When many San Diegans awoke Sunday morning, Oct. 26, they may have noticed an unusually brilliant sunrise, but few could have predicted the events that the day had in store for them. Members of America’s Finest City Softball League, San Diego’s GLBT softball league, headed to the Poway Sportsplex to play their regularly scheduled Sunday games while others were on their way to their favorite spots for brunch or services at the Metropolitan Community Church.

But by 9:00 a.m. the sky had begun to turn brown, softball had been canceled and a slow but steady rain of ash began signaling one of the worst ecological disasters in San Diego’s history. Now, with half a million acres burned, the number of homes destroyed nearing 1,000 and no end in sight, the city and the GLBT community are dealing with the physical and emotional fallout from the fires.

“At times when there is a natural disaster that impacts people like this, they need to take care of their immediate physical needs first. They need to find shelter and then they worry about their house. A lot of these people don’t know yet if their house was destroyed,” The Center’s Executive Director Delores Jacobs told the Gay and Lesbian Times. “They have a lot of things to take care of in the first 72 hours that are immediate needs. The Red Cross system is really a wonderful system for addressing those needs.… More often than not, the other needs, the kind of grief and emotional needs, and needs for support and help negotiating whatever benefits system is in place come later. I would expect that if people have been impacted and need our assistance then we would start to get those calls late [Wednesday], Thursday or Friday.”

The fires forced the evacuation of thousands of people to shelters or into the homes of friends who were out of the fires’ reach. Two of The Center’s board members were among those affected by the fire early Sunday Morning.

Julia Legaspi first became aware of the fire when her sister contacted her early Sunday morning.

“I told her not to panic because it was too far, but when I went out and I saw all of the smoke everywhere… the worst was on the north side of my house,” Legaspi said. “I thought it was just a block away from the house because I saw all of the red [flames] and black smoke, so we went inside and started packing.”

Legaspi heeded the warning of a voluntary evacuation and left her home. Later, the area near highway 67 was forced to evacuate.

“We were allowed to go back yesterday,” Legaspi said. “I was the first one to go back, because most of my neighbors have kids, and because of the smoke they didn’t go right away. It was really dark and there was lots of ashes falling.”

To the north, fellow board member Rich Valdez and his partner Sam Arenivar woke to the smell of smoke and assumed it was the fires that had been burning in Ramona until they looked to the south where the fire was raging.

“It looked like Scripps Ranch was on fire and it was completely black, and we could not see beyond the ridge that separates us from the other part of Scripps Ranch,” Valdez said. “The amount of smoke that we smelled and as black as it was, obviously something bad was going on.”

Valdez took a three-mile drive from his house to Lake Miramar where he had a better view.

“Looking across into Scripps Ranch I was amazed that I could see flames and it was obvious that it was in the residential area,” Valdez said. “It was also amazing that I didn’t hear any helicopter overhead or any fire engines or any sort of relief dousing the fire at all, so I figured they had limited resources and this thing was already out of control.… And that was at 8:30 in the morning on Sunday morning.”

While Valdez and his family were never forced to evacuate, the fire did come within a mile of their home and they had plans to go to a friend’s house in Rancho Peñasquitos.

When asked if he had any concerns about having to stay at an emergency shelter if there had not been any other options, Valdez responded, “It was such a state of emergency and state of shock that everyone was trying to figure out what was happening to their homes. I don’t think I would have had any concerns going to a shelter with my partner. I don’t think sexual orientation is one of the top issues to address when you’re dealing with such a state of emergency. I wouldn’t have been concerned with that.”

At The Center, they are currently evaluating the situation to see how they can work with the Red Cross and other service providers to support the GLBT community. They have already sent counselors out to emergency shelters to work with people who have been impacted by the fire.

“One of the things that we will be really interested to hear from the whole community about, is in a crisis like this, what can we do for them,” Jacobs said. “Do they need to be connected with other community members? Do they need a special shelter or not? Were there enough resources?”

She added, “We’ll be watching and waiting to hear from the community about how they would like us to plug into the emergency networks for them. Obviously we have a physical building that, if we needed to convert to an emergency shelter for a week or several days, we could, but is that need really there?”