Fire Blackens 119 Acres but Spares Houses

A fast-moving brush fire swept across a steep hillside in Thousand Oaks on Thursday, threatening neighborhoods of new and old houses and causing a small power outage before firefighters were able to bring it under control.

The fire, which sent plumes of black smoke hundreds of feet into the air and could be seen from as far away as Chatsworth, charred 119 acres within a four-hour period, fire officials said. No injuries were reported and no structures were damaged in the blaze, authorities said.

Arson investigators said the fire was of suspicious origin but had not determined its cause by late Thursday.

The fire erupted about 2:15 p.m. in a brushy area in the 1500 block of Erbes Road, across the street from a residential neighborhood where many houses have wood-shake roofs.

Fire officials did not call for an evacuation, and many residents hosed down their roofs and the sides of their houses to fend off the intense heat from the blaze. A section of Erbes Road, between El Monte and La Granada drives, was closed to traffic for about three hours as firefighters fought to control the blaze.

“We heard sirens and helicopters,” said Sari Wade, who lives two blocks from where the fire is believed to have started. “My son went outside and he said, ‘Mom, I can see smoke.’ I thought he was putting me on. We walked out on our front lawn, and we saw an immense amount of flames.”

Residents along nearby Sapra Street said they feared their houses would be lost when a wall of flames came within 100 feet.

“I was mowing the lawn, and I looked across the hill and I saw this flame,” said Shane McCarthy, 16. “Then it just spread.”

McCarthy said he ran into the house and alerted his family. He said he climbed onto the roof and began hosing it down.

“We just panicked,” said Betty Adolph, McCarthy’s mother. “We’ve just seen all that destruction in the Santa Barbara fire, and we were afraid we’d lose our home.”

Westerly winds eventually pushed the blaze up a steep hillside toward the exclusive community of North Ranch. However, about 200 Ventura and Los Angeles county firefighters, assisted by a number of hand crews and three water-dropping helicopters, managed to keep the blaze away from the houses in the area.

Capt. Tom Law of the Ventura County Fire Department said the city’s strict weed-abatement ordinance was largely responsible for keeping the fire at a distance. The law requires that residents keep a clearance area of 100 feet around their houses and other structures.

“It’s definitely working today,” Law said of the ordinance. “It’s saved our bacon many times.”

Carol Larson, area manager for Southern California Edison, said about 50 customers in the area were without power for several hours because a single utility pole had been damaged in the blaze.

“We initially turned off power to approximately 2,000 homes for 60 seconds in order to isolate the equipment that was damaged,” she said. There are a large number of power poles in the charred brush area, but the poles are treated with a special fire retardant, Larson said.

Debbie Beaumont, a Ventura County Fire Department spokeswoman, said fire officials were pleased that they were able to get a handle on the fire as quickly as they did.

“Everybody was really nervous after the Santa Barbara fire,” Beaumont said. “But everything went really smoothly.”

Brush fires in Santa Barbara and Glendale last week destroyed 637 houses, injured dozens of people and caused more than $200 million in damage. A brush fire also charred 585 acres and threatened high-priced houses on the northern edge of Ojai last week.

Times staff writer Carol Watson contributed to this story.