Officer and 5 Others Fail in Desperate Bid to Escape

Patrolman John Grubensky was struggling to guide five people down Charing Cross Road, just ahead of the firestorm in the hills above, but death overtook them all.

Grubensky was found face-down, authorities said. His radio, still crackling police advisories, lay a few feet from his hand. The 32-year-old police officer and the people he tried to rescue had apparently begun to crawl down the hot pavement in a last attempt to escape the fire and smoke. They identified Grubensky by the serial numbers on his gear. The other five have not been identified.

“They were trying to get out,” Sgt. Earl Sherman, Grubensky’s boss in the Oakland Police Department’s Fourth Platoon Division, said Monday. “He was that sort of guy . . . always helping victims.”

As the survivors of the fire, which marched like a merciless army through the affluent hillside neighborhoods above Oakland and Berkeley, began returning to the scorched earth where their homes once stood, the dead were being accounted for Monday, and mourned.

The six-year police veteran was working on his day off to earn overtime when the fire exploded. “He was a true hero,” said Sgt. John McKenna, once Grubensky’s boss in the homicide division. “He died serving the community and saving lives.”

Sherman said Grubensky had been dispatched to the hills of Oakland’s Hiller Highlands to help evacuate residents. He apparently found five people on Charing Cross Road, put them in his patrol car and headed toward safety, Sherman said. But the roads were blocked by debris and exploding cars.

So the group got out and began making their way down the hill. The severely burned bodies were found about 50 feet from the police car, Sherman said.

Their deaths underscored the capriciousness of the fire. It laid waste to whole streets, then spared an occasional home. Returning residents were overcome by mixed emotions: They had lived, but a lifetime of belongings and memories had vanished in a few hours.

Sheree and Ian Ahwah’s first home, a two-story-high Mediterranean, lay in steaming, ankle-high ashes at their feet Monday. In her hand she held four brass numbers--5, 9, 8, 5--their address, the only thing that survived. No pictures. No wedding dress. No diplomas. Only the brass numbers.

Bleak jokes were exchanged over the cooling heaps of embers as people came across the absurd survivors: a ceramic Godzilla was intact. A pet duck was alive. In one house, bedsprings, an overturned bathtub, and a piece of a recipe for Italian chicken from a Junior League cookbook.

In upper Rockridge, one of the worst-hit areas, Paul Dachslager crouched in what used to be his mother’s home, a vintage 1920s cottage designed by renowned California architect Julia Morgan. He sorted through the ashes in what he guessed had been the dining room.

“I can’t believe I found it,” he cried, digging up an antique gold wedding ring that had belonged to his grandmother. It was all he figured he could recover.

Smoky air still hung over the ravaged hillside streets. A lush landscape had turned to blackened spikes of eucalyptus and redwoods, intermingled with chimney stacks--the only monuments to mark what had been opulent homes.

Stunned residents, some of them slipping past police lines, stood weeping or hugging one another.

At noon, Chris and Carol Argentos got in to see the ashy waste that for 23 years had been their home. Across the street their neighbors too stood aghast. They all wept and hugged on the filthy pavement. “We’ll rebuild,” he said. “I don’t know where else to go.”

And Don George, a university administrator, had moved into his Oakland Hills home on Saturday, and lost it on Sunday. On Monday, he awoke fretfully at 3 a.m. at a neighbor’s house, and wrote down what had lost. He had saved his computer.

Barbara Westover’s losses, too, were overwhelming: antique English furniture, architectural books, Limoges china, the multilevel doghouse she was building for her dog, Waylon, who escaped.

“The only solace is that you are not alone in this,” Westover said. “So many people lost so much,” Westover said. She and her husband want to rebuild if the neighborhood’s character can be maintained.

For some, the immediacy of what to do--how do we get our mail? what about the insurance?--kept them absorbed.

Isabel Weissman and her husband wearily gave details to an insurance agent at a shelter in Berkeley. The money was not what mattered, she said, and began to sob softly. “We are 74 years old,” she said. “We worked all our lives for that kind of life and that kind of house. We have lost our history.”

Insurance companies sent agents to shelters and gave out hot-line numbers over the radio. Many fretted that they had lost all their receipts; some companies promised to take them at their word. “We’re trying to make this as pain-free as possible,” said Lisa Ormond, a spokeswoman for State Farm insurance.

At shelters, people were already posting signs for lost dogs and cats. In quirky Berkeley fashion, several dozen street people showed up at one shelter, waiting in line with fire victims, eating the free chicken and vegetables and availing themselves of free telephones.

Some survivors came away with their homes as well as their lives.

Michelle Taylor and her five children waited for hours with other residents hoping for a chance to return to the Rockridge area. Sobbing, Taylor begged a police officer to at least drive her past her home, to see if it still stood. Sgt. Art Roth relented. He had lost his house in the fire, lost everything, in fact, but the uniform on his back.

On a street where lot after lot was bare, Taylor found her house virtually untouched, and the houses where three generations of her family had lived. Even the paper skeleton her kids hung outside. “I just feel terrible for all these people who lost so much. . . . It’s a cemetery of timbers.”

Taylor had gathered up the children and some diapers when the fire began. Her husband stayed through the worst of the fire, hosing the house down. It had paid off.

She looked down at her 7-year-old daughter. “Remember when I told you to say your prayers?” she said. “Someone was listening.”

Evacuating Tips

Los Angeles fire officials offered these suggestions in the event a fire is moving near your home:

* Turn off any propane tanks on the outside of house.

* Turn off all water hoses and any sprinklers; this will help increase the water pressure in your area.

* Leave lights on.

* Back car into garage, heading out, close car windows.

* Place valuable documents in your car, along with pets and other items you would want to take with you in case of evacuation. Items such as: bank books, address book, extra pairs of eyeglasses, any essential prescription medicines, photo albums, etc.

* Close all doors but do not lock them.

* Use good judgment; evacuate when instructed to do so by authorities.

SOURCE: Los Angeles County Fire Dept.