Once burned, twice as hard to leave

This time, Nazia Shah and her family didn’t leave their big house on Longacre Avenue. The hills bordering her new subdivision on the northern flank of the San Fernando Valley were nude from last month’s Sesnon fire. She figured there wasn’t anything left to burn.

In just four months living on a shaved-off hilltop on the edge of the Santa Susana Mountains, Shah has endured two wildfires.

After the first one, which she fled, people reassured her: “It’s over and blah, blah -- it usually only happens every 20 years,” she recalled.

But a month after flames licked the slopes behind her home near Porter Ranch, howling, sooty winds again blasted through, raining ash on swimming pools as the Sayre fire, which broke out Friday night, raced toward her neighborhood.

The only thing that stopped the fire from getting closer was the burned footprint of the Sesnon blaze.

“If the Sesnon fire hadn’t burned, it would have kept on going with the winds we had last night,” Los Angeles City Fire Capt. Neal Jones said as he scanned the smoking hills looking for spot fires less than a mile from Shah’s street.

Jones, who is from Station 87 on Balboa Boulevard, also fought the Sesnon blaze. “It’s just one of those years,” he said. “It’s the city’s turn to get the bulk of the fires. It’s just the way it goes.”

Shah and her neighbors in the 2-year-old Aliso development off Sesnon Boulevard were equally resigned.

“Where is the best place to be?” asked Jeffrey Medovoy, a cabinetmaker who evacuated with his wife and four cats during the Sesnon fire but stayed Friday night.

“There is Malibu. There is Montecito,” he offered, mentioning other former and current hot spots. “If you go out of state, you have hurricanes.”

Like Burma Shave advertisements, a series of small black signs across the street from the development trumpeted its allure: “Estate caliber residences,” “Authentic architectural character,” “Breathtaking vistas.”

The air quality was breathtaking, but the vistas were obscured in smoke, the hills black and barren save for charred trees and twisted stumps.

Shah, who has lived in various parts of the San Fernando Valley for years, didn’t think about the wildfire threat when she moved to the valley’s edge.

“People said it was windy. That’s OK.”

It turned out she was moving into a Santa Ana wind corridor that researchers say produces some of the most punishing gusts in Southern California. With the winds come wildfire, which again and again have sped down the mountains, periodically running all the way to Malibu and the Pacific Ocean more than 15 miles away.

“We have had fires before, but between these two -- this and the Sesnon -- my goodness,” said Brenda Hanssen. “It just came so quick. I thought we were going to lose the house.”

Hanssen was bleary-eyed from being up most of the night. She had driven her teenage son and family dog out of the area, crawling down Balboa in the middle of the night in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Then she returned to her house on Garris Avenue in Granada Hills and stood sentinel with a garden hose, dousing embers in her backyard.

“This is so beautiful. You take your chances,” she said in what has become a Southern California motto.

Bill Cloyd Sr. stood with a camera across the street from the 50 acres of canyons and hills he plans to develop with upscale homes and equestrian trails just north of Sesnon Boulevard.

The eucalyptus trees that had grown back after a 1988 fire burned again Friday night. As Cloyd and his son, Bill Jr., walked down a buckled asphalt road into the old ranch, they passed downed power lines and the rigid corpse of a fawn that couldn’t outrun the flaming wind.

Cloyd bought the land 30 years ago from the Roman Catholic archdiocese, which had used the property for a boys camp, since demolished. Some of the acreage had been part of Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch.

“There will be no more fire burning through here for a while,” said Cloyd, an architect and custom home developer. Everywhere he looked, the land was charred. Stumps still smoldered, glowing orange as the gritty winds whipped new life into the embers.

As water-carrying helicopters flew above, he was matter-of-fact about the blaze. This is chaparral country, adapted to fire. The Indians used to burn the hills.

As for the wisdom of erecting more houses in a Santa Ana corridor, he said he would keep plenty of open space in the development and build in a fire-safe manner. He pointed to nearby houses with tile roofs and stucco walls that survived Friday’s blaze unscathed.

“We’re never going to stop growing. It’s impossible unless people stop having babies.”

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bettina.boxall@latimes.com