City Axes Brush Plan Sparked by ’85 Blaze

In the same week as the fifth anniversary of the worst fire in the city’s history, the San Diego City Council has eliminated a brush-management program designed to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again.

The program sought to remove thick chaparral and range grasses from high-risk canyon areas, much like the region of Mission Valley where an arson-triggered blaze began burning out of control on the morning of June 30, 1985.

The Normal Heights fire destroyed 64 homes and damaged 20 others. Added to the casualties were 18 vehicles, three businesses and 18 outbuildings. A few thousand people were forced to flee, but as savage as the blaze burned, no one was killed, and not a single serious injury was reported.

Shortly before noon five years ago, it came roaring out of the foothills of the valley below, its flames licking the roofs of houses, then engulfing each one, leaving behind smoke and rubble and millions of dollars in damage.

The ensuing outcry led to the brush-management program, which, at its peak in 1987, allocated more than $1 million to a full-time staff of nine.

However, because of budgetary constraints, the program was killed by the City Council on Thursday night.

Only that aspect that seeks to remove brush from public property--an allocation of about $400,000--was preserved, under the auspices of the city Park and Recreation Department.

“Did the city ever really do anything? Truthfully, no,” said schoolteacher Louis Perez, whose home on Panama Place burned to the ground. “There was a lot of talk but never much action.”

Deputy City Manager Maureen Stapleton said the program was “never a case” of the city responding to public pressure, then backing off, although the part of the program pertaining to private property--such as the homes in Normal Heights--was allowed to dwindle to $77,000 and a full-time staff of two for the fiscal year ending today.

Now it’s gone completely.

“The city made a concerted effort after the Normal Heights fire to identify all top-priority, publicly owned and privately owned parcels through the brush-management program,” Stapleton said. “Subsequently, we have inspected and abated private parcels in the Priority 1 group. We’ve gone through and cleaned up publicly owned properties bearing serious brush concerns.

“Because of the fiscal constraints we’re facing, the inspection program for private parcels--operated under the rubric of the (San Diego) Fire Department--is going to be on hold for a year. We hope by the next fiscal year (beginning July 1, 1991) to fund the program again.”

Asked about the timing of the program’s death, Stapleton said, “This simply wasn’t a one-shot deal by the city. It wasn’t, a little bit of funding and then it goes away, when, quote-unquote, public pressure is off. We’re very serious about it, and we continue to be.”

City Councilman John Hartley, whose district includes Normal Heights--his predecessor, Gloria McColl, represented the area during the fire--said Friday he was unaware of the brush-management effort having been axed.

“Oh, really, I thought it had been preserved,” Hartley said. “I’m surprised. Well, I guess we’ll have to work on getting it back next year.

“It does seem to happen, though, that whenever there’s an emergency, there’s always a mobilization; then, when the threat lessens, people demobilize. It’s like putting out neighborhood alerts during crime. Six months without crime, the effort drifts away. People have to stay vigilant.”

Capt. Al Macdonald, a spokesman for the San Diego Fire Department, said brush management was not a specific line item, considered separately by the council. It was omitted from the overall Fire Department budget request approved by the city manager, Macdonald said.

“We had to cut the budget by a certain percentage,” he added, “and brush management just happened to be in question.”

Kay Haines was among the victims of the Normal Heights fire, which she said she would like to forget. Staying vigilant for her is to not remember.

However, she agreed with a newspaper account of the fire, which likened it to “a horse at full gallop,” evoking “the haunting image of a World War II bombing: fireplaces and brick chimneys standing amid smoldering rubble, naked trees seared black, people crying openly at their losses.”

The loss for Haines and her husband, Doug, was “everything--everything went,” she said. “There was nothing left. You just wanted to die.”

Haines and her husband live on Cliff Place, which supports a row of houses perched on the edge of a cliff. The land below plunges into the valley. Like most streets in the area, almost all houses have been replaced, rebuilt from the ground up. Only one on Cliff Place was spared, and it was used as the Fire Department command post. It was also ringed by ice plant.

Haines did not escape with her photographs--hardly anyone did--but she did manage to save a dog and three cats. Haines, 68, and her husband, 74, rebuilt their house, exactly as it was before, for $120,000.

“The most emotionally wrenching part for me,” Doug Haines said, “was watching it go up in flames. Unless it’s happened to you, it’s an indescribable feeling. Afterward, you have no choice but to start from scratch.”

For Carla Christensen, 38, who lives with her husband and newborn son on North Mountain View Drive, the fire was “devastating, overwhelming. . . . It took quite some time for us to put our lives back together.”

Such disasters never pick the right time to happen, but for the Christensens, the timing could not have been worse. When the blaze hit, the couple had only recently mourned the loss of a baby boy, as well as the death of Mr. Christensen’s parents.

“It took two years for us to feel like we were back to normal,” Christensen said, cradling in her lap her 6-month-old boy. “It took about a year to get the new house built; we moved in in August of ’86. In the meantime, we rented an apartment in Hillcrest, which wasn’t fun.

“I felt like I lost . . . a sense of identity. We lost a house and two cars and all our photographs, including our wedding pictures, but we also lost a part of ourselves. There are so many things you can never replace. Mementos, possessions. . . . All these things you take for granted, the things that money can’t buy, which mean so much.

“The process of rebuilding was so stressful. To get through the insurance company’s bureaucracy, the red tape and the paper work. . . . It seemed at times they were there to make life more difficult, rather than easier. Still, it wasn’t as bad for us as it was for some people. There were some people who didn’t have policies. They really did lose everything.”

Louis Perez, who teaches school in Chula Vista, had a neighbor like that on Panama Place, where Perez’s hillside home was reduced to a cinder.

Perez said the neighbor had only recently argued with his insurance agent, and in a fit of pique, had canceled his policy without renewing it or getting a new one.

“All he could do was sell and leave,” Perez said. “It was a goner.”

Perez, who lives alone without a family, has “no regrets” about the fire, which left him with a new home, one that he designed.

“I live in my own tropical fantasy world here,” he said, pointing to the airy interior of a home filled with Brazilian artifacts, rattan furniture, fancy French doors and exotic artwork.

Still, Perez came to resent the “looky-loos,” the gawkers who, to this day, drive down the streets, craning their necks to catch glimpses of the damage and where it all started.

His advice to anyone interested in lessening the aftermath of fire: Keep as many records as possible in safe-deposit boxes and record a videotaped inventory of everything inside, then store that in a safe deposit box.

Carla Christensen said she came to resent, most of all, the passers-by who approached and, marveling at her new home, expressed their emotions in shades of envy.

“As though we wanted this to happen!” she said. “I got to where I asked them, ‘But are you willing to pay the price--emotionally--for what your new home will cost?’ Believe me, the cost is high. In many ways, we’re still paying it.”