Wind Pushes Giant Oak Onto 2 Homes

Brad Jones sifted through the debris on his living room floor Wednesday afternoon, picked up the shattered pieces of a treasured antique smoking pipe and groaned. A moment later, he retrieved a nondescript glass beer mug that had been near the pipe on a bookshelf; the mug didn’t have so much as a scratch on it.

“It’s amazing what got broken and what didn’t,” said the 34-year-old Laguna Beach carpenter, surveying the destruction about him. “Everything about this is amazing.”

About 10 hours earlier, a giant oak tree, shaken loose by pre-dawn winds that ripped through the Southland, had slid off a hill behind Jones’ tiny wooden bungalow on Canyon Acres Drive in Laguna Beach and crashed through the roof.

A heavy main branch about 10 inches thick crunched through the roof of Jones’ bedroom, jamming into the floor no more than two feet from where he had been lying half asleep in his bed.

A Fire Department official who later examined the damage said that if the branch had hit Jones, he almost certainly would have been killed. As it turned out, no one received even minor injuries in the incident; not Jones, who was in his house alone, nor his next-door neighbor, Renee Lang, whose house was also struck by the tree as she slept inside.

But while both occupants were unscratched, the same can’t be said for the houses.

Lang said the spare bedroom of the two-bedroom A-frame she moved into six months ago was demolished. Jones’ one-bedroom bungalow, which he had been painstakingly refurbishing and had recently painted, was all but destroyed.

Both said their houses were insured.

“I just put that back door on,” he said Wednesday afternoon as he walked through the house he had lived in for three years. “I had to break it down to get out.”

The tree, which was decades old and so big it fully shaded two lots, had made several large holes in the roof and branches and leaves poked into the bungalow’s interior. The base of the trunk, which came to rest on the roof, had dumped dirt through the holes.

The force of the falling tree was so great inside the house that some furniture was crushed and smaller objects were sent flying.

Jones said he left the house in a daze and went next door to Lang’s home.

“I first thought just the branch came in,” he said. “Then I got up and saw what had happened. I tried to get out the front door, but I couldn’t get it open.”

Lang said Jones arrived on her porch with “eyes as big as saucers.”

She said she had been awakened by the sound of breaking glass and had just discovered the damage to her house.

Other neighbors, who had been kept awake by the howling wind, took Jones and Lang in and called police and fire officials, who ordered electrical service in the immediate area turned off temporarily because the tree had pulled down some electrical lines when it fell.

Jim Watson, 33, who, along with his wife Kelly, is Jones’ other next-door neighbor, said the fallen oak tree could have been 100 years old. Another neighbor who has lived on the street since 1956 said the tree was already of imposing size when he moved there.

Jones and his neighbors pointed out that despite its age, examination of the spot where the tree had stood showed that its roots had not grown very deep. The spot has only a thin layer of soil and is atop a slab of sandstone.

“The wind just pushed the tree off the hill,” Watson said. “I don’t know how it ever stayed there as long as it did.”

SOME MAJOR SANTA ANA WINDS AND FIRES: Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 1967--Fanned by 50-m.p.h. winds, the Paseo Grande fire scorched 50,000 acres and destroyed 66 homes in the Lemon Heights-Santa Ana Canyon area. Nov. 28, 1968--Santa Ana winds gusting to 40 m.p.h. flipped over a small plane at the old Orange Airport and felled many trees. April 4, 1973--Thousands of county homes were without electrical power as winds gusting to 50 m.p.h. ripped wires and created desertlike dust storms. Feb. 6, 1974--Winds that reached 60 m.p.h. caused widespread damage in the county, including toppling an 80-foot pine tree onto a portable classroom at Tustin High School. Oct. 28-30, 1980--Wind-fanned flames in Owl Canyon raced across 14,873 acres in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Nov. 24, 1980--The Indian-Trabuco Canyon fire, spread by 60-m.p.h. winds, burned 28,000 acres of watershed valued at $7 million, mostly in Cleveland National Forest. April 21, 1982--A fire stoked by Santa Ana winds of up to 50 m.p.h. roared through a densely populated Anaheim neighborhood of apartment complexes, destroying $50 million in property. The winds triggered the fire by blowing power lines together, sparks from which ignited dry fronds of a palm tree near one of the apartment buildings. Oct. 9, 1982--Santa Ana winds that reached 60 m.p.h. spread a brush fire in Gypsum Canyon into the exclusive Anaheim Hills-Villa Park area, destroying 14 luxury homes and causing $16 million in damage. Aug. 11, 1985--Winds described as “erratic” spread a brush fire that scorched 1,500 acres in the Carbon Canyon-Telegraph Canyon area. Wind storm batters Southland. Part I, Page 1.