Healing Comes Slowly on Fire-Scarred Street : Disaster: More than a year after blaze, residents are trying to rebuild their lives. And they have found a new neighborhood unity in the process.

Thirteen months after a wind-whipped fire charged out of the Santa Susana Mountains and into a sleeping neighborhood in Porter Ranch, the physical scars are healing.

The blackened slopes north of Granada Hills have given way to brown winter brush. On Beaufait Avenue, where the fire exacted its greatest toll, nearly all of the 36 damaged homes have been rebuilt or repaired, and most families have returned.

Construction crews and trucks still arrive each workday, and the last houses to rise from their ashes are just a few months from completion.

But the emotional damage from the blaze has been harder to repair. The victims of the Porter Ranch fire say they find solace in one another, in a neighborhood closeness forged in the shared experience of the disaster.

Ann Friedman recently surveyed the new house built on the spot where her old house had stood for 18 years. But in the new one--bigger, with high ceilings, polished wood floors and electrical outlets exactly where she and her husband wanted them--there are few personal belongings. They were all lost in the fire. So, to Friedman, the house doesn’t feel much like home.

“It just doesn’t feel right,” she said. “I don’t know when it will. We lost almost a whole lifetime of belongings. Maybe it will take another lifetime until we feel at home.”

Despite that uncertainty, Friedman and other residents on Beaufait Avenue look back on the past year and can easily find a positive note: The fire left them with something they didn’t have before, a “real” neighborhood, a place where superficial waves and hellos have been replaced with actual bonds of friendship among residents.

“We have a sense of place now,” said Eric Struthoff, who lost his home to the fire and is still waiting for rebuilding to be completed. “It was a fire that brought it on, unfortunately, but there is a sense of belonging now. The fire has given us a spirit of community.”

It was that neighborhood closeness and spirit that was toasted last month at a community dinner organized to mark the first anniversary of the fire. About 75 Beaufait Avenue residents--casual acquaintances before, close friends now--met at a local restaurant to begin the second year after the fire together. The media, which have closely chronicled the neighborhood’s destruction and rebuilding, were not invited.

“Just residents,” Friedman said. “We want to start getting some of our anonymity back. We want normal lives.”

The residents’ anonymity was lost at dawn on Dec. 9, 1988, when Santa Ana winds up to 70 m.p.h. pushed flames over the hills northeast of the neighborhood.

Along the way, the fire of unknown origin scorched 3,200 acres--including nearly all of 714-acre O’Melveny Park--and then destroyed 15 houses and damaged 25 others. All but four of the houses were on two blocks of Beaufait Avenue, an exclusive neighborhood of $400,000 homes built above Aliso Canyon in the 1970s.