CHRONOLOGY OF REGION’S MAJOR FIRES

Fires have rampaged regularly across the dry face of Southern California through hot summers and tinderbox winters. Here is a chronology of major blazes:

June-July, 1985--Flames lashing through four Southern California counties destroyed at least 64 homes in San Diego County and scorched nearly 30,000 acres in Riverside, Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

October, 1982--One wind-driven fire swept 15 miles from Simi Valley to the Malibu coast, and another leaped across northeast Orange County and into the Anaheim Hills. At least 56 homes and 41 mobile homes were lost.

April, 1982--An electrical fire sparked a blaze in a palm tree that ended up destroying 50 buildings, most of them apartments, and displacing 1,200 people in Anaheim. Damage was estimated at $50 million.

November, 1980--At least six separate fires stretching across Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties killed four people and demolished 320 homes and cabins, as well as 150 other buildings. Santa Ana winds up to 100 m.p.h. sent flames across 140 square miles, causing more than $50 million damage.

October, 1978--A juggernaut of flame and smoke from eight almost-simultaneous fires destroyed 230 homes and a church in blazes from Malibu to Agoura and Mandeville Canyon. One man was killed, and damage was estimated at $71.4 million. One of the blazes sprang up at virtually the same spot where a destructive September, 1970, fire began.

July, 1977--Santa Barbara saw 216 homes leveled in fires that caused about $33 million damage.

September, 1970--Ten people died and 403 homes were ravaged as several blazes roared in a single wall of flames 20 miles long from Newhall to Malibu. The conflagration, which charred 435,000 acres, caused an estimated $175 million in property damage.

November, 1966--Eleven firefighters died, trapped by flames as they fought a fire on a Pacoima hillside.

November, 1961--Costly homes of stars such as Zsa Zsa Gabor and Burt Lancaster were consumed as high winds sent flames through the exclusive neighborhood of Bel-Air, destroying 484 homes worth an estimated $25 million.

July, 1959--A Laurel Canyon blaze destroyed 38 houses.

December, 1958--Gale-force winds hurtled fire through Malibu, destroying 36 homes. On New Year’s Eve, fire consumed 71 more homes in Topanga and Benedict canyons.

December, 1956--A Malibu-Zuma fire that also hit the Lake Sherwood area in Agoura wiped out 99 homes.

November, 1958--Twelve people were killed trying to put out a vast brush fire in the Cleveland National Forest.

November, 1945--A fire in the Malibu hillsides destroyed 150 homes.

November, 1938--A Thanksgiving Day fire in Topanga Canyon burned 350 buildings, many of them shacks on the then-rural and sparsely populated hillsides.

October, 1933--29 men, many of them on relief during the Depression and put to work fighting fires, died when flames trapped them in a ravine as they fought a blaze in Griffith Park.