Then you grab another hose that someone had cut off, so half the time you’re working angry.” Then you grab a hose and see that someone ran over it and you’re mad as hell because the bent brass fitting won’t work.
“When I ran out of hose, I grabbed another one and hooked it on and kept going. His second most effective tool: An ever-growing tangle of garden hoses. “You had to know what you couldn’t save,” he says. His most effective tool was quick decision-making as he tried to prioritize each impending danger. Later into the night, as the fire surged again, a stream was all that separated the rhinos from flames.
I’m 76, and now I had to climb the fence again to get out. As soon as the male went through, the others followed him. “The animals didn’t want to jump the fire line so I had to climb the 8-foot fence and try to push the male through the fire to escape. Cheetahs were in a night house that he had to save.Īs the fire continued creeping down the hill, five Nyala antelope were trapped in the corner of their enclosure. The hyenas were in great danger, he said, moving quickly in packs each time a fire encroached and repositioning after he would put it out. On another part of the property, he hopped on a forklift to move flammable materials away from spreading flames. When a neighboring house to the west went up in flames, he quickly moved nearby vehicles before they caught on fire.
Early on, he drove back and forth over embers with his Jeep and stamped out embers with his boots. While his own house on Porter Creek Road burned to the ground a half-mile away, he worked alone from 10:30 p.m. “And I just wandered off I couldn’t leave.” “The sheriffs were evacuating everybody,” he said. The first night fires screamed down the hill from Calistoga to Santa Rosa, Lang woke up to “a wall of flames.” As everyone else fled - including his wife, Nancy, his employees and guests - the 76-year-old Lang stayed behind to save his endangered giraffes, zebras, cheetahs, and countless other exotic animals that roam the 400-acre wildlife preserve. ‘I hate to be referred to as a hero of a fire,” said Safari West owner Peter Lang.īut his epic tale - the story of a man who saved a thousand animals from relentless flames with nothing more than a winding chain of garden hoses - has become almost biblical.
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