IT Vendor's Staff Battles To Save Company Headquarters From Southern California Fires
October 30, 2003
By Mitch Wagner
Page 1 of 2
Staff at ADCS, a San Diego IT services company, spent a day and a half personally battling fires threatening the company's headquarters.
Led by facilities manager Bryan Wilkes, seven facilities staff fought the fires all day Sunday, Sunday night, and most of Monday. They used garbage cans full of water, hoses, and fabric to wet down the building and surrounding parking lot and grounds, and put out embers as they landed. The fire -- which totalled more than 100,000 acres on Sunday -- lapped right up to the building parking lot, about 100 feet from the building itself. Flames shot more than 30 feet in the air.
"It was scary, but it was sort of exciting at the same time," Wilkes said in a Thursday interview. "We were doing everything we could to make sure nothing would happen to the building. At one point, you could look around to the west, to the east, to the north, to the south, and there was fire all around."
Only two staff were injured; both receiving minor burns that did not require hospitalization.
Within a few hours of Wilkes's arrival on the scene Sunday morning, the fires were getting very close to ADCS. "We could see flames and feel heat. The winds picked up, we probably had fifty to sixty mile-an-hour gusts," Wilkes said. That was around noon on Sunday.
"I don't know the exact time there was the first explosion and the neighborhood starting losing power," Wilkes said. He saw neighboring buildings lose power; power fluctuated at ADCS but it remained on. Wilkes said he still doesn't know what the explosions were.
Wilkes saw three electric poles catch fire. One of them eventually burned through and fell, which pulled down another one. "There was another explosion. We watched the voltage go down the line -- there was a huge spark -- and then the power went down," he said. The electrical poles were about 200 yards from the office building.
The ADCS building stands on a ridge overlooking a valley filled with residential homes. When the electric poles went down, Wilkes could see the power go out at all the homes in the valley.
The adventure started for Wilkes hours earlier.
"I got a call Sunday morning at eight o'clock from the owner's wife," he said. ADCS is owned by Brent Wilkes, Bryan's uncle, whose wife is Jina Wilkes. She asked him to turn on the news, where he saw the fire was threatening the area of ADCS. He immediately called everyone in his department and asked them to report to the building.
Wilkes is a lean 33-year-old with sandy, close-cropped hair and fair skin. For our interview, he wore worn jeans and a V-necked lightweight cotton shirt. He looks far younger than his actual age, which is 33.
ADCS has about 100 staff located at its headquarters in Poway, an inland suburb just north of the city of San Diego. The company is in multiple businesses: It does document conversion and warehousing, scanning in paper documents, extracting the information from the scans and cross-referencing the information in usable form. Its biggest project was archiving 1.2 million engineering drawings for the Panama Canal in 1999. Sister companies that have been spun off from ADCS include a marketing company, Group W Media; Mirror Labs, an independent research and testing laboratory; a catering company and transportation company.
ADCS's offices are in a nondescript high-tech office building, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with similar buildings, each of them surrounded by about 100 feet of parking lot. The street is the same as thousands like it all over suburban California. The building is low and wide, with lots of stone and mirrored glass on the outside, and a fountain in front that was switched off on Thursday, presumably to help preserve water for the firefighting emergency.
