Pendleton Blaze Brings Travelers to Standstill

A brush fire whipped by fierce Santa Ana winds raged across thousands of acres in the sprawling Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base Wednesday, choking off the main coastal artery between San Diego and Los Angeles and stalling tens of thousands of frustrated commuters heading in both directions.

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

By dusk, there were no injuries reported as a result of the blaze, which erupted at 8 p.m. Tuesday and crisscrossed the busy Interstate 5 freeway just south of San Clemente, burning 7,000 acres of grass and brush in its path.

Late Wednesday afternoon, the flames had moved across the desolate base expanse to singe several buildings at the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at San Onofre.

“Basically, that’s the only thing out there to burn in the immediate area,” said Captain Rose-Ann Sgrignoli, a media operations officer for the base. “The rest is pretty much lunar landscape.”

By 7:45 p.m. Wednesday, the fire was 50% to 70% contained, but not controlled, according to Cpl. Lamont Peabody, a spokesman for Camp Pendleton. Containment is not expected before today, officials said.

“The fire is burning in a direction they want it to go--inland, towards the fire breaks,” Peabody said. “It’s still a dangerous fire, though, because of the dry conditions and the wind.”

CHP spokesman Gerry Bohrer said Wednesday that the closure of the usually busy stretch of interstate was the longest in history.

At 5:10 p.m., 15 hours after it was closed, officials reopened the stretch of Interstate 5 from Harbor Drive in Oceanside to Cristianitos Road in southern San Clemente.

Throughout the day, redirected northbound traffic crawled across the huge base on inland roads--often in sight of the orange-red flames. At 2 p.m., CHP officers started escorting groups of 300 motorists in a stop-and-start creep along the freeway as the inferno continued to rage, sending forth billowing plumes of smoke that could be seen for more than 30 miles.

The fire continued to play havoc with traffic through the afternoon rush hour, when southbound traffic backed up more than 6 miles into Orange County, officials said. Northbound backup was minimal.

Twelve hours earlier, the fire had already forced northbound morning commuters to huddle in Oceanside, creating a small boom for local restaurants.

“When we opened this morning at 6 a.m., there was a line of people all the way to the parking lot,” said Waddell Burgin of Allie’s coffee shop.

More than 500 firefighters from Camp Pendleton, San Diego and Orange counties and the state and federal departments of forestry battled the blaze, reinforced by six planes, three helicopters and four bulldozers.

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

“The biggest problem is the wind,” Sgrignoli said. “We’ve got to stop the fire’s southerly flow to reopen the freeway.”

The cause of the blaze, which broke out in a training area known as Bravo 3 in the northern part of the base, about a half-mile east of the freeway, remained under investigation late Wednesday.

Sgrignoli said the base has been plagued by several fires in the past month, most of them on confined artillery ranges.

“Almost anything that’s been shot off has started some kind of fire that’s had to have been put out right away,” she said.

“But this blaze did not start in a target area, and I can’t say right now what started the thing. It could have been started by a passing car for all I know.”

Overnight, the fire swept through the popular San Onofre State Beach Park but skirted the nearby nuclear power plant. The flames were stubborn enough to spook utility officials, who declared a low-level emergency at 12:45 a.m., when the fire jumped the freeway and came within a quarter mile of the coastal plant.

The power plant emergency was called off at 2:30 p.m., when the fire front was 6 miles south of the plant, officials said.

Several high-voltage wires supplying power to San Diego were closed in the early-morning hours, and power to the area was rerouted from other sources, said David Barron, spokesman for Southern California Edison.

“Those high-voltage wires are sensitive to smoke,” he said. “That’s why we had to shut them down.”

San Diego Gas & Electric also experienced voltage fluctuations, causing lights in the utility’s service area to flicker.

The capricious flames stranded some motorists at the Aliso Creek rest area a few miles north of Oceanside and left many food vendors at the stop with little choice but to stay with their snack-laden trucks because they didn’t have the keys to lock up and move them.

A 6-mile stretch on both sides of I-5 from the San Onofre nuclear power plant to the Las Pulgas Road exit was ravaged where flames had jumped across the lanes, burning the center divider and consuming dry scrub brush all the way to the ocean.

The fire was traveling south, parallel to the freeway, authorities said. Even after the freeway itself was no longer in danger, the CHP kept the road closed because heavy smoke cut visibility to near zero.

CHP officers said they feared that unescorted motorists traveling at high speeds would be forced to slam on their brakes in smoke-clogged stretches, causing accidents. They also feared that drivers, slowing to gawk at the fire, would create chain collisions.

The adage of the day seemed to be, “You can get there from here. It’s just going to take time.” While frustrated motorists fumed, passenger rail service linking San Diego and Los Angeles was intermittent Wednesday morning until the railroad was reopened at 1 p.m.

“It’s been like the perils of Pauline here,” said Cliff Black, an Amtrak spokesman in Washington. Originally shut down at 4 a.m., the tracks were reopened at 8:10 a.m., only to be closed again at 10:25 a.m.

Only two trains--one northbound and one southbound--made it across the base during the seven hours after the tracks were originally closed, forcing would-be passengers to endure delays of up to 8 hours, Black said.

For those trains that did make it through the fire line, Amtrak imposed a 20-m.p.h. speed limit across the Marine base, where trains usually reach speeds of more than 80 m.p.h.

On Wednesday morning, train depots in both Oceanside and San Juan Capistrano became way stations for marooned rail passengers, many of whom were forced to let their fingers do the walking, holding meetings by telephone instead of in person.

“I am definitely losing money,” said Yolanda Johnson, the owner of a beauty salon in Los Angeles who travels to San Diego twice a month to teach a cosmetology class, as she waited for a train in Oceanside. “I just had to cancel all my appointments.”

Rail and automobile passengers weren’t the only ones waiting out the fire Wednesday. Greyhound in San Diego reported delays of up to 30 minutes for its nonstop bus service to Los Angeles and at least an hour-long delay for local routes, because of the slower alternate routes the buses were forced to follow.

“Please, please, let this day end,” said Bob Wagnon, terminal operations manager in San Diego.

A spokesman from the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce said that 2,000 to 3,000 Oceanside residents commute to jobs in Orange County and Los Angeles each day.

“They’re going to be on their own today,” he said. “God help them.”

The fire also slowed the flow of commerce on both sides of Camp Pendleton as truckers were forced to line coffee-shop counters throughout the morning.

“I got a stroke of luck today,” said Roy Liles, branch manager for San Diego Mayflower moving company. “I don’t have any trucks going out of here today, so I’m safe. But tomorrow might pose a different problem, because I got trucks going to San Onofre. So I just hope they get that road opened.”

Phone service in and out of San Diego County apparently was not affected by the flames, according to both local and long-distance companies. However, service to the San Onofre Border Patrol station remained out overnight.

The fire burned for about six hours before becoming enough of a hazard for officials to shut down the freeway.

The southbound lanes of the freeway, the main artery between San Diego and Los Angeles, were closed about 1:40 a.m., and the northbound lanes two hours later.

Some motorists who made it across the base late Tuesday--before the interstate was closed--were treated to the ride of their lives.

“The flames were burning right in the middle median strip at San Onofre,” Tori Surrey of Escondido said of her 11 p.m. trip across the base from Los Angeles to San Diego. “The winds were really, really strong. They blew our truck so you really had to hold onto the steering wheel.

“You could see the flames in the distance as you came south. We couldn’t believe the freeway hadn’t been closed off. I just told my husband, ‘David, please drive fast.’ I’ve never seen a fire like this.”

At mid-morning, Camp Pendleton opened its interior roads to detoured automobiles heading north through the base. Southbound traffic into San Diego County, however, was directed inland to Interstate 15, officials said.

As a result, the southern end of San Clemente became a parking lot of frustrated truckers and motorists whose passage into San Diego came to a grinding halt.

Hundreds were directed off the freeway at Camino Las Rambles in San Clemente, near the Doheny State Beach Park, and they weaved onto four-lane El Camino Real, a frontage along the east side of the interstate.

There, traffic was backed up--and literally stopped--for 2 miles as motorists were confronted by thick plumes of orange-brown smoke.

The inferno was in fact two separate fires, about 15 miles apart. The Rattlesnake Canyon fire at the southern end of the base appeared to be controlled by 9 a.m. Wednesday, after burning about 500 acres of brush.

The northern fire was the more troublesome and was held responsible for sweeping through San Onofre State Beach Park, destroying facilities there.

About 300 residents of the San Onofre Trailer Park on the base were evacuated Tuesday night but allowed to return to their homes two hours later when the flames skirted past.

Times staff writers Tom Gorman, Jonathan Gaw, Nancy Ray, Eric Lichtblau and Len Hall contributed to this report.

REST STOP SAGA, B1