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A RING OF FIRE

Many sought refuge in shopping centers during California wildfires

BY MAURA K. AMMENHEUSER

Photo: The Associated Press

Tim Mills, left, and Beverly Gebur watch as a fire above a Wal-Mart parking lot flared up with the evening wind in Lakeside, Calif.

There is such a thing as a retail location that is too hot.

In October wildfires devoured 738,000 acres in five Southern California counties, forcing 100,000 people from their homes and prompting President Bush to declare the area a disaster site. Weeks later state officials predicted that insurers would face about $3 billion in claims. The total of 12 fires killed 22 people, according to the American Red Cross and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, and destroyed 4,246 homes.

Remarkably, though, the infernos mostly spared the shopping center industry. Sources reported no such properties lost to or even damaged by the flames.

But a few centers in San Diego County, where fires took the worst toll, were affected indirectly. Some properties closed. Employees lost homes. Late October was certainly not business as usual for them. Executives at three companies had stories to tell.

Phoenix-based Vestar Development Co. operates two San Diego County centers that were affected by the fires.

The 400,000-square-foot Rancho San Diego Towne Center, near the small town of Crest, includes an Albertsons, an Edwards Multiplex, a Target, restaurants and more. Two wildfires passed behind the center, and a number of nearby rural homesteads were burned. Residents forced to evacuate but unwilling to go far found a safe haven in the center’s parking lot, though nobody officially declared it a shelter. For many families, it became home for three or four days, says Kathy Kirk, CMD, the center’s project director.

“They just came there,” she said. “They didn’t have any place to go.” Some of those desperate families brought with them whatever they could, Kirk recalls, from household pets and even horses to boats and trailers. The parking lot wound up housing at least 50 recreational vehicles. “We let them stay there, because everybody was trying to be as helpful as they could.”

Afterward came the cleanup. Ash covered everything, and when the mid-November rains came, the ash on the roofs began pouring from the water spouts, Kirk reports. The air conditioners filtered most of the soot from the inside air, she says, but many still found themselves brushing ash off their desks. No tenants reported losses, however.

Photo: The Associated Press

The October wildfires were most devastating in San Diego County.

Another Vestar property, the 440,000-square-foot Santee Trolley Square, was closed when the fires knocked out electricity to the Santee area, some 18 miles from downtown San Diego, for about two days. But Target and restaurants Chili’s and Mimi’s Café used generators and kept exterior lights on and their own doors open. Some people came to shop, says Kirk, notably firefighters. They worked a fire line a mile and a half away, she said, “which doesn’t seem far when you figure the fire was miles wide when it swept through this area.”

Members of Vestar’s San Diego regional staff were unable to get to the Santee office to monitor things personally, so they used cell phones and pagers. The problems were relatively few, says Kirk, but she was rattled by the experience.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” she said. “None of us have ever seen anything like this before.”

The Viejas Outlet Center is a 255,000-square-foot entertainment-retail center near Alpine, a town 25 miles east of San Diego that was evacuated. The Viejas band of Kumeyaay Indians own and operate the center and a casino across the road. Some 225 yards from the center’s entrance, behind the casino, there is a mountain. “The whole mountain was on fire,” said Robert L. Dye, SCSM, the center’s vice president of real estate.

At the time the inferno was roaring nearest the center, Dye was off-site, trying to maintain communication with center employees despite the loss of cell phone towers. Security staff worked 36 hours straight, surrounded by the fires. “They felt a little isolated, a little trapped,” he said. The area blazed for at least three days. “Everywhere you looked was on fire,” said Dye, who described the experience as “apocalyptic.” Thirty employees lost their homes. The center itself was spared because the wind eventually shifted, pushing the flames away. But thousands of utility poles were burned, cutting off power and forcing the center to close for six days.

Here, too, the biggest task was the cleanup, which took a number of days after power was restored. “It was a miniature [Mount] St. Helens,” said Dye, referring to the aftermath of the 1980 volcanic eruption in southwest Washington. “Ash was several inches thick.” Maintenance workers were hard at work clearing it from the center’s roof and fountains.

Los Angeles-based Westfield America Trust has seven Shoppingtown centers in San Diego County. Three of them — Horton Plaza and Mission Valley, both in San Diego; and University Town Center, in La Jolla — are open-air centers, so they were affected primarily by the smoke, says Gary Karl, executive vice president of management at Westfield America.

“There was smoke in the air from the north part of L.A. to San Diego,” he said. The stores’ air intakes were shut down periodically over about three days to keep sooty air out.

“We never closed,” Karl said. Some of the tenants did, though, because their workers had to attend to their families.

The management of Shoppingtown North County, Escondido, the Westfield property nearest the fires, stationed people on the roof to watch for approaching flames, Karl recalls.

Westfield properties, too, became a home for people fleeing the flames in SUVs and campers. Emergency workers distributed water, while Westfield allowed use of the centers’ rest rooms. “Over the two or three worst days there were between 75 and 100 vehicles,” said Catharine Dickey, a Westfield spokeswoman, mostly at Shoppingtowns North County and Parkway, in El Cajon, a city 10 miles east of San Diego.

Sources say good emergency planning was crucial, but the fires also taught them new lessons. Air quality was an issue, so Westfield is looking at improving its air filter systems, Dickey says.

“Advance preparation is important, but flexibility and good communications are key in the thick of things,” she said. The ability to keep close contact and to evaluate situations by the minute determine appropriate action, she notes, adding that shopping centers must also prepare to play untraditional roles in the face of crisis; as sites for displaced residents, they must be able to provide water, space, safety and more.

At press time, sources said they were unable to quantify immediate fire-related sales losses, but added they were optimistic that the rebuilding efforts will boost long-term sales.

“We’re the largest center to serve some of the rural population that was hardest hit,” Kirk said, referring to Santee Trolley Square. “I anticipate over time we’ll see a lot of folks buying necessities.”

During the worst days of the fire, Westfield’s crowds were sparse, says Karl. But “when people began to realize their houses were not in danger and they could move about, they did come back.” Restaurants and cinemas benefited because people sought relaxation and clear air. Then hard-goods sales picked up. The Sharper Image at Horton Plaza, for example, sold three times its usual number of Ionic Breeze air purifiers, says Aimee Cooper, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based chain.

At Viejas Outlet Center, November sales “are coming in very, very strong,” Dye said.

“It’s been a boon to the economy, because you’ve got 2,700 homes that need to be built [locally].” Beyond that, there are work crews with hundreds of new hires tackling erosion control and reseeding in the nearby mountains. That has helped sales in all the center’s categories, Dye says, adding, “onward and upward.”

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