Putting a Limit to Their Dreams : Those Who Lost Homes in Fire Discover That County Might Restrict Their Ability to Rebuild

THE REGION —  To the outrage of residents in an isolated canyon community above Pasadena that was devastated by fire two weeks ago, county officials are considering a limit on the number of houses that can be rebuilt.

While government agencies have gone out of their way to expedite relief efforts, insurance paperwork and tax exemptions for fire victims throughout Southern California, Los Angeles County officials have singled out Pasadena Glen for a special study and are saying that life may never be the same in the neighborhood.

“Before it burned, it was very picturesque with houses jammed in. But that’s also the danger,” Harry Stone, assistant director of county public works, told the Board of Supervisors last week. “We don’t want to re-create the same unsafe conditions.”

Already, the county has stopped issuing building permits for the area until the task force completes its study. The findings, Stone said, could mean some houses won’t be rebuilt or some may not be rebuilt as large as they once were.

Residents of Pasadena Glen, where 27 of the 62 residences were destroyed and half a dozen more were damaged, see the county’s scrutiny as retribution for a long-running battle over who is responsible for flood control in the canyon.

As they continued cleaning up after the fires, several residents last week said they were infuriated when they went to get preliminary building permits and were told a moratorium was in place. It is a double whammy to lose their homes, they said, and then be told they might not be able to rebuild.

“Right now what we need is hope--and they are dashing our hope,” said Steve Schindler, 53, a Caltech astrophysicist who is vice president of the Pasadena Glen Improvement Assn. Schindler lost his house to the wildfire that started from a transient’s campfire in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains.

County officials say they are not trying to dash anyone’s hope, but are analyzing a very complicated situation in Pasadena Glen, where the combination of fire, flood and mud have posed problems for decades and where modern building codes were not always followed.

“It’s a little unique,” county public works spokeswoman Donna Guyovich said. “But we certainly want to work in (the residents’) favor.”

Last Friday, a county task force toured the neighborhood, which is unincorporated and whose roads are privately owned. By the end of the month, the task force is expected to decide how much rebuilding can occur.

“It’s a nightmare from a planning point of view,” Stone said of the neighborhood, where houses were built between the narrow canyon walls and set along a perennial stream that winds through the canyon bottom.

Shortly after the turn of the century, the Glen, as residents call it, was subdivided into irregular lots and established as a vacation getaway, nestled on the edge of the Angeles National Forest. With just one narrow main road that winds back and forth across the stream, the canyon has a rustic feel. At the northernmost end flows a 12-foot-high waterfall, hardly wider than someone’s outstretched arms.

There are no street lights. At night, the chirp of crickets, the hoot of owls and the rattle of acorns dropping on roofs can be heard. Boulders and hedges line the stream bed and roadways. Even after the fire, a canopy of oaks and sycamores remains.

Gangs and graffiti are not much of a worry in the Glen. But mountain lions or wildfire or floods are another matter.

“It’s a pretty stiff price, I know, but it’s worth it,” said Jeannie Wurm, who added that firefighters told her that her house was saved from the recent blaze only because “God must have been on the roof with a fire hose.”

The Oct. 27 fire is the worst in modern times, Glen residents say.

In 1968, wildfire destroyed two houses. The next year a torrent of boulders, mud and water washed through the Glen during heavy rains, crashing into some houses and floating cars away.

During the next decade, residents say, fire threatened three times but never reached the Glen.

Over the years, the neighborhood has managed to survive. In the process, it has expanded what once were vacation cabins into year-round residences.

If less than 50% of a residential structure is destroyed, county regulations allow for rebuilding of what was there. But if more than 50% is destroyed, the county has the right to require rebuilding under current regulations.

In Pasadena Glen, Stone said that would mean the main road’s width would need to be doubled to at least 20 feet--the current minimum standard set by the county Fire Department. And greater setbacks of residences would be required from the stream.

He emphasized that the county is hoping to work out a plan that satisfies officials’ concerns and allows homeowners to rebuild. By the end of the November, he said, the task force hopes to update the Board of Supervisors, which has the ultimate say.

Earlier this week in the Glen, where some residents are living in tents or campers on their property, the word filtered in that the county would not issue building permits for the neighborhood.

“Now I’m really angry,” said Sue McGough, an elementary school teacher who lost her house. She was close to tears as she talked with her husband, Terry McGough, and neighbors Bob Anderson and Nancy Goldsworthy, who had just returned from a special office set up to handle fire victims’ needs.

“We already had declared a moratorium ourselves,” Sue McGough said. “Nobody is going to rebuild before the rainy season.”

Her husband, a general contractor, had stayed during the fires, saving two houses from the flames by using water from yard hoses. “I didn’t leave during the fire, so they’ll sure play hell to get me out of here just by condemning my house,” he said.

As they spoke, trucks from utility companies, the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency cruised the road that runs in front of McGough’s home, now a blackened shell with little left except walkways and a chimney.

Goldsworthy, an architect, and Anderson, a general contractor, told the McGoughs that they were able to get a demolition permit, as well as authority to set up a power pole, but were denied other permits to rebuild their two-story, hilltop house.

The restrictions, the four concluded, must have been put into place because of the Glen’s fight with the county over flood control.

In 1969, after a torrent of debris poured into the canyon, Glen residents signed an agreement saying that if the county made flood control improvements, the neighborhood would oversee maintenance of protections such as a debris basin designed to catch the flood flows.

Later, the residents sued the county, saying the county had flood control responsibility. Two years ago a Los Angeles Superior Court judge said the 1969 agreement was invalid but stopped short of saying who was responsible for flood control.

Over the years, the residents, armed with sandbags, have battled the flood waters.

New Yorker magazine writer John McPhee, in his 1989 book “The Control of Nature,” recorded the story of this neighborhood “that would rather defy nature than live without it.”

Among the people he featured were Mel and Barbara Horton; he, a retired executive and she, a dance teacher turned author.

Both 76, they moved in 1951 to a Craftsman-style, turn-of-the-century house with a huge screened-in porch overlooking the stream. Once, the two-story structure was the home of naturalist John Burroughs.

The fire took almost everything, including a Russian samovar on the mantle and the brass wiring designed to keep the teakettle from falling in an earthquake. Only a massive chimney of river rocks and some foundations remain.

Last week, Barbara Horton looked to the hillside, barren and soot-covered, where cactus had melted. “If we should have a terrible rain, it will sweep right through here,” she said.

But as she talked of rebuilding, she said the canyon “is going to come back. I don’t know how fully in my lifetime, but certainly in the lifetime of my kids. It looks hopeless now. But things have an extraordinary revival capacity.”