Down in Valley, ‘It Looked Like It Was Raining Fire’

The fires came with ruthless suddenness.

In La Verne, it was a wind-hounded brush fire, nipping at the edges of the San Gabriel Valley foothill community, bounding past entire blocks before settling randomly here and there on a house, or a pair of houses.

“The wind was just ferocious,” said Jim Wiley, whose home was destroyed. “It was like sparklers going off everywhere.”

Down in the valley, in Baldwin Park, a blaze in a paper recycling plant sent a firestorm of burning ashes down on a neighborhood of small houses, driving residents into the streets in their pajamas.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, and I don’t want to see it again,” said Harold Thompson, whose home was scorched, but left largely undamaged.

In both communities there seemed to be no logic to the course of the fires.

On California Avenue in Baldwin Park, for example, houses were flattened, leaving nothing standing but charred trellises of water pipes or brick chimneys, while next door, other homes were left largely untouched.

The victims in both areas told their stories Thursday in disbelief.

Miguel Robledo had been restless Wednesday night, he said. The wind kept whipping through his Baldwin Park neighborhood in gusts, sending the trees outside his house into wild motion.

“I was afraid one of them would fall over and hit the house or a piece of the roof would blow away,” said Robledo, a tool-and-die maker at a local factory.

Looking out his bedroom window, he noticed sparks flying through the air.

“They were pretty high up, and I wondered where they came from,” he said.

His kitchen, at the back of the house, faces the utility yard of the Allan Paper Co., on Joanbridge Street, where the fire reportedly began. Strolling to the kitchen window, Robledo first noticed a glow. Then he saw a column of flames, with a frothy topping of embers, coming out of the paper company yard.

‘Could Feel the Heat’

“It was as if somebody were throwing fire with an air hose,” Robledo, 29, said. “The flames went up and they came down in an arc. The window was closed but I could feel the heat coming through. Sparks were bouncing off the glass.”

Robledo and his wife, Betty, started hustling their four children into their Plymouth Duster.

“It looked like it was raining fire,” Betty Robledo said. “I wrapped the children in blankets so they wouldn’t get burned.”

By then, the Robledos’ garage, holding a neighbor’s car, Robledos’ carpenter’s tools and his electric bass guitar, was on fire.

The Robledo family joined a collective mad dash away from the block.

While the Robledos’ house was only partially damaged, the home next door went up like a pile of kindling.

Hector Salas, 20, whose home was reduced to little more than charred wood, said he was awakened by trash cans being blown around by the wind.

“I looked out the front window, and the transformers on the electric lines were blowing up,” he said. “They were popping. The back yard was full of burning ashes. It looked like a big barbecue pit. I woke my dad and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ ”

Most residents consider themselves lucky to have gotten out with their lives.

“Everybody was trying to drive out of the street through this opaque smoke,” said Orves Holmes, 75, whose house on California Avenue was destroyed. “You couldn’t see anything in front of you.”

Holmes’ wife, Dorothy, described the confusion in their house, built by Holmes himself 43 years ago.

“I grab the dog and he grabs his glasses,” she said. “They (firefighters) got us out of there so fast, they didn’t even tell us about the Red Cross being there. We spent the night in our car.”

The couple were unable to retrieve any of their valuables.

Others made their way to Margaret Heath Elementary School in Baldwin Park a few blocks away, where the Red Cross had set up a shelter.

Teresa Harrington sat at the school Thursday afternoon, waiting to be allowed back onto her block to check the damage.

“We saw flames high in the wind,” she said. “As we left, one of the sparks hit a tree in front of the house and it started going up.”

La Verne Fire

The fire in La Verne started in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in a neighborhood of custom-built homes overlooking the valley.

At the height of the windstorm, a power line snapped and landed in sparks on Jim Wiley’s roof on Williams Avenue in unincorporated county land bordering La Verne.

A neighbor saw the flames and woke Wiley, 53, who tried to control the blaze with a garden hose.

“It was just a matter of seconds before it became a big fire,” he said. “I tried to put it out, but I knew it was gone.”

The fire lit up the night and sprayed a shower of bright orange embers into the sky. Wood shingles blew off in the wind and hurtled next door like fireballs, he said. Within minutes, the house was completely engulfed in flames.

“I knew before I left there wouldn’t be anything left,” said Wiley, who was evacuated by firefighters.

Eight hours later, Wiley stood amid a mass of soggy ashes holding a few family photos that had survived the flames.

Few Belongings Left

“So far, this is it,” he said, pointing to a desk drawer containing a burned camera, a few family mementos and a scorched baseball signed by members of the Detroit Tigers.

At the house next door, a charred Cadillac sat in the driveway and the remains of a piano sat blackened behind a window. A swimming pool behind the house was a muddy blue, surrounded by puddles of melted metal--all that was left of a small aluminum fence.

A quarter of a mile away, Bernard Crowell, 68, a retired insurance agent, sifted through the remains of his house on Briney Point Road. The houses around him were untouched. All that was left of his house was a floor covered with charred wood, cracked roof tiles and pieces of fused silverware.

Crowell, who was out of town with his wife when the fire broke out, had called a neighbor. “They told me there was nothing left,” he said. “In some ways, it was a blessing we weren’t here.”

The powerful winds carried burning embers from the tops of the hills far out over the valley, sporadically igniting houses in La Verne as far as a mile away.

‘A Miracle’

One house in a middle-class section around Williams Avenue was gutted. But just next door there was limited damage to a garage and nothing else.

“How did we make it?” asked John Movich, who had watched embers shower down on his house. “I don’t know. It’s a miracle.”

At the house next door, Doris Fritz stood amid a few things that she had salvaged from her home--a few plastic bags filled with clothes and a small pile of scorched Christmas packages. Her husband, Don, had tried to save the home with a garden hose, but the wind blew the water back in his face, she said.

The reaction to the devastation by some victims in La Verne and Baldwin Park seemed to be one of stoicism, even gallows humor, rather than grief.

“We’re thankful we’re alive and well,” Doris Fritz said. “The things we lost are just things. We’ll be fine. We’ll just have to take one day at a time.”

“So this is my Christmas present,” said Hector Salas, looking at the charred remains of his home in Baldwin Park.

His sister-in-law, Annette Salas, who had sped away from the house in panic with her three children, laughed as she reflected on the scene she returned to Thursday.

“My son was saying to me, ‘Mom, save my girlfriend’s picture,’ ” she said.

Miguel Robledo surveyed a water-soaked rug and blackened living room furniture, shaking his head. His wife had just pronounced the living room lost.

“We have bedrooms and maybe a kitchen,” she said. “But there is no more living room.”

“That’s life,” Robledo said. “You just have to start over again.”

In La Verne, some residents were not quite ready to start over. With the prospect of more high winds in the forecast, even those who were untouched by the fire were uneasy.

“As long as the winds are blowing, we won’t be out of the woods yet,” said Don Stotts, who saw his neighbor’s home on Williams Avenue leveled. “You better believe I’m going to be sleeping with one eye open.”

Times staff writers Jeffrey Miller and Elizabeth Lu contributed to this article.