Flux Canyon Fire Destroys Family Home

Lisa Marie Bezzina was at work with her five-year-old twins in her family-owned piercing business in Tucson shortly after 2 p.m. on Saturday when her phone buzzed with a text from a friend.

“Hey there’s a fire in Flux Canyon,” the text read.

Uh-oh. Lisa’s husband, Alec, has made his home in Flux Canyon for about 14 years, and she joined him there about ten years ago. At first, she thought it might be a neighbor’s house. Then she was texted a photo.

“That’s when everything started getting really weird,” she said.

The family rushed back, to have their fears confirmed. Flames were shooting from the roof of their home. A garage and workshop were reduced to ashes, as was a wooden boardwalk and rustic Old West village that Alec had erected over the years on the grounds.

Fortunately there were no human injuries, and the family’s dogs and tortoise had been rescued by response teams, though their chickens and ducks were not so fortunate.

“It’s a crazy feeling,” Lisa said. “It doesn’t seem real.”

Faced with an unimaginable tragedy, Lisa said the family has stayed true to what they were before the fateful text.

“Just keep doing the things we’re doing,” she said Monday. “We took the kids to the circus Sunday; we already had tickets, so we went. Did a little shopping. Staying positive.”

The family is temporarily staying with a neighbor, Joe Higgins, while looking for rental properties, preferably in the canyon. South32 owns four vacant homes in the vicinity, and the Bezzinas are hoping an agreement can be reached with the mining company. Their home was insured, and they are intent on rebuilding.

“We love this location, we love this land, we love our home,” Lisa said.

Flux Canyon neighbor Cindy Mohr has set up a GoFundMe account to assist the Bezzinas with rebuilding.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Mohr said. “They’re just super-nice, gracious, really good people. Great neighbors.”

Lisa gratefully acknowledged the outpouring of community support and personal donations for the family in the immediate aftermath. “People have already given so much,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

Mohr said the fire was first noticed by guests at her home who were outside, smelled smoke and heard some loud popping sounds. They knocked on the doors to make sure no one was home and called 911.

Zay Hartigan, chief of the Patagonia Volunteer Fire and Rescue, said the call came in at 2:13pm.

In an eerie twist of fate, Saturday was the day of the memorial service at Patagonia Union High School for former PVFR chief Ike Isakson, and Hartigan said neighboring fire departments were on call until 2pm to cover for the Patagonia department. Those neighboring agencies had crews at the memorial, but most had dispersed when the call came in.

The first units on the scene were two PVFR tenders, which were needed to supply water to fight the fire in the isolated location. Within 19 minutes of receiving the call, structure enginges from Sonoita-Elgin Fire District, Rio Rio Medical and Fire District and PVFR and two brush trucks from PVFR, all of which were in town or in proximity of the high school, had joined them in fighting the blaze.

All told, 13 members of PVFR, along with crews from Sonoita-Elgin, Tubac, Rio Rico, Nogales Fire Department and Coronado National Forest, helped extinguish the fire and prevent it from spreading to the landscape and surrounding properties.  

“PVFR is thankful for the strong support of our partners in the Mutual Aid agreement between all five departments in the county,” Hartigan said. “Sonoita, Nogales, Rio Rico and Tubac departments all sent staff and apparatus that played crucial roles in fighting Saturday’s fire. And they all played a part in the moving memorial to our dear departed Chief Isakson.”

Hartigan said a free-standing garage and workshop were already engulfed and had collapsed when firefighters arrived at the scene, and two vehicles had also burned. Flames had followed the path of the boardwalk from the garage to the house and into the attic.

“Our initial focus was on knocking down the flames,” Hartigan said. “It was kind of tight quarters in there. That was a challenge. We had to keep running back and forth for water.”

Crews were considering venting the structure, but it became unstable due to the fire intensity, and they had to fall back into a defensive position. Much of the living quarters were spared from burning but were damaged due to collapse of the structure’s ceiling. Hartigan said a PVFR crew, engine and tender remained on scene overnight to extinguish flames that reignited several times.

No adjacent properties were affected by the fire, and on the ground at the scene, there is little evidence of charred vegetation near the structures. The dominant trees in the residential part of Flux Canyon are massive oaks. From their proximity to the wash and aquifer, as well as the occasional rains, they all appear healthy and green—not dry, dying and more combustible like many smaller oaks higher in the Patagonia Mountains. 

Hartigan said the coincidental timing of the memorial enabled a quicker and more robust response from neighboring departments and helped prevent the spread of wildfire.

“The biggest difference is if it had been called in a half-hour earlier, we probably would have saved that structure,” he said. “That’s a common reality. Often nobody sees it until fire is coming through the roof.”

The origin of the fire is being jointly investigated by Sonoita-Elgin Fire District chief Marc Meredith and the Department of Forestry and Fire Management. Meredith said Tuesday it is premature to identify a cause or location of the fire and unhelpful to speculate.

Investigators were onsite Sunday collecting data and evidence and conducting interviews. They are now in the process of reviewing the information and painstakingly ruling out possible scenarios one by one, hopefully arriving at the most logical explanation, though one is not always apparent. A joint report is not expected until the end of the month at the earliest.

Meredith, like Hartigan, expressed gratitude for the response of all the neighboring agencies. 

“We were incredibly fortunate that there were those resources in town, and that all the agencies in Santa Cruz County are working really hard together to take care of each other’s communities, because no one of us can do it on our own,” he said. 

Similar sentiments were shared by Lisa Bezzina, who was out at the fire site on Monday to take stock of the family’s belongings. She said the twins are doing well and helping provide a lesson in resiliency.

“Everything we have we love,” she said. “I’ve got my family and my kids. All the animals are alive, except my chickens and ducks. A lot of stuff is going to be salvageable. The things we can’t get back, we can replace. We’re blessed.”