For Firefighters, It Was a Wednesday From Hell : Inferno: Winds. Dense brush. Limited resources. These factors conspired to create blazes of unstoppable fury.

By J. MICHAEL KENNEDY

Oct. 31, 1993 12 AM PT

This article was reported by Times staff writers John Hurst, Tracey Kaplan, J. Michael Kennedy and Jeffrey L. Rabin in Los Angeles; Nancy Wride in Orange County; Daryl Kelley in Ventura County, and Tony Perry and Michael Granberry in San Diego County. It was written by Kennedy

The enormity of it all, the unrelenting destructive power, is what set these infernos apart.

When flames ate homes in seconds, when firefighters were forced to surrender entire blocks, when mountainsides were seared to nothing, it only got worse.

The blazes came in waves and from everywhere, spreading havoc over such a vast area that firefighters had no way of winning until the roaring winds of the Santa Anas began to fade.

Even in Southern California, where brush fires come with the change of seasons, Wednesday was a day from hell. All of the worst things that could happen--from the winds to the warped minds of arsonists to a transient’s runaway campfire--came together to create one of the most destructive days in a region that regularly deals with destruction. Of the 14 fires that raged through the region, 11 started Wednesday.

As the danger of fire receded, if only slightly, this weekend, fire officials were assessing what happened on that day when it seemed as if nothing could stop the flames. What worked and what didn’t? What might have been done differently?

For firefighters, the battle to protect life, their first priority, was a great success. No one died in Wednesday’s firestorms, which officials said is a testament to the prompt evacuations of neighborhoods from Ventura to San Diego, from Laguna Beach to Riverside. The grim lesson about the need for speedy evacuation had been learned from the Oakland hills fire two years ago, in which 25 people died.

Despite the deployment of more than 8,000 firefighters, drawn from as far as Mendocino and Lake Tahoe, the toll in property loss was staggering, with more than 500 structures damaged or destroyed and nearly 100,000 acres burned before the day of devastation ended.

Some firefighters made brave stands, successfully beating back the flames with shovels and axes, water hoses and air support. But many other times they were no match for the fury and could only retreat to a new line of defense.

They were often handicapped by the steep, brush-choked terrain, and by narrow, winding roads that were nearly impassable.

Weak water pressure in many areas left firefighters without any alternative but hand-to-hand combat with a fast-moving enemy.

Their old nemeses--weak building codes, wood shake roofs and houses enveloped by foliage--allowed the flames to leap unchecked from block to block.

Bureaucratic tangles kept some air tankers on the ground.

And the sheer speed with which fires exploded across the Southland caused a logistics nightmare and overtaxed the firefighting ability of the entire state.

“You wouldn’t think that the state of California would run out of resources,” said Paul Beckstrom, a deputy chief of the state Office of Emergency Services. “We were stressing the system as much as it’s ever been stressed.”

A Tinderbox

The potential for calamity was clear. The welcomed rains of winter, followed by the usual dry summer, had turned Southern California’s bumper crop of brush into a tinderbox. All it would take was a match.

Certainly the Los Angeles Fire Department knew the danger was there last week. Each day the department calculates how dry and combustible the grass and brush are. On Tuesday, the readings signaled what Capt. Steve Ruda called “a potential day for disaster.”

Ten city fire engine companies immediately were shifted into the brushiest areas of the San Fernando Valley.

The first fire, however, broke out in neighboring Ventura County early Tuesday afternoon near the 15th and 16th greens of Los Robles Golf Course in Thousand Oaks. Had the winds not been blowing, this deliberately set fire would have been easier to handle. But the Santa Anas had already kicked up to 20 m.p.h. Five acres had been consumed by the time firetrucks arrived. Even in the early going, it was obvious there was going to be trouble.

By nightfall, 400 firefighters from Ventura and Los Angeles counties were on the lines and 900 acres were burning. Near the exclusive neighborhood of Hidden Valley, flames came within a few feet of million-dollar homes.

Steadily, inexorably, the Ventura County fire marched toward the Pacific Ocean. That blaze alone would have been enough to occupy a major portion of firefighters throughout Southern California. But in only a few hours, the skies would be filled with flames and smoke from Ojai to San Diego.

After Ventura County called for more outside assistance, the state’s mutual aid system kicked into action. Within minutes, an emergency coordinating center--the war room used to fight fires over a broad area--was set up on the second floor of the county Fire Department’s new gray, two-story headquarters in East Los Angeles. A dozen staff members scrambled in from surrounding offices, not knowing that this was only the first fire of many that would need tracking in the next 24 hours.

Fires Before Dawn

As late Tuesday night turned into early Wednesday morning, the awful series of events began to unfold. At 1:26 a.m., a fire erupted in the Chatsworth-Box Canyon area of the Valley. Suspected cause: arson. Five minutes later, another fire began, in the Santa Paula area. Suspected cause: arson.

About 2 a.m., in San Diego County, a woman who had stayed up late watching television looked out her window to see an orange glow in the distance. She dialed 911. By the time she got off the phone, fire virtually ringed her home--and soon threatened the 1,800-acre Wild Animal Park.

The division of the firefighting forces was soon to begin.

In Chatsworth, the fire had lain low during most of the night, giving strike teams a chance to try to work on their lines near Lilac Lane. It was nearly sunup when the flames turned on them, great sheets of fire moving fast toward the trucks. The winds at nearby Santa Susana Pass were by then gusting to 50 m.p.h. A warning crackled over the radio that the blaze was turning, but it came too late to retreat.

Capt. Sonny Garrido of Engine Company 35 dove into a culvert to escape the flames, which shot directly over him as he lay there. The men on his truck sprayed water toward the fire, creating a canopy of water. The flames shot over them, too.

A short distance away, the four members of Engine Company 98 saw the flames coming and dove into their rig, rolling up the windows. The heat popped out the glass and the flames licked at the inside of the cab.

“In under a minute, it turned from a safe environment into an inferno,” Garrido said. All four firefighters in the cab were seriously injured, but they walked toward Garrido in the darkness. It was only when they got close that he could see how badly they had been burned.

To the southeast, in the San Gabriel foothills of Altadena, a 35-year-old transient named Andres Huang awoke in the middle of the night. As he later would tell authorities, Huang, who had taken refuge in a small gully above town, started a fire in a ring of stones to warm himself.

Almost immediately, the fire jumped the circle, igniting an inferno that would stretch several miles from Altadena to Sierra Madre, consume 5,000 acres and destroy 118 buildings.

At 3:48 a.m., the Los Angeles County Fire Department received the first call about the Altadena fire. Seven minutes later, after it became clear that a major fire was under way, the Pasadena Fire Department was asked for help. Five engines were dispatched to the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, which straddles Altadena and Pasadena. Seconds later, the second alarm was sounded and five more engines were dispatched.

The canyon was already engulfed in flames--and the wind was carrying embers. “Once we got there, with the wind conditions the way they were, we knew we weren’t going to (stop) it,” said Gaylord Ward, acting supervisor of Los Angeles County Camp 2 in nearby La Canada Flintridge.

The Day From Hell

As dawn approached, residents across Southern California awoke to hot winds, the smell of smoke and ash falling from the sky. There were increasingly ominous television and radio reports. During the night, still more fires had burned thousands of acres in San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

And it was only the beginning.

At 6 a.m., Karen Dodson, the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s disaster coordinator, arrived at the regional command center. Altadena was burning, and so was Chatsworth. A new fire in Ventura County had broken out and the Anaheim Hills fire was going in Orange County.

“It was like, ‘Oh, my God, we have all these fires going,’ ” she recalled.

The emergency center already had exhausted its ability to deploy firefighters and equipment within the region and turned to fire agencies in the Inland Empire for help. But they were fighting blazes of their own. The only recourse was to ask for state assistance.

Sacramento would respond with firefighters and equipment from all over the state--some so far away that it took up to eight hours for help to arrive.

In Ventura County, Fire Chief George Lund watched as his resources dwindled and his problems multiplied. Besides the raging Thousand Oaks fire, he had to deal with three other blazes. Firefighters from Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Barbara counties quickly responded to his request for help. But only by late Wednesday did the first of 100 firetrucks begin arriving from the Bay Area, the San Joaquin Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills.

So fast were the fires moving that any thought of a complicated battle plan was quickly discarded. The fire crews had no choice but to fall back around structures and fight to save them, one at a time. But they were stretched dangerously thin. In the crucial firefights in the hills above Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, there were only about 15 fire engines to protect 100 homes--and in the end more than two dozen dwellings were destroyed.

“In this defensive posture, we’re prioritizing what’s possible to save and what’s not,” Lund said. “We had firefighters actually driving by structures they knew they couldn’t save.”

By midmorning, much of the attention was focused on Altadena, where the fire had spread to an area known as Kinneloa Mesa. There, houses were burning with amazing speed as firefighters were pushed ever-backward by the wind-whipped fire.

“The wind was nothing but flaming embers,” said Firefighter Andy Solorzano, whose crew at one point was surrounded by flames.

Firefighters and residents had no water to battle the fire because a power failure knocked out the pumps that carry water to the mesa. Houses that were already burning were given up as lost.

Some firefighters later said more crews might have saved more homes. “We didn’t have enough people and fire engines,” said Capt. Dirk Wegner, whose three-man crew came from Palmdale.

From Bad to Worse

Just when it seemed the destruction could get no worse, a brush fire was reported on Laguna Canyon Road in Orange County. It was 10 minutes before noon.

Orange County Fire Capt. Gary Stenberg was one of the first to arrive. As his engine pulled up, the blaze was gobbling up a patch 100 feet by 500 feet--an area not much bigger than a football field--at the roadside less than a mile south of the San Diego Freeway. The wind was pushing the flames through the canyon and directly toward Laguna Beach.

“The crews were so overrun, so fast, that it was like trying to catch a freight train by foot,” Stenberg said.

“All the resources we had dispatched were on scene and available, but we needed more. How much more? This particular fire, in my opinion, required the use of aircraft, because of the wind. . . .

“Aircraft could have made a difference, but we didn’t have it.” As Stenberg watched, he had that sinking feeling that the fire could not be stopped before it hit Laguna Beach, four miles away. And so they moved all the equipment back to Laguna, putting it among the houses, and waited.

The flames came quickly enough, racing over the brush-covered hills at extraordinary speed, until they reached the town at midafternoon. Firefighters moved from one neighborhood to the next, saving what they could.

“We were given assignments based on where fire was hitting the hardest,” Stenberg said. “You would stop, save what you could, move on and save some more.”

The exclusive Emerald Bay estates in Laguna were burning, as were trailers that lined the water’s edge at El Morro Bay on the northern edge of Laguna. Some of the fire hydrants could not be used by trucks brought in from elsewhere because the fittings were not the same size.

It was perhaps at this juncture that the fires were at their worst.

Back in the regional command post in East Los Angeles, staff members watched as requests for aid flashed on their computer screens. They also glanced over their shoulders at television images of whole neighborhoods burning--in Ventura County, Los Angeles County and Orange County. The entire region seemed to be ablaze, the fires unstoppable.

“You feel helpless,” said Dodson, the L.A. County Fire Department disaster coordinator. “We look at our computer screens and we’re at maximum commitment and, at the same time, we look at our TV screens and see that we are losing homes.”

Laguna Beach, where a huge part of the destruction took place, seemed to be going up as if it had been soaked in gasoline. The seaside community’s charms may have helped doom it: The very geography that distinguishes the city of 23,000 and its stubborn insistence on retaining its quaint architecture had made it a fire hazard.

Where miles of tract homes elsewhere sport tile roofs and diminutive patches of lawn, Laguna homes straddle wooded hillsides and perch willy-nilly on stilts. The narrow streets of wood homes with shake roofs finally succumbed to the devastation that for decades officials had warned was the region’s destiny. After the Oakland fire two years ago, Orange County Fire Capt. Dan Young said communities such as Laguna Beach were “designed for disaster.”

Low water pressure and an outdated emergency communications system also hampered firefighters. The town, some local fire officials believe, also did not have an adequate reservoir.

And like other areas, Orange County found itself faced with an ironic predicament. It had sent some of its firefighters to help neighboring areas only hours before its home turf was ablaze.

County Fire Chief Larry Holms later said that even an army of firefighters with the most advanced equipment could not have prevented the destruction in Laguna and other parts of the county. “Some areas were simply indefensible,” Holms said.

The losses for Laguna Beach alone would be staggering: 313 homes destroyed, 17 others damaged, reported property damage of $270 million, a burn area of 16,000 acres--the largest fire in Orange County since 1948.

Holding the Line

There were huge tragedies Wednesday, but also small victories. To the north, in Los Angeles County, the Altadena fire had spread east to Sierra Madre, a quiet, small town with tree-lined streets and winding roads that go high into the foothills. And on Wednesday evening, when the winds had picked up again, the forces were fully engaged in the battle of Park Vista Drive.

It had been close to dusk when the flames showed themselves at the top of the hill, just above a section of homes that would be the first target of the fire as it raced down the hill. Fire Capt. Roy Francis of the Pasadena Fire Department saw the flames and knew what was coming.

The flames were soon marching relentlessly down the hill. They shot more than 100 feet into the air when a tree caught fire, then another. Francis ordered his men to form a line behind the houses, and there they made their stand.

The firefighters hosed down the brush as the fire came at them from two directions.

“We just laid our lines down and said we were going to stop it here,” Francis said the next day. “We just made up our minds we weren’t moving.”

For two hours they fought with their hoses and shovels until they had beaten back the fire.

In the darkness of Wednesday, the fires still burned. In Sierra Madre, firefighters using flares methodically set backfires, hoping to create a line that would not be jumped by the flames. As of Saturday, the tactic had worked. The fire had climbed over the hill and into an uninhabited area of Angeles National Forest.

By day’s end, it became clear that some homes had been saved by sheer luck and timing. Fire officials, for instance, said the Chatsworth fire was quickly brought under control because it happened so early, well before the ranks of firefighters were thinned by the blazes that never seemed to end.

But officials also gave credit to the aggressive enforcement of a brush-clearing program in the area.

The seemingly inevitable debate began Wednesday--even before the fires died down--about whether the available firefighting resources had been used wisely. Several military aircraft that could have fought the fires had somehow been mired in red tape, both in Orange and Ventura counties. Some residents said firefighters had been too slow to respond. Others asked whether they had been too quick in abandoning houses and why they worked to save some but not others.

Los Angeles County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman said firefighters did all that was humanly possible but were “outgunned” by nature. As the day unfolded, deploying enough personnel and equipment became exceedingly difficult, he said. Mobilizing firefighters Wednesday was like “trying to juggle with one hand tied behind your back,” he said. “Resources got sent to one fire, got pulled off that fire and sent to another fire.”

On Thursday morning, Roy Francis was sitting with his men, some of whom were sleeping on the sidewalk. The fire was still burning. The air was smoky, but for the moment all was quiet.

A car pulled up and a woman on the passenger side rolled down her window. Her name was Lois Kasten and she lived down the street.

“We just want to thank you all,” she told the firefighters. “We left yesterday and I never thought I would see our house again. We just thank the Lord and we thank you.”

Making a Stand

The fires that exploded across Southern California started in dry brush and grassland, then were driven by powerful Santa Ana winds toward populated areas. The terrain, winds and other factors determined the tactics used by firefighters. In many cases, they first sought to first attack the fires, then contain the fires and, finally, assumed a defensive posture to protect homes and other structures. Efforts to contain the fires are impeded by evacuating residents, narrow roadways and water pressure problems.

1. To initially attack fires, hand crews, engines and water-carrying helicopters are deployed. The crews throw burning debris back into the fire and clear away brush, grass and other combustible material in the path of the fire.

2. As fire spreads and advances, firefighters try to take advantage of natural breaks, such as roadways, or they bulldoze fire stands. Air tankers drop chemical retardant on the flames.

3. If wind conditions permit, they might start backfires along the fire breaks. The wind caused by the advancing fire pulls the backfire toward it, and when the two fires meet, the flames die out. The strategy was used in the Sierra Madre and Irvine fire among others.

4. When fire gets dangerously close to populated areas, firefighters are forced to assume a defensive posture. Engines are positioned between the fire and homes. Firefighters extinguish flames and wet down houses and surrounding land. With strong winds, there is a danger that embers will spark new fires outside the fire line creating “hot spot” that start more fires.

Compiled by Robert J. Lopez / Times Staff Writer

Centers for Fire Relief

State authorities and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have set up four Southland disaster assistance centers to help fire victims. The centers are:

* Arcadia Community Regional Park

405 S. Santa Anita Ave.

* Laguna Beach Recreation Center

505 Forest Ave.

* Sheriff’s Training Facility

Camarillo Airport

425 S. Durley Ave.

* French Village Airport

37552 Winchester Road

Rancho California

* San Bernardino and San Diego counties: Victims can call a special hot line: (800) 462-9029.

Compiled by Anne Louise Bannon / For The Times