MONTECITO — The Westmont College gym was itchy hot and getting hotter. Eye-burning smoke seeped inside, despite the blue duct tape covering the cracks between the double doors.
As campus officials repeatedly assured about 800 students and faculty that this sturdy, cinder-block gym was the safest place to be, some evacuees formed prayer circles on the wooden floor.
Others made frantic cellphone calls to family and friends. One played a guitar and sang. A few burst into tears, and more joined them when a voice on the public-address system announced that some of the dorms were engulfed in flames. What was to come of them? Of the laptops they had left behind? Of the leafy campus of the small Christian liberal arts college tucked into the hills of Montecito?
Freshman Megan Reed tried to hold it together. Thursday was her 19th birthday. What was supposed to have been an evening of celebration with friends at a popular Italian restaurant on Santa Barbara's State Street had turned into a long, sweaty night in the gymnasium.
"Just keep breathing," she said to herself, "but not too deeply." The air was thick with smoke. A confetti of ash began drifting down from the ceiling vents.
"A lot of the girls started freaking out," Reed said afterward. "It made me uncomfortable." She said she felt a surge of panic before taking comfort from her roommate, Codi Dennstedt. The picture of calm, Dennstedt, 18, had been forced to evacuate her home when she was in high school and wildfires raged through her hometown of Fallbrook, in northern San Diego County.
Amid the crying and the rising tension, Westmont President Gayle D. Beebe took to the PA system to reassure evacuees that they were in the safest place on campus.
The anxiety inside the building paled against the maelstrom outside, where tornadoes of fire and smoke skittered across the campus, igniting trees, buildings and the lawn.
After midnight, the worst had passed. Daylight revealed the toll: at least 14 of the 41 faculty homes, the physics building, the old math building, a pair of Quonset huts and four of the 17 buildings that make up Clark and Bauder halls were gone. One of those buildings was the home of the resident director and his family.
In a message to the campus Friday, Beebe expressed his gratitude that no one was injured by the fast-moving firestorm that swept down the hill and set the campus ablaze. "But we're deeply saddened that 15 of our faculty families -- and one retired professor -- have lost their homes. Given the strength of the winds and the fire, we're amazed that the damage isn't greater."
