Firefighters Contain Pebble Beach Blaze

Firefighters late Monday contained a wind-blown forest fire that destroyed 31 posh houses, damaged six others and forced evacuation of 200 frightened people from homes in one of the world’s more expensive residential areas.

By Monday night, residents were being permitted to return to their neighborhoods--some to find their homes in ruins--others to find theirs spared--sometimes seemingly miraculously.

Four of the 200 firefighters working on the 150-acre blaze suffered minor injuries, and the blaze continued to smolder in the hills.

Authorities said the fire, blamed on an illegal campfire, also destroyed four outbuildings, a house trailer, a television microwave tower and the transmitters for a high school radio station and a U.S. Navy postgraduate school. Total damage was estimated at $10 million.

Homes Overlook Ocean

On Sunday, fire officials said 36 homes had been destroyed, but changed that number Monday after a house-by-house count.

The Del Monte Forest neighborhood homes, valued at as much as $600,000, were not in the exclusive lower Pebble Beach area of multimillion-dollar dwellings, but in a neighborhood that overlooks the ocean at the start of the famed 17-mile drive and is heavily wooded with Monterey pines.

Those pines--residents need a county permit to cut them--fueled the fire, as did the wooden homes with shake shingles.

“They do try to follow a certain style and it is very attractive. It is also combustible,” said Monterey County Supervisor Karin Strasser Kauffman.

Gov. George Deukmejian declared a state of emergency in the fire zone, which will allow the county to give residents property tax relief for damage to their homes.

George Alex of the California Department of Forestry said the fire began in a makeshift campground, one frequented by neighborhood youths and drifters, located in a steep gully just downhill from the homes that were destroyed.

Fire in Garbage Can

He said someone had built a fire there in a 30-gallon garbage can that had been sawed in half. Fire inspectors found mattresses and eight beer bottles, some of them full, indicating that whoever started the fire left quickly when it got out of control.

The first wisp of flame was first reported at about 3 p.m. Sunday, and it spread quickly, fanned by winds rising to 35 and 40 m.p.h., burning up the side of the hill and leaping from roof to roof among the homes.

Most people were evacuated by 7 p.m., but some stayed longer.

“I soaked the roof one last time at about 7, but I knew it was gone,” said John Clark III, who was back in the area Monday, kicking through the charred debris that had been his father’s home. The only thing undisturbed was a fishpond with several thousand dollars worth of koi.

Clark said he and his brother carried their father, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, to safety shortly before the house began to burn.

“It was kind of a panic situation,” Clark said, and his father’s charred and mangled wheelchair, standing in the driveway, gave emphasis to his words.

Elsewhere, only incombustible items--metal lawn furniture, children’s swings and jungle-gym sets, items of plumbing, fireplaces and foundations--were identifiable among the charred spikes of the Monterey pines.

“Everything, everything is gone,” said John Panetta, whose father’s home was destroyed. “Utter devastation--who could comprehend it.”

He and his brother, Joe--they are nephews of Rep. Leon Panetta (D-Monterey)--and their friend Pat Homan, an off-duty Monterey County sheriff’s deputy, tried to use garden hoses to save the house but were unsuccessful and later set about helping to evacuate the neighborhood.

“The wind changed and--boy--it just ran right up the hill!” Homan said of the firestorm.

Cancer Victim Aided

Homan said they found one man, a cancer victim, confused and helpless in his home, unable to open his electric garage door because the power was off. He said they finally had to break the door down in order to free him.

He said they told another man to leave after seeing him try to fend off flames from the roof of his house with a wet towel.

Some who lived in the fire zone were fortunate.

“There was just nothing more I could do but hope,” said Joseph von Schwind, whose house survived the flames, while those across the street were reduced to foundations. He said he left at about 8:30 p.m., after spending five hours spraying his roof with a garden hose. Just before he left, he said, he grabbed a stuffed animal that once belonged to his daughter.

“I don’t know why,” he said.

About 200 people evacuated from the path of the fire spent the night with friends or in a shelter set up by the Red Cross at the gymnasium of Monterey Peninsula College.

Overwhelming Response

After Frank Mullen was evacuated from his house and arrived at the gym, he said, “the community response was overwhelming.”

“People were walking up to me and inviting me to stay in their houses,” said Mullen, whose house was not damaged. “Restaurants gave me free food; hotels offered me free lodging. My wife and I ended up at the Hilton and everything was on the house--the room, drinks, breakfast.”

Five hotels and motels in the Monterey area offered free lodging to those evacuated, said Elizabeth Taylor, disaster chairwoman for the Carmel chapter of the Red Cross. More than 250 residents called the Red Cross offering food or lodging, she said, and five restaurants delivered free meals to the evacuation center.

While fire disrupted the lives of many, on the area’s famous golf courses, people teed off as usual.

At one of the newest, the Poppy Hills Golf Course, clerk Greg Griffin said the fire sent smoke out to the course on Sunday, but did not stop the golfers. He added that the course was deluged by calls Monday morning from people wanting to know whether they could still tee off on time.

Meanwhile, three fires that scorched more than 1,700 acres of brush in Southern California continued to burn Monday but officials said firefighters had fully contained one and had partly surrounded the others without loss of structures.

U.S. Forest Service spokesman Steve Stump said a 1,000-acre blaze in the Cajon Pass north of San Bernardino was about 60% contained and could be fully controlled by this morning. About 250 firefighters also contained 60% of a 500-acre blaze 15 miles northeast of Ojai in Ventura County, and a 212-acre blaze that broke out Sunday in a dump near Morongo Valley was nearing the mop-up stage by mid-afternoon. One firefighter was treated for smoke inhalation at the Morongo Valley blaze.

Times staff writer Ted Thackrey Jr. in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.