Five Huge Fires Hit Condo Row; 150 Flee Homes

An explosion of pre-dawn fires showered the night sky with flaming cinders as it raged out of control in Westwood’s exclusive condominium row Saturday, blazing through a 14-story apartment building, igniting 14 other structures and routing 150 people from their homes.

Driven by stiff winds and spewing fireballs that arced over the Wilshire Boulevard corridor, “five major fires” nearly strained the Los Angeles Fire Department to the limits of its manpower and forced the greatest mobilization for a building fire in the city’s history, said Chief Donald O. Manning.

A total of 400 firefighters, dispatched from as far away as San Pedro and the San Fernando Valley, battled the blaze for more than four hours.

“This is the largest single commitment ever,” Manning said. “At one point, the dispatcher said we had no more (firefighters) to send.”

Seven firefighters suffered minor burns or heat and smoke-related injuries, including three men who were burned on their faces and hands. They were taken to UCLA Medical Center and later released.

The only civilian casualty was an 89-year-old woman who was evacuated from her burning apartment after being overcome by smoke. She was also treated at UCLA.

Two elderly women--one described as nearly blind and about 84 years old--remained in their apartments throughout the four-hour blaze and well into the afternoon, when fire officials escorted them out. One was found on the fifth floor and one on the 12th floor. Neither woman suffered serious injury.

Fire Capt. James Littlefield said he and other firefighters took one of the women down from the 12th floor. “We walked her down one step at a time. It was very difficult persuading her to leave,” he said. Fire officials added that she was never threatened.

Assistant Fire Chief Peter Lucarelli said firefighters found both of the women on their first sweep through the building, but determined that they were not in danger an allowed them to stay. Both women were in units at the west end of the building--away from the blaze.

A fire company was on each floor of the building--near the women--throughout the ordeal, Lucarelli said. “If there was any danger, we would have gotten them out of there,” he said.

The fire began at the construction site of a nearly-completed four-story luxury condominium complex on the north side of Wilshire at Devon Avenue.

When the first fire units arrived less than 10 minutes after the 3:37 a.m. alarm, they faced sheets of flame that swirled hundreds of feet into the air and heat so intense that it buckled a construction crane.

Afterward, fire investigators sifted through acrid smoke and the blackened ruin of the construction site, trying to determine the cause.

Aurelio Terrazas Barron, who was on his first night on the job as night watchman at the construction site, said he heard a large explosion followed by a smaller one inside the building when the fire erupted.

Terrazas, who was questioned for more than an hour by arson investigators, said he told them that the explosion seemed to occur in the middle of the building.

“The first explosion was very, very big and then (there was) another. The fist made a lot of noise, the other just made the fire go higher,” he said.

Damage estimates were unavailable, but losses--which included priceless private art collections--were expected to rise into millions of dollars.

“It’ll take a significant amount of investigation,” said fire spokesman Ed Reed. “Everything is burned so severely that there’s very little left to investigate. So they’ll sift the debris and it may require lab analysis before they’re able to come up with a cause.”

At the fire’s peak, jets of flame raked the eastern edge of the Wilshire Terrace apartment building at Beverly Glen Boulevard--next door to the construction site--while firefighters poked their way up 13 flights of stairs on the opposite side of the building. Some crawled on their hands and knees, hosing down each floor while others led the residents--many of them frail and elderly--to safety.

“It was mass confusion up there. Hose lines everywhere, men everywhere. It was real clogged up, very tough,” said firefighter Dane Jackson. The temperature of the fire inside the building, estimated at 600 degrees Fahrenheit, melted the leather shield on his helmet.

Nurses and neighbors helped some of the 106 evacuees down the stairs. Dazed, their nightgowns and fur coats smeared with soot, most tenants were taken in by friends and relatives. Fewer than a dozen checked in at two temporary shelters, Red Cross officials said.

Several Wilshire Terrace residents said that film director Billy Wilder, who lives on the 12th floor, was among those evacuated. He could not be reached for comment, but a building employee said he was safe and staying with friends.

Actress Greer Garson, whose 6th-floor apartment was among those destroyed, was at her Texas ranch at the time, a neighbor who asked to remain anonymous said.

The building’s tenants’ roster also lists other notables, such as Lucy Doheny Battson, daughter-in-law of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles oil tycoon Edward Doheny, and Alyse McLaughlin, widow of Charles J. Correll, “Andy” of the Amos and Andy radio comedy team.

It may be several weeks before residents of even the least damaged units in the building are permitted to return home, fire officials said late Saturday.

Meanwhile, some residents, who escaped from their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs, expressed shock over the magnitude of the blaze.

“The whole sky was orange,” said Judy Gorman, who grabbed her purse and fled with her husband from a nearby Wilshire Boulevard apartment. “It was like orange daylight.”

Smoldering chunks of wood sailed from rooftop to rooftop, burning the upper floors of two smaller apartment houses on Wilshire and destroying one multimillion-dollar home on Holmby Avenue three blocks away. Three other homes nearby also were burned.

On Holmby Avenue, where homes sell for $600,000 to $1 million, neighbors raced outside in their nightclothes and pitched in together. As flaming apple-sized chunks of wood drifted down on their wood-shake roofs, they grabbed garden hoses and sprayed each others’ homes until firefighters arrived.

“People came outside and pulled together,” said Holmby resident Shirley Frierman. “I didn’t know whether to water the roofs or the sky above.”

Even after the fires were brought under control, the canyon of condominiums and apartment houses along Wilshire remained a vision of chaos. Hose lines snaked through the streets. Nearby, officers rerouted last-minute Christmas shoppers who were heading for Westwood Village, near the UCLA campus.

Along with the 400 firefighters, 67 fire trucks, four helicopters and six ambulances were sent to the scene. And weary dispatchers placed the city’s entire force of 2,900 firefighters on standby, alerting fire departments in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Culver City to be prepared to send help, Manning said.

Although damage estimates were not immediately available, the losses were visible.

At the construction site where the fire started, flames had consumed the frame of the Tudor-style condominium complex where 17 units--complete with marble floors and maids’ quarters--were being offered at $1.3 million each.

The Devonhill was to be a low-rise chateau in the middle of the corridor of high-rise glass-and-steel buildings. Only Friday, the roof had been put on.

“It was about 65% to 75% completed,” said Ed Boctor of Chartere Construction, a Universal City firm building the complex. “We had a night watch and (he) called the Fire Department. They responded in three minutes. But apparently three minutes was too long to save the building.”

Fire officials said the first alarm at the construction site, on the north side of Wilshire, was called in at 3:37 a.m. Fire spokesman Pat Marek said the first units arrived at 3:42 a.m.

“The whole thing was in flames,” said Ann Strauss, an apartment dweller who glanced toward the condominium site.

Awash in fire, a towering crane in the construction yard collapsed, its metal skeleton twisted. Radiating heat and flame to the edges of the construction site, the fire burst forth next door onto the third and fourth floors of the Wilshire Terrace, built in 1961 as one of the first residential buildings on the Wilshire Corridor.

From across Devon Avenue, Arlene Gerber watched, horrified, from her apartment building. “Someone had a window open,” she said. “The curtain was blowing out in the wind. I saw it catch.”

Flames licked the balcony, racing up the east side of the Wilshire Terrace building. Although much of the eastern edge was aflame within minutes, firefighters said that the fire moved more slowly between that section and the rest of the building.

The structure of the Wilshire Terrace, built of steel and concrete with “solid doors,” impeded the flow of the fire, Manning said. The building had no sprinkler system--although its lack of such a system is legal under city codes because of the building’s age.

It was not immediately known if the building’s alarm system worked. Some residents from the undamaged west end of the building said their own smoke alarms did not activate. Others did say they heard alarms.

“I woke up and thought it was daylight,” said 80-year-old Wilshire Terrace resident Ken Pingree.

Jane Smith, a Scottish nurse who lived on the ground floor of the building, ran up the stairwell to the 12th floor, where her 97-year-old employer lived. Smith, wearing a nightgown, a tartan scarf and a black tam-o’shanter, gently walked the elderly woman down to the first floor, where she was placed in a wheelchair.

One of the last residents evacuated was an 89-year-old woman who was carried down by firefighter Steve Hall. Wheelchair-bound, the woman was unable to walk on her own. Hall tore off his breathing apparatus, hoisted the woman over his shoulder and hurried down the stairwell.

“It was burning really hot and fast,” Hall said. “When I got her down, I put her on the grass. She said ‘thank you’ and the paramedics attended to her.”

One firefighter, who declined to give his name, was burned on the ears while dousing flames on the 11th floor. “I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “I had to get out. It was just too hot.”

Embers drifted across Wilshire to a second construction yard. A pile of lumber there began to burn. Soon, several explosions ripped through the area. Firefighters believe two drums of fuel oil had ignited.

The intensity of the blasts dissolved the windows and bumpers of a BMW parked on Wilshire. The heat twisted tail lights on six other cars parked in a garage nearby. A plastic portable toilet melted.

Cinders rained like fiery hailstones. Some landed on the roof of the Devonshire Apartments, across Devon from the Wilshire Terrace. Residents fled as the roof burned. Hundreds more sparks floated south, borne by the wind toward expensive homes. The wood-shake roofs of six houses on Ashton Avenue caught fire. Another on Kinard was scorched.

On Holmby, where the owners of two houses were away on vacation, embers wreaked their heaviest damage on two homes. Some neighbors on the street complained that firefighters failed to respond to the burning homes for a half hour. But fire crews were taxed to the limit as they struggled to bring the blaze under control.

On Wilshire, fires still raged at 7 a.m. “There were still lots of fires when we got here,” said Battalion Chief Mike Littleton, who arrived late from South-Central Los Angeles.

Finally, at 7:43 a.m., fire dispatchers announced that the blaze had been extinguished.

Also contributing to coverage of the Wilshire fire were Times staff writers Bob Baker, Stephen Braun, Ashley Dunn, Marita Hernandez, John Johnson and Bob Pool.

More Coverage in Metro

THE WILSHIRE CORRIDOR FIRE Fire’s starting point--Northwest corner of Devon Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. Four-story condominium under construction. Destroyed.

10345 Wilshire Blvd.--Two-story apartment house, the Devonshire. Received major damage; four vehicles damaged or destroyed.

850 Beverly Glen Blvd.--Fourteen-story co-op apartment building, the Wilshire Terrace. Sustained major damage to its east side on floors two through 14.

10366 Wilshire Blvd.--Three-story apartment house. Heavily damaged, one car destroyed.

10380 Wilshire Blvd.--Construction site. Crane platform burned, construction materials destroyed.

10367 Ashton Ave.--Triplex apartment. Damage to wood-shingled roof and to attic.

10373 Ashton Ave.--Two-story single-family home. Minor roof damage.

10379 Ashton Ave.--Triplex apartment. Damage to wood shingled roof and to attic.

10376 Ashton Ave.--Single-family home. Minor roof damage.

10380 Ashton Ave.--Single-family home. Minor roof damage.

1328 Holmby Ave.--One-story single-family home. Destroyed.

1322 Holmby Ave.--Single-family home. Major roof damage.

1309 Holmby Ave.--Single-family home. Minor roof damage.

10447 Kinnard Ave.--Single-family home. Roof and attic destroyed.

10451 Kinnard Ave.--One-story single-family home. Minor roof damage and broken glass.

Source: Los Angeles Fire Department; Times Staff Writers.

FIGHTING THE FIRE--The Wilshire Corridor fire “made the First Interstate look like a dumpster fire,” according to one of the many firefighters who assembled in unprecedented numbers to fight the blaze.B1

TRAGEDY AVERTED--Despite the scope of the fire, the time of day and the apparent failure of a building alarm, everyone made it out alive.B1

MORNING AFTER--Residents of the fire area, where homes range from $600,000 to $900,000, either thank their lucky stars or start picking up the pieces.B5