Counting Blessings--and Losses : Brush fire: Several ranch hands barely escape advancing flames in Sylmar, but a mobile-home park is spared to residents’ surprise.

When flames streaked across a Sylmar hillside early Monday, some had hours to prepare, others only minutes.

Edmund H. Ribeiro watched “this kind of glow” behind a ridgeline erupt moments later into a wall of fire that engulfed his 24-foot trailer and killed most of his pets, including his 2-year-old Australian shepherd dog, Maax.

He tried to soak the trailer and a nearby metal barn with a garden hose but “I lost the whole thing, everything.”

At the other end of the scorched hillside, residents in Oakridge Mobile Home Park had hours to evacuate or prepare for the flames because they had been warned during the early stages of the fire.

They were luckier than Ribeiro. Although flames licked up to the boundaries of the 600-unit park, most never had to run to the cars they had earlier packed with their most valuable keepsakes. No homes were damaged in the park.

“You could see trees exploding,” said Joyce Martin, pointing to a burned eucalyptus grove behind her home. “I was certain there was going to be a major problem. But then it stopped. . . .”

The fire, which began shortly after midnight, blackened 757 acres before being nearly completely contained eight hours later. The cause of the fire was unknown.

The indiscriminate path of flames left some people reflecting on their good fortune and others counting their losses.

Ribeiro, who will be 63 on Thanksgiving Day, spent Monday morning sorting through debris after the fire swept through Sunset Farms Ranch north of Foothill Boulevard in Grapevine Canyon.

The ranch hand did not find much.

Besides his trailer and the barn, the fire, which was believed to have started near the ranch, destroyed his truck and swept through the animal pens he kept. He had set Max free but the frightened dog apparently ran back into its pen and was there when the flames quickly moved through the area.

“These animals are like kids,” Ribeiro said, surveying the charred remains of his dog, chickens, guinea pigs and rabbits.

Later, he pulled a small safe out of the ashes but found that the fire had melted the lock and gotten inside, destroying cash and personal papers. When Ribeiro upended the safe, only ashes poured out.

“Everything you see here, everything I have, is gone,” he said. “What the hell can I do? I ain’t got insurance.”

Farther east, the fire spared horses and stables on Saddletree Ranch but destroyed the ranch office and other outbuildings, including a small apartment where four ranch hands slept. They lost all of their belongings.

“I only have what I am wearing,” said Rudolfo Lopez, 18, who was moving horses from stables into trailers so that they could be transported away from the fire when flames engulfed the buildings.

“The fire was too quick,” Lopez said. “I saw smoke coming down the hill, then the fire. I lost everything I had: clothes, blankets, my saddle.”

Just a block to the north, the fire skirted along the back yards of expensive homes on Saddle Ridge Road but none of the structures were damaged. Some residents were waiting with garden hoses; others had evacuated at the urging of firefighters and police officers who knocked on doors.

“It is so weird what you do,” said Suzanne Breault, who evacuated with her family. “What can you pack in two minutes? We grabbed pictures, my grandmother’s quilt, my grandfather’s clock and we were gone.”

She said they were unsure if their house had been spared until they returned two hours later. There was no damage.

Alan and Donna Porco evacuated their three children then came back to their Saddle Ridge house to spray the roof and eaves with a hose.

The fire burned to their property line but left the house untouched.

Like others on the street, the Porcos’ roof is fire-resistant tile, a fact firefighters said prevented the fire from spreading into the neighborhood.

“It was scary; it came so quick,” Donna Porco said.

Across the hillside, in Oakridge Mobile Home Park, residents heard early of the fire--announced first by the sound of fire helicopters and planes passing overhead--and had time to ready themselves while growing anxious about the fire’s progress toward them.

Many said they packed their valuables into cars, backed the cars into the street, then went back to their garden hoses and waited.

“We were ready to go,” resident Bob Halstead said.

The fire’s eastern advance was headed off about 100 yards from the mobile-home park by firefighters and helicopters that dropped water on the flames.

Residents watched as a eucalyptus grove exploded into spectacular 30-foot flames.

“It was like somebody opened a furnace on top of you,” said Sharon Lanman, whose home was at the edge of the mobile-home park. “The hills lit up. The heat was just terrible.”

Lanman had packed belongings into a car and moved it down the street when the flames neared. From there, she watched as the flames came near but never damaged her house. She had seen fires in the hills before but never had a blaze come so close to the mobile-home park.

“It’s a different story when it’s in your own back yard,” she said. “We were lucky.”

Residents continued to watch the scene through the morning as firefighters mopped up. Chris Johnson watched from a lawn chair behind his mobile home, even talking on a mobile phone to a sister in Oregon who saw a report of the fire while watching CNN and had called to make sure that he was safe.