Gretchen Wyler, vice president of The HSUS Hollywood Office, left for work early on Saturday, October 25, and spent the entire day ensconced in a committee meeting for the 18th annual Genesis Awards. It wasn't until she jumped into her Volvo and headed back home to nearby Camarillo, California, that Wyler realized her life had taken a dramatic turn for the worse.
"It was five o'clock and the sun was setting, and you could not find the sun," Wyler recalled. "You could sort of see maybe a tinge of a little orange or gold. But it could not be seen&So I'm driving and I make the exit off of my freeway immediately to see 50 cars parked with people out, looking north. I slowed my car. The last thing in the world I'd do is get out and look at anything. But I could see in the distance a fire raging. I just wept.
"I was afraid that I would be driving into the fire," she continued. "By the time I got home, which was ten minutes from there, the first thing I did was go to my no panic list. I can't tell you what comfort it brings."
Wyler, a self-described "panic person," developed her no panic list specifically with earthquakes in mind. She never thought she'd need it for wildfires, seven of which continue to consume vast stretches of Southern California, leaving at least 20 deaths and 750,000 acres of charred landscape in their wake. (Click here to read HSUS Disaster Services' latest activities in the area.)
The former Broadway star and long-time animal activist had to juggle two, virtually contradictory impulses: one to weep at her potential loss of property and invaluable memories, and the other to prepare to flee her ranch-style home with her animals.
Wyler allowed herself time to cry over her seemingly impending losses—the wildfires were a mere five miles away in Moorpark—and for good reason. This Camarillo getaway is her "dream home," a 2,500-square-foot country retreat filled with countless keepsakes from her long career on stage and screen. It has an expansive rose garden, a barn for her two horses, and spectacular views of the surrounding mountains.
But Wyler collected herself quickly. She knew she had work to do and lives to protect. The lives included not only her own, but her three cats, her senior dog, and two rescue horses. She had to prepare each animal for an emergency evacuation, should one be called. Wyler believed the call was imminent.
So she consulted her no panic list, which she keeps tacked to a small bulletin board in the kitchen. After all, in times of panic, Wyler noted, you don't want to panic about where your no panic list is.
She had already had a week's worth of dog and cat food at the ready. That was on the no panic list (along with the expiration date of the food in case she needed to replace it before the next disaster). She had four animal carriers prepared, too, one each for her three cats (Simba, Domino, and Blossom) and the final one for her 12-year-old poodle mix, Mocha, who is both deaf and blind. Each had ID tags attached. Wyler even had ID tags attached to her horses' bridles in case she had to take them to a nearby fairgrounds with hundreds of other equines. She also had the foresight to pack all the animals' important paperwork, including their medical records.
Late Saturday night, Wyler began to lay all of these items out in the garage, along with the things she needed for herself, including medicines, clothes, make-up and a few painstakingly selected keepsakes (such as the huge poster from Sweet Charity, which Wyler performed in for a year in London). Then she started to pack the Volvo.
That's when the panic really hit her.
Wyler realized she had never thought about how to stuff four animal carriers into her smallish Volvo. "I had never seen how they fit into the car," she said. "I found that I could put one in the front seat next to me, and my large one and two small ones in a backseat."
With that problem solved, Wyler recognized that there were other gaps in her emergency planning, some minor, others not. They were the kinds of things you often don't think about until you're actually in the middle of a disaster. For instance, Wyler realized on Sunday afternoon, as the smoke filled the sky and the ash rained down, that she had not packed a can opener for the dog and cat food. Nor a spoon. She also realized that her safe house, about an hour away from her Camarillo home, may not be that safe, depending on where the fires were raging. So Wyler contacted friends in each of the four directions to ensure she had a temporary home for herself and her pets.
The same thing held true for her horses, Zephyr and Gypsy. Where to take them that would be safe? On Sunday afternoon, Wyler contacted a stable owner "very far to the southwest" who agreed to pick up the horses as soon as the state called for a voluntary evacuation (Wyler was not about to wait for the mandatory evacuation notice). She kept the bridles on Zephyr and Gypsy so they would be ready to roll.
Wyler was particularly concerned about her horses because, as she noted, they're "flight animals" which, when in the wild, "will run fast to get away from smoke." The poor animals were extremely anxious, she said, pacing back and forth and not relishing their food.
The household pets, meanwhile, barely noticed anything was happening. That was by design. Wyler placed her three cats in a secured room with food, water, and their litter boxes. She also tightly secured all the windows in the house and turned on the air conditioning, to make sure the animals would not breathe any of the potentially toxic smoke.
"I'm not exaggerating," Wyler said. "I heard at least three people being interviewed in the last couple of days who had to leave their cats because they couldn't find them. You cannot find a cat when you need to&So on alert status, you must start finding those cats and putting them in a room with a litter box and food and water. And leave them there until you know you're out of trouble."
All day Sunday Wyler believed that trouble was knocking on her door. Then she heard a TV report late that evening about firefighters working diligently to protect the Ronald Reagan presidential library in nearby Simi Valley.
"The last thing I heard through my tears was the TV telling me that Route 118 was on fire, north of the freeway, but that the entire company of 38 firemen, completely equipped, were staying there to keep the fire from crossing over the freeway to protect to the Ronald Reagan library," Wyler said. "I flipped because had the fire jumped over 118, it would have come right down near my house. And who knows? If the Santa Ana (winds) had pushed it, I would have lost my home."
The next morning, "the first thing I heard was that freeway 118, near me, had been protected; the fire never jumped, and the firefighters saved the library," Wyler added. "So Monday I was a little more relaxed.
"I have a feeling that Ronald Reagan saved my house."
