Out of the Ashes : Despite Losses and Uncertainties, Survivors of Santa Barbara Fire Discover Life Does Go On

Three months ago, the devastating Santa Barbara fire destroyed more than 400 homes and caused more than $250 million in damage. As the flames died, The Times profiled three families burned out of their homes. Here is a second look.

Jim and Jeri Gray have finally given up looking for Bub. It was just too depressing. All those animal shelters, all those black cats, all with their fur burned off. The cats seemed to be in shock; could they even recognize a familiar voice?

The Grays figured they would know their cat by his declawed front paws. Then one day, at one of the shelters, they thought they heard his cry. Jeri began to weep. The cat stopped crying and reached through the bars of the cage--and scratched at them. It had claws.

Now the Grays like to say Bub is “off eating the flowers,” a fond tribute to his weakness for baby’s breath--an appetite that drove many a mangled flower arrangement into the bathroom and more than once caused the cat to throw up.

“Material things you can buy,” Jim Gray says now, pondering a truism about loss and irreplaceability brought home by the Santa Barbara fire. “But the cat. . . . You can get another cat, but you can’t get that cat.”

All things considered, the Grays are faring well three months after the fire devoured their $500,000 home and left them washed up like flotsam in a beach hotel, their few remaining possessions in the trunk of their sedan.

They have moved with their 2-year-old son, J.W., to a condominium in Goleta that they had been trying to sell at the time of the fire. They have a new house in the works, with plans to start construction this fall. They hope to be in by Christmas, 1991.

They are well-insured. They are in reasonably good health. Their two dogs are ensconced, at considerable expense, in a nearby kennel. The Grays have been bolstered by friends and family, showered with replacement teapots, crockery, glassware and toys.

“I look at us not as fire victims but as fire survivors,” said Jim, a 50-year-old bank vice president, in a new chair, at a new kitchen table, in new clothes. “And, shoot, everybody’s troubles are nothing compared to the lady that got killed and her husband.”

The lady was Andrea Lane Gurka, whose body was found in a dry creek bed near her house, where she died attempting to flee the fire. Her desperate husband had driven home from work through the jammed streets in hopes of being able to save her.

Yet even for the fortunate, the last few months have been far from easy.

Take insurance. The Grays’ coverage is extensive. Their policy promises, among other things, living expenses and full replacement value on the house. Nevertheless, they expect to take a loss. They figure their net worth will be reduced by perhaps $150,000.

One reason is that full replacement value applies only to the house. The coverage for landscaping, for example, is a flat percentage of the policy. So the Grays are getting $13,000 to cover the loss of mature pine trees and other vegetation valued at $70,000.

Similarly, they spent two weeks trying to inventory the contents of the house--room by room and drawer by drawer on 50 single-spaced pages--only to discover that the possessions they had accumulated exceeded their coverage for contents by $60,000.

There are two lessons here, they say:

Update your inventory and your estimates of value, then update your insurance accordingly. And, where possible, avoid the temptation of trying to get by on minimal insurance--a practice Jim likens to “carrying around an umbrella with a hole in it.”

There have been other problems, beyond the nitty-gritty ones of insurance. Minor ailments have bedeviled the family since the fire. For weeks, J.W. refused to go to sleep. There have been colds, sinus and allergy problems, a gastrointestinal bug. Nerves are frayed--by the sound of sirens, by a whiff of barbecue, by soot floating down from the hills on a windy day.

The Grays’ old Rancho San Antonio neighborhood is quiet. Lot after lot has been scraped clean of all but the last traces of the fire. Ruins have been demolished and carted off, leaving just a driveway, a retaining wall, a swimming pool.

The family goes up there from time to time to water their surviving trees--two charred eucalyptus and a smaller shrub against the old dog run. J.W. has been back. He understands that this is where he once lived and where he will live again.

“Within three weeks of the fire, some vegetation began to sprout back,” said Jim on one recent hot, late-summer afternoon. “When there’s some green poking through, it really stands out. So you realize, life goes on.”

In contrast to the Grays’ neighborhood, there are signs of renewal everywhere on Sherwood Drive, where Frank and Alice Hernandez lived.

Construction crews are building foundations and framing houses. Surveyors are measuring property and sizing lots. Demolition companies are clearing debris. Work crews are installing chain-link fences around construction sites.

Yet on the Hernandezes’ property, a dusty lot overlooking U.S. 101, little has been done.

The lot has not been surveyed; it has not even been completely cleared. A pile of debris remains at the back of the property.

“If you’ve got insurance, you can rebuild right away,” Frank said. “You get your check from the insurance company and get started. But without insurance. . . .” He paused and studied the activity around him. “You’ve just got to wait.”

When the Hernandezes bought their house 27 years ago, they had to take out an insurance policy as a condition of the loan. But when they paid off the house in 1984, they didn’t renew the policy.

Frank, 66, and his wife Alice, 65, are both disabled. They have an income of $857 a month and spend it all on food and medicine. They simply couldn’t afford the insurance payments, they said.

After a wall of fire raced down the hillside and destroyed their home, the Hernandezes were destitute. They lost everything, and, now, without insurance, they are uncertain about their prospects for rebuilding. They applied for government grants and loans, but still don’t know if they can obtain sufficient funds.

“The waiting is the hard part,” Frank said. “We see our neighbors getting started, but we still don’t know what the future holds for us.”

In the days after the fire, the Hernandezes walked around in a daze, wearing clothes from the Red Cross, sleeping at different relatives’ houses each night, filling out countless loan and grant application forms.

The strain was so great that Frank, a former World War II paratrooper, broke down in tears whenever he talked about the house. Alice, he recalled, felt as if “she were about to have a nervous breakdown.” But after a story about the Hernandezes appeared in The Times, and later on several television news shows, the couple said they were heartened by the outpouring of support.

They received hundreds of cards, letters and checks, ranging from as little as $4 to as much as $1,000. A rebuilding fund was set up for them, and they now have $10,500 from donations and another $5,000 from a local telethon that distributed funds to fire families.

“It wasn’t the money that helped so much, it was just knowing that people cared,” Alice said.

In the weeks after the fire, Frank rarely returned to the property. Just smelling the burnt remains or seeing a metal chair leg, twisted from the heat, was too painful. But recently he has been spending his mornings at the lot, pruning the few rose bushes that survived the fire, trimming the withered eugenia hedges and watering the four charred fruit trees he hopes to bring back to life.

The couple now lives rent-free in a studio cottage behind their son’s employer’s home. They have spent some of the donations on living expenses, but they are trying to save most of it for rebuilding.

Until they settle their financial uncertainties, they are in limbo.

They now spend the evenings in their cottage and their days with their daughter, Carla Trujillo, and her two children. Trujillo lived in a small house behind the Hernandezes; that house also was destroyed in the fire. She now is renting a small house about 50 feet from Sherwood Drive.

“We were all very happy here,” Frank said, walking along the edge of his property. “My wife and I lived here 27 years and raised six children. I really hope to rebuild . . . so my grandkids can be raised here, too.”

At least Frank Hernandez has a piece of land to contemplate, to dream about. Marina Alzugaray and her husband, Steve Kurstin, don’t even have that.

The majority of those who suffered losses in the fire were homeowners. Marina, Steve and their son, Sharin, were renters. They lost their $850-a-month rustic house, located on 30 acres in the mountains above Santa Barbara. They even lost their $400 cleaning deposit.

“If you owned your home, you at least had a place to put a trailer, or even a tent. We had no place to return to,” Steve said.

Searching for a place to live has left both of them disillusioned. The rush of families seeking temporary housing in the wake of the fire was a boon to local property owners, and many jacked up their rents, Marina said. As a result, Steve and Marina still have not been able to find a suitable place to live.

Now, Marina, 41, a certified nurse-midwife, and Steve, 49, who makes custom jewelry, are thinking of leaving Santa Barbara, where they’ve lived for 15 years. They doubt they can afford to stay in a city where the price of housing is so high.

Marina has been through this before. She came to the United States 24 years ago, a refugee from Cuba, arriving at the Miami Red Cross office with only two pairs of shoes, five changes of clothing and a few hundred dollars in her purse.

This time, she was left with even less--no change of clothing, no pairs of shoes. When she saw the fire roaring down the mountains, she ran out of her house barefoot and drove off. Everything else she owned was destroyed.

“Sitting in the Red Cross office after the fire flooded me with all the memories I had after I left Cuba,” she said. “The feelings were so powerful I ended up walking outside and crying and crying. . . . But then I talked to my mother, (and) she told me: ‘You’ve started all over once; you can start all over again.’ And that’s how I’ve tried to approach everything.”

They now live in a small, two-room cottage, with unfinished plywood walls and a ceiling covered with chipped, peeling paint. Sharin sleeps in the living room on a mattress, an open suitcase next to his pillow.

They have yet to replace even a fraction of what they lost. Marina recently ate her morning cereal with chopsticks because they didn’t even have a spoon in the house. They had some renter’s insurance, but it has covered only a small portion of what they lost.

“I went to a swap meet a few weeks ago, but I didn’t buy a thing,” Steve said. “I needed so much, I didn’t know where to start. I felt completely overwhelmed. How do you replace everything?”

Marina, who has delivered 300 babies since she opened her midwife practice seven years ago, lost about $15,000 worth of medical equipment and all her medical charts, records, billing lists and six chapters of a book she was writing about midwifery. She recently placed an ad in a newspaper, asking all former clients to meet at a city park for a reunion so she can she reconstruct her files.

Although the fire wiped them out, the response by their friends has been uplifting, they said.

A few musician friends threw a benefit for them and collected $400. Some of Marina’s patients opened a bank account to rebuild her midwifery business and raised $500. A local charitable agency replaced some of Marina’s medical equipment. A doctor Marina has worked with paid her $600 medical insurance premium. A local thrift shop gave them clothes.

“Going through something like this puts things in perspective,” Steve said. “When I saw the flames leaping all over the place, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to save anything, I was very upset. Then I realized my wife and my son were safe . . . and all the things I lost didn’t seem so important.”