‘Little Tornado’ Blows Down $335,000 Home

Aida Behr and her family had just returned from church Sunday morning when a 7-year-old neighbor boy ran up to her La Crescenta home yelling, “Your house blew down.”

“I thought he had been listening to too many fairy tales,” said Behr, 32, a housewife and mother of four.

But she soon learned that the boy was not crying wolf. The wind had, indeed, blown down the half-built, $335,000 house down the street that she and her husband had recently purchased.

Santa Ana winds gusting up to 70 m.p.h. ripped the roof off the home in the 5300 block of Quail Canyon Road shortly before 5 a.m., Glendale police said.

No one was injured. But what would soon have been the Behrs’ beautiful, three-story, four-bedroom, four-bath house was reduced to a pile of splintered wood beams, jagged glass shards and broken roof tiles.

Debris in Home Next Door

Some of the debris ended up in the entryway and family room of Dirk Du’s new home next door.

Glendale police estimated damage to Du’s house at about $5,000.

Du, 42, a Pasadena liquor store owner who moved into his new house three weeks ago with his wife and two daughters, said he and his wife had lain awake all night worrying about the wind. But when he heard the sound of shattering glass shortly before 5 a.m., he simply assumed that some debris had blown into the house, he said.

It wasn’t until morning, when Du noticed that “the light was somehow brighter than usual” in his house, that he realized that part of his neighbor’s house had smashed through his own home. “I was a little upset, but what could I do? Nature made it happen,” Du said.

As for the Behrs, they will have to start again, from scratch.

“It was like a little tornado,” said Jose Tovar, construction foreman for JCC Enterprises of Torrance. His crewmen had been working on the framing of the new house. He said the house was covered by insurance, but added that it could be as long as a year before the house can be rebuilt.

“It’s kind of funny,” Chris Behr, 33, owner of a construction company, said as he filmed the wreckage with a video camera “to show my kids someday.”

A steady stream of neighbors and curiousity seekers came to the house Sunday to stare at the pile of rubble as workmen began to clear the debris.

“There’s one we can afford, Steve,” a woman said, nudging her husband.

“Now that’s what I call a fixer-upper,” another man remarked.

The gusty winds triggered dozens of false burglar alarm calls, caused scattered power outages and kept lifeguards at local beaches busy rescuing weekend sailors and windsurfers who ventured too far out to sea, where winds were picking up and flipping over catamarans and windsurfers.

High winds early Sunday also spread a minor roof fire in West Hollywood to three adjacent buildings in the 9000 block of West Keith Avenue. Damage to the buildings was estimated at $60,000 by Los Angeles County firefighters. No injuries were reported and no families were displaced by the blaze, officials said.

Firefighters suspect the blaze was intentionally set and the cause of the fire was under investigation, Fire Inspector Chuck Gutierrez said.

The windy conditions, caused by a high-pressure system over the Western states, were expected to taper off by today, the National Weather Service said.

Highs in the Los Angeles area should range from 80 to 85 today, but cooler weather can be expected as the week progresses. Readings should be in the low to mid-70s by Tuesday, forecasters said. Sunday’s high was 77.