Flames Spread by Winds : Fire Destroys House and Damages 3 Others

Mild Santa Ana winds turned a smoldering roof shingle into a raging fire in Orange Wednesday afternoon, destroying one home and damaging three others while neighbors scrambled to hose down the roofs on houses downwind.

“It happened so fast, it’s frightening,” said Mackie Brooks, 45, of 2753 Ashwood St. The four-bedroom home occupied by Brooks, her husband, Tom, and her two teen-age children was almost completely consumed by the fire that started on their dry, cedar-shake roof and quickly spread to houses as far as a block away.

$150,000 in Damage

Eight fire trucks and 35 firefighters responded to the call at 1:37 p.m. It took almost 20 minutes to put out the Brooks’ fire, according to Orange Fire Department Battalion Chief Robert Clevenger, and by that time only two rooms of the house escaped complete destruction. He estimated damage at $150,000.

“With the Santa Anas blowing, it makes it a little more difficult to put out a fire,” he said. “We send companies to patrol downwind, but we can’t always be at the right place at the right time.”

Clevenger said that shake roofs--which are common in Orange County--are easy prey to fires because they are made from dry cedar shingles. The Brooks’ roof was more than 20 years old, he said, and it “burned very readily.” City law now requires that wood shingles installed on new homes be treated with a fire-resistant chemical, but the law does not apply to homes built before the law was enacted. “I don’t remember where I was,” said Mackie Brooks. “I looked out the window and saw smoke but I thought it was fog. I never even thought it was smoke.”

The Brookses were alerted to the fire by their neighbor, Nancy Mihr, who was leaving to go shopping with her sister.

Warned Family

“At first I thought it was the fireplace, then I saw it was more than the fireplace,” Mihr said. “I pulled the car up in front of their house and saw flames, then I opened the gate--because the dogs tend to nip--and yelled in and Tom came running out.”

Tom Brooks, a self-employed musician, said he was reading a book in the den when he heard Mihr at the gate. The whole family, including two dogs and a cat, escaped quickly, he said, and no one was injured.

Brooks said he had burned the family Christmas tree in the fireplace that morning, but the fire was out more than an hour before the roof fire started. The Fire Department declined to speculate on the cause of the fire, but Brooks said it might have been started by an ember from the fireplace. He said the house was insured against fire.

Family members only had time to run out of the house with what they were wearing, Brooks said. Firefighters salvaged the small pile of clothes that were lying on the wet front lawn, along with a stack of Christmas bills and a microcomputer that had been a Christmas present.

Neighbors Given Credit

“I didn’t get the baby pictures,” Mackie Brooks sighed, staring at the skeleton of the house that her family had lived in since 1974. “But I got the babies--although as you can see they aren’t babies anymore. I guess if I had to choose between the pictures and the real thing, I’ll take the real thing.”

Susan Pike of 2722 Ashwood, across the street from the Brooks home, said her house might have gone up in flames as well if quick-thinking neighbors hadn’t doused her roof with the garden hose lying in her front yard. She was at work when the fire started and had returned to get her car when she discovered her son and her neighbors putting out a small fire that had spread to her roof from the Brooks fire.

Pike said the fire damaged her roof, but not the interior of her house. Hyong Han, a neighbor who lives next door to the Brookses, said his roof also caught fire, but he put it out before it caused internal damage.

The fire also spread to a home at 2710 Cottonwood St., one block southeast of the fire’s origin. Firefighters said the roof of that four-bedroom home was burned fairly heavily and that a few rooms had sustained some water damage.

The damage at the three other homes was relatively minor compared to the Brooks home, which looked like a torch had burned the roof right off the walls.

“I still don’t believe it,” Mackie Brooks said.” I feel like I’m kind of in a dream.”

Her husband crossed his arms and looked at the remains of his home.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said flatly, “I’m never going to have a shake roof on a house again.”