Fire aftermath draws media, investigators

Grimy firefighters were rolling up their hoses and stuffing them back into their engines Tuesday as clean and pressed network television reporters were rolling out their cables and hooking up their cameras to their satellite trucks.

Also going about their work along the beachfront Malibu street were the authorities, taking toll of Monday night’s brush fire -- five homes destroyed, six more damaged and an estimated $60 million in losses -- and looking for the cause.

Reporters for such programs as the “Today” show peered through the tinted windows of SUVs traveling down narrow Malibu Road, looking for celebrities who may have been living in the destroyed or damaged homes.

The charred remnants of multimillion-dollar homes perfectly framed the reporters as they stood amid the debris, filing their live shots with the blue ocean shimmering in the background.

There was a flurry of activity as actress Suzanne Somers and her husband, Alan Hamel, pulled up in front of their burned-out house in a black Cadillac Escalade.

TV cameras were yanked from their tripods as tabloid show crews clustered around the actress -- best known for her role on the television series “Three’s Company” -- while she stepped past her burned Jaguar convertible into what had been her home’s front courtyard.

Somers and Hamel were not there when the flames, pushed by strong winds, flashed down the hill across the street and leaped into pine trees in front of their stucco dwelling on stilts about 10 feet above the sand.

Somers bit her lip before making a statement for microphones thrust in front of her. In proper Hollywood fashion, that statement was scripted.

It wasn’t as though she’d lost a son or daughter in Iraq, she said.

“My nature is to look at the glass half full,” Somers said, reading from a piece of paper. “I haven’t lost a loved one. We will rebuild, and I truly believe we will learn something great from this experience.”

As the day wore on, city inspectors picked through the ruins, listing addresses of destroyed and damaged homes. They photographed walls of homes that had been scorched but were otherwise seemingly undamaged.

At a tiny, cabin-like beach house left unscathed by the flames that destroyed the house next door, they made note of the heat-shattered window glass on a rear deck. And of the asbestos shingles -- long ago banned from residential construction -- that probably saved the tiny dwelling.

Once the inventory was done, Los Angeles County fire officials announced that five homes, not four as previously thought, had been destroyed. The additional one was behind another burned structure and had been overlooked at first.

About a quarter-mile north of the burned homes, arson investigators were closely studying a blackened area next to Pacific Coast Highway, looking for clues to the fire’s origin. By midafternoon, Los Angeles County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman had acknowledged that officials were uncertain of the fire’s cause -- or its exact starting place.

Malibu surf shop owner Jefferson Wagner took note of the arson experts huddled next to PCH, just west of the city-owned Malibu Bluffs Park, which is at the highway’s intersection with Malibu Canyon Road. Wagner speculated that the brush between PCH and Malibu Road had not burned since the early 1970s.

“If you think about it, that’s a popular intersection, Malibu Canyon and PCH, with lots of traffic. Nobody’s going to start a fire there with all that visibility. Can you imagine a guy hopping out of his car and starting a fire with no one seeing him?” Wagner asked.

“Here’s a good theory: Someone who is a passenger 15 or 20 cars back in the line waiting at that traffic signal is smoking a cigarette and chucks it out the window. It lands in 35-year-old dead leaves, the wind mixes it with the leaves and it catches on fire.

“It’s not going to catch on fire while you’re sitting there,” Wagner said. “You’ve driven down the road when the light turns green when the fire starts.”

As the fire investigators worked next to the park, residents came to survey the damage beneath the bluffs. Park visitors walked along a meandering sidewalk whose concrete surface had been melted in spots by the fire, which burned within eight feet of the city’s 16-year-old Michael Landon Community Center.

Malibu Road resident Jeanne Heneghan was surprised to see that the fire had exposed hiking trails that zigzagged along the bluffs by burning away vegetation that hid them for decades.

“I’ve hiked them many times but never been able to see the trails before,” Heneghan said, glancing down toward her home. “We were so lucky, I guess -- those of the rest of us whose houses didn’t burn.”

Back down on the beachfront road, residents were slowly starting to reclaim the narrow street from firefighters and TV trucks.

Justin Yungfleisch, 33, whose grandparents owned one of the destroyed homes, surveyed the damage as gentle surf lapped the beach in the background. He said his grandparents, whom he declined to identify, had owned the wood-frame home more than 20 years. Now in their 80s, the couple no longer lived there full time.

“It’s amazing that so many homes were saved. But it’s also amazing that of [those] destroyed, one was my grandparents’,” he said.

Like many homes along the hilly coast, that owned by Yungfleisch’s family rested partially on stilts or wooden supports, leaving plenty of space beneath the structure where embers could take hold.

In many cases, the flames licked up through the floors and into the living spaces, said Inspector Ross Scott, a county Fire Department spokesman. He said firefighters had to crawl under the homes to attack the flames.

Howard Smith was one of those whose homes were spared. Only a bedroom on the first floor of the two-story structure was damaged. The room was yards from the landmark tower house that burned to the ground.

Ironically, Smith said, it was the man who owned the tower house who suggested that Smith replace his old roof with tile. Smith said the neighbor did not take his own advice, installing a copper roof instead.

“It’s just things,” said Smith’s wife, Jane, of the losses. “Fortunately no one was hurt. It’s just things, and they can be replaced.”

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Times staff writer Bob Pool contributed to this report.