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Brush Fire Means Fight or Flight in 2 Small Towns

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Times Staff Writer

A brush fire raced into the outskirts of the small mountain community of Elizabeth Lake in the Angeles National Forest on Wednesday afternoon, forcing residents to choose between fleeing the flames or staying to defend their homes.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s patrol cars hurried along the roads, urging residents over loudspeakers to evacuate immediately.

Sheriff’s deputies and county fire officials estimated that from 1,000 to 1,500 of the 2,500 residents did so.

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Others stayed.

“My choices were to leave it, and just get the hell out of the way and let it burn, or put it out,” said Mike Kurth, 43, principal of the Linda Verde Elementary School in Lancaster, who lives just south of Elizabeth Lake.

Saw Embers Hit Roof

While saving his own house with a garden hose, he said, he saw embers blowing onto his neighbor’s wooden roof and doused them until firefighters arrived.

“You kind of don’t like to give up and then come back and see something burned down,” he said. “My neighbor’s house, I know it would have burned down.”

Curtis Hull, a Culver City firefighter, was not as fortunate. His house and barn on the southern edge of the community were the main structures lost to the fire.

Another barn also burned in the blaze, which raced through more than 3,700 acres of brush and was still burning uncontained early today, being fought by 300 firefighters. Containment was expected “toward afternoon” today, predicted Los Angeles County Assistant Fire Chief Leon Provost.

“I really don’t feel like talking to anyone right now,” Hull said, surveying the charred ruins of his home in the eerie glow cast by the setting sun through a cloud of ashes and smoke. About a dozen tongues of flames flickered from the ruins, around trees burned bare of leaves.

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Threw Dirt on Fire

Raymond Moreau, 41, a general contractor, was working on a house in nearby Green Valley when the fire erupted shortly before 2 p.m. near the San Francisquito Campground. Moreau said he and his eight colleagues picked up shovels and threw dirt on the fire as it approached the neighborhood, extinguishing that threat, before he headed for his own home, which was in the path of the fire in Elizabeth Lake.

“I saw it coming down the hill,” Moreau said. “You see pictures on the news of smoke billowing, and you almost think they’re speeding up the film. The smoke was doing that. It was that fast.”

Moreau put a sprinkler atop the house. He said he hid inside the house when deputies came through, ordering residents to evacuate, so he could stay behind to protect his house. In case he did have to run, he said, he put the files from his contracting business in his truck.

Many residents did run.

Ronni Douglas, 41, said she “started getting wind” of the fire about 2 p.m. at her home on Ranch Club Road. The smoke and smell grew “worse and worse and worse,” she said, and by 3 p.m., she could see flames coming over a hill about 200 yards away. She called her husband, Rick, at work in Valencia. He was able to reach the house and pick her up an hour later.

“It was so smoky, ashy and black, we could hardly breathe” as they fled, she said.

Evacuation Center

Like a few dozen others, the Douglases went to an evacuation center set up by the Red Cross at Quartz Hill High School. Many residents stopped by the evacuation center to gather news, but preferred to wait out the evacuation in their cars at roadblocks leading into the mountain area from the Antelope Valley.

“You hear about it, and you see it on TV in other places, and when it happens to you, you can’t do anything about it,” said Eva Wheeler, 59, who works in Chatsworth. A neighbor called her at work to warn her about the fire, which burned to within half a mile of her home on Lead Hill Road, she said.

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Prevented from reaching her home by the closed roads, she was planning to spend the night in her car at a roadblock west of Lancaster. But officials reopened the area to residents about 8 p.m.

The fire destroyed 15 power poles, leaving all of Green Valley and about five homes in Elizabeth Lake without electricity, said Rex S. Wells, district operations supervisor for Southern California Edison Co. The power in Green Valley was expected to be restored by noon today at the earliest, Wells said.

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella, Richard Lee Colvin and Philipp Gollner.

One home and two barns were destroyed in the Antelope Valley fire: Part I, Page 3

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