Sparks Blown Roof to Roof Cause $258,000 Damage to 7 Homes

Anne Kuvas was driving along the Costa Mesa Freeway to her dentist Wednesday morning when she heard the radio report that several houses near her Oakwood Circle home in Villa Park were ablaze.

Kuvas, 38, got off at the next freeway exit and headed home, worried that the fire--which started at 9:30 a.m. in her neighborhood of homes with shake roofs--would burn out of control because Santa Ana winds were gusting at 50 m.p.h.

“I was rounding corners and looking for smoke,” Kuvas said.

The Santa Anas and the uncontrollable spot fires they can cause also weighed heavily on the mind of Orange County Fire Department Capt. Neil Graf as the fire engine he commanded raced through the streets of Villa Park.

“With the winds being the way they were, I was gearing to how we were going to fight roof fires that can leap homes and streets,” Graf said.

The paths of Graf, the firefighter, and Kuvas, the homeowner, crossed in the neighborhood near Villa Park High School, where a fast-moving spot fire danced across the shake roofs of seven homes, causing more than $258,000 in damage, according to the county Fire Department.

The fire began on Haninger Way and skipped over houses and streets, causing spot fires on Serrano Avenue, Oakwood Circle, Nichols Avenue and Alta Drive, county fire spokesman Pat McIntosh said.

One of the damaged homes belonged to Kuvas. But she said she was grateful that the damage was slight, limited to a small part of her shake roof and attic crawl space.

Two other nearby homes were not so lucky, one with $150,000 in damage and another with $75,000, McIntosh said.

But no injuries were reported from the blaze, which McIntosh said took 70 firefighters about an hour to control. The fire started when heavy winds blew a sparking power line into a palm tree, which began to smolder. It brushed against the shake roof of a home at 9801 Haninger Way, setting it ablaze, McIntosh said.

The house, which McIntosh said was uninhabited, had about $150,000 in damage, with the roof and back walls damaged most.

Windblown sparks spread to a corner house next door at 1801 Serrano Ave., which suffered $75,000 in damage to its shake roof, McIntosh said.

Sparks then spread to five other homes up to a half a mile away on Oakwood Circle, Nichols Avenue and Alta Drive, McIntosh said. The five homes suffered light to moderate roof damage, with losses estimated at $33,000, McIntosh said.

People whose homes were damaged said they were shocked at how fast the wind-fueled fire danced across rooftops. Chris Komaki said that at about 9:30 a.m., she smelled wood burning and walked outside to see fire racing across the roof of her next-door neighbor, Kuvas.

“We ran out and were calling for help,” Komaki said. “But we didn’t even notice that our own house was on fire too.”

Neighbors, gardeners and passersby with garden hoses doused roofs until waves of firefighters and fire equipment from four fire departments arrived.

“Whenever we have a high-risk situation like this, we send in more firefighters and equipment than would be necessary normally,” McIntosh said. So, at the Villa Park fire, 15 engines, two trucks, and 70 firefighters were thrown into the fray.

Firefighters from the county Fire Department were joined on the fire lines by colleagues from the Anaheim, Garden Grove and Orange fire departments.

Another 10 fire engines and 35 firefighters from the Santa Ana, Newport Beach and Costa Mesa fire departments stood by at the nearby county fire headquarters at Tustin and Chapman avenues in Orange, McIntosh said.

“Without this massive outpouring of manpower and equipment that we had here today, we would have lost all these homes completely,” he said. “We prevented a disaster from happening.”