After the Smoke Clears : In Year Since Santa Barbara’s Disastrous Fire, Lives Have Changed Forever

If anything could underscore the bittersweet unpredictability of life more than the fire that devoured 400 homes here last summer, it may be what has happened to some of the fire’s victims in the year since the blaze.

Take Jim and Jeri Gray. They had good insurance, good jobs and a good life. So they rebuilt their house, only bigger and better. Then federal regulators seized the bank where Jim worked as a vice president. Now the Grays may have to sell and move away.

Marina Alzugaray left in December, driven out by high rents. Tired and sad, she and her husband moved to the Florida panhandle. Now they are flourishing, at a place dreamily named Sugar Beach on the Emerald Coast. Marina swims regularly with the dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico.

News travels fast these days in the once fire-ravaged neighborhoods outside Santa Barbara, where daybreak brings flocks of contractors and the whining of circular saws, where dozens of houses are springing up this summer on denuded hillsides facing the sea.

There are tales of illness--a neighbor’s heart attack in the months after the fire, the man whose cancer was diagnosed in September and who was dead in October, the person with the rare disease, the innumerable colds and bouts of flu to which so many people have seemed so unusually prone.

Then there are horror stories about contractors and insurers--the woman with an open-and-shut claim whose insurer took 91 days to settle, the contractor $50,000 over budget, the accidentally severed sewer line that inundated a brand-new house.

Meanwhile, Frank Hernandez, 67, sits alone in his car day after day, thinking. He and his wife, Alice, had no insurance. They live in a tiny cottage, rent-free, while the state helps them rebuild. But the pace is glacial. The contractors have yet to demolish the ruins.

“We’re real depressed,” Alice said sadly one recent afternoon, passing the day with a daughter who lives near the site of the old house. “But I’m pretty sure that something will happen. It’ll have to. It can’t go on like this much longer.”

About 470 structures disappeared in what has come to be called the Painted Cave fire. Fueled by dry brush and late-afternoon winds, the blaze began when flames came billowing down out of the hills on June 27, 1990, reaching the speed of a new Corvette on an open road.

One year later, nearly 300 building permits have been issued by the county for reconstruction. Thirty-seven houses had been completed by early June. Insurance companies had paid out millions of dollars in claims on the $250 million in damage wrought by the fire.

“We’re pretty much right on track where we thought we would be at one year,” said Scott Halliday, fire recovery coordinator for Santa Barbara County. “. . . Experience from previous fire disasters indicates rebuilding is not complete for two years.”

“Of course, some of them never rebuild,” said James W. Norris, a retired insurance agent in Santa Barbara who has donated his services to 40 families. “Some sell their lots and take their insurance money and go buy something else.”

The Times chronicled the devastation through the experiences of three families.

Jim Gray, then 50, was a vice president at County Bank. His wife, Jeri, 34, worked for a title insurance company. With their 2-year-old son, JW, the Grays had lost the 2,200-square-foot ranch house they had bought one year earlier for $500,000.

Alzugaray, 41, was a midwife. Steve Kurstin, 49, made jewelry. They had lived with their son, Sharin, 18, in a rental house high in the mountains. It had burned to the ground, taking with it almost all of their possessions.

Frank Hernandez was a retired painter, disabled, living on a fixed income. He and Alice had lost the house they had owned for 27 years. They raised six children there. And after paying off the mortgage in 1984, they let the insurance lapse.

The ensuing year has left its mark on each family differently.

Jim and Jeri Gray hired a contractor and an architect within days of the fire. Construction was under way quickly, by late October. Without hitches, the exterior was up by the time the rains came in February. On April 16, the Grays moved in--for their neighborhood, the second or third family back.

The new house is Mediterranean-style--what the Grays had always wanted--with high ceilings, arches and creamy walls. There is an extra 700 square feet, a palatial master bathroom and a cavernous garage--for storage, someday, when they have something to store.

The dogs are back in the dog run after 10 months in a kennel, looking thin and grizzled and a little short on canine joie de vivre. Where the horse corral once stood, there is a gazebo, to admire the new, unobstructed ocean view. A two-story fort with a slide for JW is arriving soon.

But life has not been easy.

Jeri was laid off in late summer, rehired in the fall, laid off again, and now is working in a new job. Jim’s step-father was hospitalized at Thanksgiving, paralyzed with a tumor on his spine. He died in February.

Then on March 27, a day of the month that is coming to seem jinxed, the regulators took over Jim’s bank. Jim was asked to stay on, temporarily, to help out while the conservator winds up and sells off the bank’s assets. Sooner or later, the job will end.

The takeover turned out to be, for the Grays, a financial disaster. They had 50,000 shares in the bank, where stock was once valued at $9 a share. The day after the takeover, it was trading at 6 cents a share. Jim figures the investment, for their retirement, is practically worthless.

Ensconced in their magnificent, barely furnished, home this week, the Grays put the odds at 60-40 that they will have to sell the house. Jim has received one job offer that would have allowed the family to stay in Santa Barbara, but it would have amounted to a 10-year step backward in his career.

“Well, it would be sad, because we have the house now exactly as we wanted it,” he said about the prospect of selling. “On the other hand, you can get all hung up on a house and things. Ultimately, you find, when those things disappear, life goes on.

“There’s a lot of nice places in the world,” he said. “This is one of them. But there are others.”

Marina Alzugaray looked frantically for three months for another house. There weren’t many in the mountains any more, and the rents in town were twice as high. So on Dec. 12, she and her husband moved away after 15 years in California.

They made their way to Panama Beach City, Fla., where Marina had gone to nursing school in the mid-1970s and where they had spent six summers. They took the contents of Steve’s jewelry workshop; it had seemed to Marina an omen, that it was the only thing that didn’t burn.

In Florida, they found a new workshop four times the size of the old one for the same rent. There were two rooms attached--one for Alzugaray’s study, the other for jewelry display. Now she has formed a nonprofit group, Friends of the Dolphin, aimed at protecting the dolphins’ habitat.

She is finishing a book on midwifery and water birth, using her experiences with the dolphins as a metaphor and leitmotif. She’s helping manage Steve’s business and cultivating a vegetable garden.

They live on the water, at a place called Sugar Beach, named for the white fineness of the sand on that stretch of Florida’s so-called Emerald Coast. There are a dock and boats on the property. The boats are used to go into the Gulf to swim and admire the dolphins.

“We miss our friends, because it takes a long time to build friendships,” Alzugaray said this week. “But other than that, it’s been a healing experience. If I had had to stay in Santa Barbara, I couldn’t have (afforded to take) a couple months off to relax, get myself more centered and healthy.”

Their son, Sharin, decided to stay behind in Santa Barbara to work. In May, he went to Europe with a friend from the mountains where the family used to live. On Monday, he called to chat. He was in Czechoslovakia.

“You know, I still don’t have a big wardrobe,” Alzugaray mused. “I go to the stores now, I look, I admire, but I don’t buy. Some things that are beautiful, that I like, I give away. . . . It seems like it’s so much easier to let go and share.”

Now, for the first time, she finds herself able to joke about the fire. Occasionally, someone comments on some article of clothing she is wearing, something someone else donated after she was burned out. “Oh, yeah,” she has taken to saying. “The fire gave it to me.

“So, it didn’t take everything away,” she marveled this week.

Little has changed since the fire for the Hernandezes. They are still without a permanent home, dependent upon the charity of others. They plan to move in August into the home of one of their daughters, where they will wait to rebuild.

According to Alice, the state is reviewing two contractors’ bids. A building permit has yet to be issued. The house will be almost identical to what they had--three bedrooms and a cottage--because they can’t afford to make improvements.

These days, the Hernandezes spend afternoons with one daughter. Or they amble through the Five Points shopping mall. According to Alice, Frank “spends all his time out in the car,” sometimes reading, sometimes just thinking.

“He used to go to his room,” she offered this week, by way of explanation. “ . . . He likes to be by himself. It’s depressing for him, that nothing has been done. We haven’t heard nothing from nobody.

“I go over there and check around,” she said of the site of the old house. “I feel real bad. Because you see all those houses going up. And they’re bigger than what they used to be. So, it’s kind of hard.”