8,000 Flee ‘Rain of Fire’; 13 More Homes Destroyed

For the third time in two days, a fire driven by fierce Santa Ana winds roared through a sleeping suburban neighborhood, this time destroying 15 homes and damaging 25 others and sending 8,000 residents of the northern San Fernando Valley fleeing into the darkness early Friday.

The fire was first reported at 4:28 a.m. near the Sunshine Canyon Landfill north of Granada Hills. Pumped to blowtorch strength by the dry winds from the desert that have raked Southern California for three days, it blazed furiously westward into the Porter Ranch neighborhood of expensive homes on the slopes of the Santa Susana Mountains north of Northridge.

Many of the houses that burned had wood shingle roofs, “a disaster waiting to happen,” according to Fire Chief Donald O. Manning.

A force of 1,000 firefighters from as far away as Ventura and Santa Fe Springs battled the fire as it roared out of control, consuming the homes and more than 3,200 acres of brush.

Plan to Set Backfire

By nightfall, the fire was burning westward and was almost into Limekiln Canyon, which runs north from the end of Tampa Avenue. Firefighters were clearing a firebreak there and planned to set a backfire.

Cause of the blaze was under investigation. Two men had been seen near where the fire broke out but fire officials said no evidence of arson had been found.

Gov. George Deukmejian and Los Angeles city and county authorities declared states of emergency.

The Los Angeles Fire Department estimated damage at almost $3.9 million.

About 50 firefighters suffered minor injuries; several were treated for embers in their eyes and two inhaled chlorine from burning pool supplies, said Los Angeles Fire Department Inspector Ed Reed. At least five residents were treated for minor injuries at local hospitals.

Residents in the Porter Ranch neighborhood said they awoke to find the sky brilliant with flames, smoke pouring into their bedrooms and their houses igniting under a “a rain of fire”--clouds of blazing embers hurled out of the burning brush by winds of up to 70 m.p.h.

“It was raining fire, just orange everywhere,” Eric Struthoff said as he surveyed the ruins of his home, his trousers pockmarked with holes from the wind-driven embers.

“Everything we worked for is gone,” said a sobbing Ann Friedman, his neighbor on Beaufait Avenue.

The powerful winds made a volatile combination with thick, dry brush on the mountains on the city’s northern rim, which fire Battalion Chief Dean Cathey called “pound for pound . . . equivalent to gasoline.”

City Fire Department spokesmen said the wind was gusting from 40 to 70 m.p.h. as the flames closed in on Beaufait Avenue, a neighborhood of homes in the $400,000 range.

The wind was so strong “it would actually blow couches across the street,” said Fire Chief Manning. Although firefighters took up positions on Beaufait Avenue before the fire arrived, “we were still overwhelmed,” he said. “It was an incredible situation.”

The high winds grounded fixed-wing aircraft, but eight retardant-dropping helicopters fought the flames, weaving through the air perilously close to the hillsides under the battering of the winds.

All but four of the homes damaged or destroyed were on Beaufait, said Los Angeles Fire Department Inspector Vince Marzo. On neighboring Eddleston Drive, some homeowners stayed and fought the flames as the fire swept through the neighborhood and leaped nearby Aliso Creek.

About 5 a.m., residents said, police cars and fire trucks raced through the neighborhood, and residents were advised, over public address systems, to evacuate.

“It was bumper-to-bumper cars, trying to get out of here,” said Mike Miller, 46, who stayed on his roof with a garden hose. “If you leave, you lose your house,” he said. “I was lucky to save mine, but I stayed. Others left.”

Neighbor Charles Kunz, 50, said he was also fighting the rain of embers with a garden hose when “the whole sky lit up, and then all of a sudden the hillside over there all burst into flames at once.”

Voluntary Evacuation

Judging from the number of cars that tried to return to the neighborhood later in the day, at least 8,000 residents fled the area at one time or another, said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Kent Setty.

Fire Inspector Reed said there was “absolutely no way to guess at all at the number of people evacuated.” The evacuation was voluntary and no count was kept, he said.

About 60 people checked into an emergency shelter set up by Red Cross officials at the Ahavat Shalom Temple in Northridge, Rabbi Jerry Brown said. And about 75 horses evacuated from a farm in Aliso Canyon were being housed on the Granada Hills High School football field.

Mayor Tom Bradley toured Beaufait Avenue with City Councilman Hal Bernson, state Assemblywoman Marian LaFollete and Manning.

“This is an incredible tragedy,” Bradley said. “But when you consider it could have been worse, you have good feelings about the Fire Department.”

Manning said “a major factor” in determining which houses were lost was the type of roofing: Wood shingles ignite easily after years of drying in the sun. Many of the houses that burned had such wood shingle roofs, the fire chief said, calling them “a disaster waiting to happen.”

‘Beyond . . . Control’

Before Bradley returned Friday from a meeting of the National League of Cities in Boston, Acting Mayor John Ferraro declared a state of emergency, telling the City Council that “the emergency has, or is likely to become, beyond the control of normal” city emergency services. The declaration activated the city’s emergency operations center to coordinate the battle and allowed the city to call on outside agencies for assistance.

Later Deukmejian, at the request of the Board of Supervisors, declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles County, noting three disastrous Santa Ana-spawned fires in two days.

On Thursday, firestorms destroyed 22 houses and damaged nine others in Baldwin Park and the La Verne area, causing hundreds to flee. Damage from those fires was estimated at more than $10 million.

The cause of Friday’s fire remained a mystery.

Investigators had not ruled out the possibility that the fire was caused by downed power wires on Sunshine Canyon Landfill property. “There were downed power lines in that area,” Manning said. “But at this point in time, the arson investigators are looking at a number of possible causes.”

“It could have been power lines, it could have been spontaneous, it could have been a number of things,” County Fire Department Inspector John Lenihan said.

2 Men Sought

Arson investigators announced late in the afternoon that they want to question two men seen leaving Bee Canyon, near the fire’s origin, just before the flames were spotted. “They may be responsible, but then again they may just have seen something,” Marzo said.

Reed said a park ranger saw the men on a road near the landfill. “The ranger later told us about it, and we decided we’d like to talk to them. I’ve got no idea what two people would be doing up there at 4:30 in the morning.”

One of the men was described by witnesses as white, 5-feet, 8-inches tall, with a mustache. He was driving a white pickup truck. The other was black, with a ponytail, about 5-feet, 5-inches tall, 165 pounds and wearing an Army fatigue jacket. Witnesses said both appeared to be about 21 years old.

Los Angeles school district officials closed five schools in the area, affecting more than 5,000 students.

The elementary schools closed were El Oro Way and Van Gogh Street in Granada Hills and Castle Bay Elementary School in Northridge. District officials also closed Robert Frost Junior High School in Granada Hills and the North Valley Occupational Center in Mission Hills.

The hot, dry winds continued to gust at up to 70 m.p.h. in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties on Friday, considerably less than Thursday’s peak velocities of 100 m.p.h. but still strong enough to topple trucks on the Devore Cutoff in the Cajon Pass area.

Friday’s winds knocked out electrical service to about 4,800 customers in Los Angeles, most of them in the San Fernando Valley. The city Department of Water and Power said service was restored to most customers within three hours.

A spokesman for Southern California Edison Co., which suffered a total of 552,000 outages during the three-day windstorm, said power had been restored to all but 3,500 customers in scattered areas of the San Gabriel Valley by nightfall Friday.

Officials said the winds caused a light plane attempting a takeoff Friday morning from Burbank Airport to lurch sharply, snapping the undercarriage and tipping the aircraft over on its nose. No injuries were reported.

In San Diego County, the winds still blew at hurricane force on Friday, with gusts up to 90 m.p.h., prompting the National Weather Service to issue travelers’ advisories warning of “extremely dangerous” highway conditions in some mountain and canyon areas.

Blowing dust, sand and debris reduced visibility and caused the closure of the 14-mile Devore Cutoff on Interstate 15 between I-10 and I-15E in the Rancho Cucamonga area after several tractor-trailer rigs blew over. Traffic was detoured through San Bernardino for several hours before the route was reopened Friday afternoon.

Dave Beusterien, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., a private weather service that provides forecasts for The Times, said the winds should ease somewhat today, then pick up again on Sunday.

“It’ll be a lot quieter Saturday, with winds at something like 10 to 20 m.p.h.,” he said. “But stronger winds will be back Sunday, although it’s still too early to guess how strong they’ll be. Right now I’d say they’d be about 25 to 35 m.p.h., with maybe some gusts up around 40 below the canyons.”

Beusterien said the winds on Thursday and Friday were the product of two large circulating weather systems.

One, a high-pressure system over the Great Basin, was rotating clockwise, spinning off winds that were pumped into Southern California from the northeast. The other, a low-pressure system over Baja California, was rotating counterclockwise, reinforcing the winds by pulling them to the southwest.

By this morning, Beusterien said, the high-pressure system will have begun to weaken and the low-pressure system will have moved off to the east. He said the lull will last until a new high-pressure system begins to build Sunday over the Great Basin. Sunday’s winds probably won’t be as high as before, he said, because there will be no reinforcement from Baja California.

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Stephanie Chavez, Sam Enriquez, Gabe Fuentes, Eric Malnic and Amy Pyle.