Residents Try to Cope After Fire Hits Apartment : Disaster: Hundreds still homeless after West Covina blaze. Some still wonder how fire spread so quickly.

“How bad was it?” came the anxious voice from the crowd of evacuated residents as they peered over the boundary of yellow police tape on the sidewalk in front of their gutted apartment building in West Covina on Sunday.

Dave Griffin, the first resident allowed back inside the blackened Sunset Avenue apartment house after Saturday afternoon’s devastating blaze, shot a quick glance at his salvaged goods--a surfboard, a plastic bag stuffed with clothes, soot-covered sneakers, $200 in cash and not much else.

“It’s a mess,” the 21-year-old sheet metal worker said glumly.

There was not much else to say as hundreds of displaced residents of The Palms apartment complex awaited word on the extent of the devastation, ventured back inside for enough belongings to tide them over, and pondered the future.

“It’s still hard to believe something like this could happen,” said Southern California Rapid Transit District employee Mary Small, who returned from Texas with her husband Sunday morning only to discover disaster.

“What a thing to come home to,” she said. “And who knows what we do now?”

Reviewing the scene, authorities tempered their initial estimates of damage caused by the fire, believed to have started about 4 p.m. Saturday in a truck in a neighboring motel parking lot, spreading to several trees and then the apartment building.

Still, the numbers were not encouraging:

Half of the building’s 120 units--worth an estimated $4 million--were destroyed or severely damaged by fire, smoke and water, according to fire officials, building inspectors and building owner Leonard Walsh.

While several hundred residents were allowed to return home Sunday night, an estimated 150 to 200 more had nothing to return to.

Four firefighters and a police officer were slightly injured by flames and falling debris during the blaze.

West Covina Fire Battalion Chief Al Cheramie described the blaze as the worst in the San Gabriel Valley city’s history in terms of displaced residents and damaged homes.

About 80 residents slept Saturday night on cots at a shelter set up by the Red Cross at a local elementary school. Many arrived at the fire scene as early as 6 a.m. Sunday to try to get information. Some tempers flared as police officers held them back for hours, with some residents becoming more frustrated when those whose homes were in the more damaged parts of the building learned they would not be able to see their apartments at all.

Police temporarily jailed one woman early Sunday on a charge of public drunkenness when she insisted on trying to get into the building and would not leave the site.

Authorities planned to set up a second emergency shelter at another area junior high school Sunday night, but were “encouraging” displaced residents to find other accommodations.

Some were able to find relatives, friends and others who could help. Others among the crowd of largely blue-collar workers said they had no place to go--and what little money they had, often just a few hundred dollars cash, had been left in the building.

Trading anecdotes about the fire, residents explained that they had left with nothing but the clothes on their backs because at the outset, the fire appeared small.

Several said they watched the smoke and fire at a nearby tree from their apartment windows, not thinking much of it.

“I thought my wife was just cooking dinner,” joked bus driver Bashir Mahmud, 46. “She’s always burning something.”

Soon, the fire escalated, with embers hitting the shingles of the apartment’s third-floor roof and flames quickly wrapping around much of the building.

While fire officials are still investigating the possibility of arson, they said the blaze appears to have started when a man working on his truck poured a flammable liquid on the engine. The resulting explosion sent flames into the trees and then to the apartment building’s roof.

Police evacuated all the building’s residents, including one deaf couple, a blind person, and a man in a wheelchair, without injury.

Some evacuees complained Sunday about the efficiency of operation in which about 135 firefighters fought the blaze. They said they did not understand how such a small fire could spread so quickly. One man quipped that he half expected firefighters to start “toasting marshmallows” instead of fighting the fire.

Fire officials countered that the public does not understand the complexities of their job and that Saturday’s blaze proved particularly unpredictable.

“We couldn’t understand why it spread so fast,” said West Covina Fire Capt. Don Wilson, who worked through the night and into Sunday morning on the blaze and its cleanup. “Normally, we can get in front of the thing and control it. But we couldn’t on this one. It just kept jumping us--like a brush fire.

“I’ve been here for 20 years, and this is the worst I’ve seen.”