Palos Verdes Estates Brush Fire Controlled Before Any Damage to Luxury Homes

As flames leaped up the tinder-dry hill behind her $3-million “dream house” Friday afternoon, Nancy Guenther could only watch helplessly as her dream seemed to slowly disappear in a thick pall of smoke.

“It was so close, so close,” she said, her face furrowed with worry as she surveyed the soot-coated back balcony of her new Palos Verdes Estates home. “The flames were, quite literally, in the back yard.”

Guenther and a score of other Palos Verdes Estates homeowners were breathing a little easier Friday night after Los Angeles County firefighters stamped out a 10-acre brush fire that swept up Lunado Canyon toward several luxury homes. No one was injured and no homes were damaged in the two-hour blaze.

The fire, which broke out shortly after 3 p.m., climbed rapidly up the steep canyon walls, coming within 20 yards of about 10 multimillion-dollar homes before it was extinguished.

“We stopped it, right there, at the property line,” Guenther said, pointing to a charred area no more than 20 feet away. “We built this to be our dream home. Luckily, it still is.”

More than 100 county firefighters fought the blaze, which sent thick clouds of smoke billowing over the coastal edges of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Palos Verdes Estates Police Lt. Mike Tracy said a passerby reported that a group of small children had been seen playing near a storm drain in the fire area about an hour before the first alarm was sounded. Arson investigators have been called in as a routine part of the investigation.

The canyon, he said, runs for about three miles from Lunado Bay to Hawthorne Boulevard--a broad, undeveloped strip carpeted with tinder-dry anise weed, manzanita, sagebrush and tumbleweed. The brushy area last burned during a Fourth of July blaze two years ago.

As fire officials mopped up, residents recounted how they turned on sprinkler systems and wielded garden hoses to try to slow the flames.

Suzanne Hamilton, who moved from Connecticut into her $1.5-million home 18 months ago, said few of her neighbors were at home when a construction worker building a neighboring house appeared at her door to tell her about the blaze.

“If this had happened during the summer, when the brush was very thick and high, or if this had been one of our normal windy days, this might have been a disaster,” she said.

As she talked, her daughters, Melissa, 17, and Amanda, 15, came dashing in to find out if their home was all right.

The girls, still dressed in the Palos Verdes High School drill team outfits they had worn at a football game, complained that their teachers would not let them leave early after friends told them the fire was directly behind their house.

“There were these water helicopters landing right on the practice field and we could see them taking off,” said Amanda. “We were scared.”

Firefighters said the flames were blocked in several areas by lush landscaping and flame-resistant ice plants bought by homeowners for exactly that purpose.

“We just finished putting our plants in,” Guenther said. “I can just imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t.”

Times staff writer Shawn Hubler contributed to this story.