Fire at Camp Pendleton Stalls Trains, Motorists

A wind-whipped brush fire raged across the sprawling Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base today, choking off the main coastal artery between San Diego and Los Angeles and stalling thousands of frustrated morning motorists in San Clemente.

Passenger train service was halted, 20 miles of freeway was closed to morning rush-hour motorists, a nuclear plant alert was triggered and up to 300 residents were temporarily evacuated, authorities said.

The closed stretch of the San Diego Freeway from Harbor Drive in Oceanside to Cristianitos Road in southern San Clemente is expected to be reopened at 4 p.m., a California Highway Patrol spokesman said this morning.

By late morning, there were no injuries reported and no structures threatened by the blaze, which started at 8 p.m. Tuesday and crisscrossed the busy freeway just south of San Clemente, burning between 1,500 and 2,000 acres of grass and brush in its path.

The fire swept through the popular San Onofre state beach park overnight but skirted the nearby nuclear power plant.

The fire was enough to spook utility officials, who declared a low-level emergency at 12:45 a.m., when flames jumped freeway and came within a quarter of a mile of the coastal plant. But operations were not jeopardized, said David Barron, spokesman for Southern California Edison.

Passenger rail service linking San Diego and Los Angeles was intermittent Tuesday morning. The 5:02 a.m. train out of San Diego was canceled and several were delayed in both directions, Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black said.

Fire crews from Camp Pendleton, San Diego and Orange counties and the state and federal departments of forestry battled the blaze, reinforced by air tankers and helicopters in an aerial assault on the blaze.

Firefighters were frustrated by erratic winds that gusted up to 45 m.p.h.

“The biggest problem is the wind,” said Captain Rose-Ann Sgrignoli, a media operations officer for the base. “We’ve got to stop the fire’s southerly flow to reopen the freeway.”

The cause of the blaze, which broke out at the Bravo 3 area in the northern part of the base, is under investigation. Containment was not expected before Thursday, officials said.

The southbound lanes of the freeway, the main artery between San Diego and Los Angeles, were closed shortly about 1:40 a.m. and the northbound lanes two hours later. “We spent part of the night escorting groups of traffic through the base,” said a John Marinez, a CHP spokesman in San Diego. “But it got too dangerous.”

Tori Surrey, traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego late Tuesday night, said: “The flames were burning right in the middle median strip at San Onofre. We couldn’t believe the freeway hadn’t been closed off.”