It was 4 p.m. on Saturday at Silverwood Lake, and Mariana Mayorga was at a birthday party in the popular recreational spot with her husband and two children, ages 3 and 6.
As party guests swung at a piñata, she looked towards the horizon and noticed a plume of smoke roughly two miles from the campground.
“It just kept climbing up that hill,” said Mayorga, 31. “It kept intensifying and the smoke just kept rising.”
It wasn’t long before the smoke reached both sides of the lake.
Within 10 minutes, Mayorga and her family headed back to their campsite, only to learn the wildfire was already in the area. Forced to cut their first family camping trip short, the mother knew it would be wise to leave before things got worse.
“That was my first thought. I knew even if they put out the fire, we needed to leave now because the air quality is going to drop and we have small children,” she said.
It wasn’t the first time Mayorga, a Moreno Valley resident, had been impacted by wildfires. She said there were a couple of days last year where the air quality was “so bad” that the local school district almost canceled classes.
The family passed multiple fire trucks and U.S Forest Service vehicles headed towards the blaze as they made their way home through Crestline.
“It felt like a natural disaster, seeing all the emergency services come in,” Mayorga said. “We carry that with us, as residents living in a wildfire area … we prepare ourselves mentally. But to see it happen, it’s scary.”
She gave a special thanks to San Bernardino County’s Cal Fire unit, who helped her retrieve the items she left behind at the campsite, including three tents. Mayorga said the agency sent her a direct message after she commented on their Instagram page and asked if they could collect her family’s belongings.
“One of my thought processes when we left everything behind at the campground was that we didn’t want to put the first responders at risk because of items that could be replaced,” she said.
“I’m so appreciative of the response teams.”
Lake fire burns hundreds of acres near Silverwood Lake; Highway 138 closed and evacuations ordered
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