZU near-miss has left the community working to solve a host of challenges to protect it from the next big blaze: deteriorating private roads, limited firefighting resources, and an influx of new residents unfamiliar with rural fire risks.

Officials and residents alike hold no misconception that they can avoid a future fire disaster in the area. Residents say they are clearing out brush and gutters, sealing wooden decks, paying thousands to remove trees near their houses, installing sprinkler systems and trying to harden their homes as much as their budgets will allow. After witnessing CZU’s devastation, interest in grassroots fire and disaster preparedness organizations surged in Lompico and Zayante. 

Traveling Lompico winding roads again on his fishing trip, Clark said he decided to act, so he contacted other local leaders, beginning the discussions that lead to the town halls. The way he saw it, the people directly affected deserved all the information officials could give them.

More than 150 people attended two town hall meetings held at the Zayante firehouse this summer, where a panel presented on how residents should prepare for a fire. The panel included Clark, Zayante Fire Protection District Chief Jeff Maxwell, District 5 County Supervisor Monica Martinez, Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience Director David Reid, Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Lt. Nick Baldrige and, at the July meeting only, Cal Fire Unit Chief Jed Wilson.

Several local leaders and residents told Lookout that the mountains’ changing demographics was a large motivator for the increased fire education. As home prices and rents continue to soar across Santa Cruz County, more people are moving from urban places to more affordable rural areas, often with the expectation the government will provide services or utilities that simply don’t exist in unincorporated parts of the county. 

Zayante Fire Protection District serves the area from just north of Felton almost to the border with Santa Clara County. It has three volunteer-run stations, in Zayante, Lompico and on Upper Zayante Road near Summit Road. Of Maxwell’s 28-person department, 25 are volunteers.

Lina Ortiz Grupper moved to her Lompico house with her partner and their two children in April after living in San Jose, Los Angeles and New York. She said she’s excited to raise her children, aged 5 and 2, immersed in nature, and she’s fallen in love with the area already. Before moving, she and her partner, whose brother is a firefighter, talked about the risks of fire in the mountains.

They decided the location superseded the potential risk but moved in with a resolve to reduce their fire risk factors as much as possible. While watching two kids, she and her partner spend their time clearing brush from their property and sealing their wooden deck.

“We are preparing like it’s our full-time job at the moment,” Ortiz Grupper said. “We settled into everything and are at this point in the process where we’re just making sure that it’s our priority.”

Ortiz Grupper said her landlord has fire insurance, but her family wasn’t able to get renters insurance because of the CZU fire. If a fire were to burn down her home, her family would struggle to recover, she said.

“It would impact us in a pretty big way, being a low-income household,” she said. “We try to have an emergency fund at all times, but it’s quite small.”

Emergency preparedness plays a bigger role in her life than it has before. She worries about neighbors who are seniors or those with have disabilities who might struggle to leave as quickly as needed in an evacuation.

Longtime Zayante resident Elisabet Hiatt is similarly concerned about her mentally disabled neighbor who uses a wheelchair, another who is often rushed to the hospital with medical emergencies, and a third neighbor, a 101-year-old with limited mobility. 

“They’re our neighbors, we care about each other and we take care of each other,” Hiatt said. “I’m really concerned about them.”

Hiatt lives in the same house she’s had for 40 years with her husband, two horses, five chickens, a dog, a cat and a bird. Their property backs up to 300 acres of woods.

To access her street, she must cross Zayante Creek on a one-way bridge. While the bridge itself is sturdy and built for industrial use, a tree or car that blocks the road would render her and her neighbors unable to leave. During an earthquake in the 1980s, Hiatt dodged abandoned cars in the road driving back to her house from downtown Santa Cruz. She said she worries about people who will panic and do “really, really stupid things” in emergency situations, like leave a car on that bridge. 

An old railroad bed owned and padlocked by the Santa Cruz Water Department is her only other potential escape route. Hiatt said with no key to the gate, she’d have to abandon her animals and walk out through the woods. Several of her neighbors wouldn’t be able to walk away. 

Hiatt always keeps her van hitched to her horse trailer and loaded with a three-day supply of clothes and food, be it for a spontaneous camping trip or an emergency evacuation. During the CZU fire, Hiatt and her husband took that trailer and camped at the Santa Cruz County Horsemen’s Association for a night. They evacuated early, as officials vehemently encouraged people to do at the town hall, leaving themselves plenty of time to pack beyond the necessities.

Five years ago, she said they felt as prepared as they could’ve been. That hasn’t changed. 

Hiatt and her husband spent $10,000 this year removing fire-hazardous trees on their property, much more than their typical, constant brush-clearing. They just paid $4,500 toward yearly earthquake insurance, and she said the fire insurance is around the same — double the rates they paid prior to CZU, she said. 

“It’s the cost we pay to live where we want to live,” Hiatt said. “I’d rather spend the money than live downtown.”

Zayante Fire Chief Jeff Maxwell said his personal fire insurance rates rose $2,000 per year since the CZU fire, but as insurance agencies drop or decline to renew policies for large swaths of homeowners across the state, Maxwell is happy to still be insured.

He encourages residents to “build yourself a castle,” as in make the fire-proofing upgrades to their properties so they won’t burn down if a fire is to come. It’s the only way to avoid one day grieving your home and having to defend your possessions to insurance agencies, he said. 

Maxwell added the San Lorenzo Valley area is a “very, very difficult community to serve” as a fire department because it’s surrounded by nature and difficult terrain. 

“We’ve locally had some very traumatic experiences that have motivated folks, but I think that it still needs to resonate that the consequences are going to be felt personally, and we can help,” he said.

Prevention is key. Home hardening measures he recommends include removing combustible materials, creating ample space around your house free from vegetation and flammable materials, clearing gutters, covering vents with mesh to prevent embers from entering and replacing wooden siding, roof shingles and other external materials with fire-resistant alternatives.

But when not every house in a neighborhood is willing to put in the work, single-property efforts can only do so much. Alongside larger education events, free green waste programs and raised awareness about fire danger in the mountains, a grassroots effort to organize around home hardening and fuel reduction took root in grieving communities across the county. It’s called Firewise.

Five years ago, Firewise communities began rapidly popping up across the county, going from 11 recognized communities in 2020 to now 103 communities covering 27,000 acres and 7,500 homes, according to Firewise county coordinator Lynn Sestak. She said 20 more are pending in the county.

Lompico has two Firewise communities, one spanning Lomita Avenue and one on the north end of Lompico Road closest to Loch Lomond. Along the Upper Zayante Road corridor there are another eight Firewise communities.

To become a recognized community, residents must form a steering committee, complete a fire risk assessment, come up with a specific three-year plan, organize a community education event at least once a year and collect data on the number of hours and dollars neighbors spend on wildfire reduction, all before submitting an application to the national organization for certification.

All of this aims to reduce collective risk — with a side benefit of potential insurance discounts for the residents. 

Multiple longtime residents said they weren’t concerned with wildfires until after the turn of the century, citing the 2008 Summit fire and 2009 Lockheed fire, which burned roughly 4,300 and 7,800 acres, respectively, as their first big confrontations with wildfire. Maxwell said the changing climate has upped the risk significantly as time went on.

District 5 Supervisor Martinez called the San Lorenzo Valley’s experience with CZU a “wake-up call” for many people who hadn’t put in much thought about the fire risk in the area before, including herself. 

During the CZU fire, Martinez evacuated her Felton home for a little over a month, moving into her parents’ property in San Luis Obispo County for that time; she said she’s grateful she had a plan in place and was able to leave without issue. 

Now, she said, she wants to provide every opportunity for mountain residents to safely evacuate, zeroing in on solutions to Lompico’s delicate situation.

Martinez said her office is close to securing easements to build a second evacuation route out of Lompico — a theorized county road that crosses private properties to provide a way out on the eastern side of the canyon. Once the easements are in place, she hopes to bring the issue to the county budget hearings next summer and secure funding for the project.

“Because of its critical nature in providing what could be a life-saving emergency exit route, it’s very high on my priority list,” Martinez said.

She, like many mountain residents, weighed the risks of returning to the homes that came so close to devastation. Though wary, she said she made the decision to move her family back to the place where fires will continue to pose major risks in the future.

“My community is up here in the San Lorenzo Valley, it’s where my friends are, my kids’ schools, my kids’ sports teams,” Martinez said. “And I decided then that not only do I want to stay here and invest further in living in the San Lorenzo Valley, but I wanted to be a leader in ensuring that our community is as resilient and prepared as possible.”  

While Martinez’s proposed evacuation route could offer a glimmer of hope for Lompico residents, it’s just one uncertain piece of a complex puzzle. For those who live here, each fire season increases the premium on paradise, with homes and lives hanging in the balance. The risk isn’t whether nature will one day call in its debt, but whether the community will be ready when it does.

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