Firefighters Feel the Raw Heat of Fear : Blazes: Those on the front lines say they are happy to be alive after facing the double threat of spreading infernos and rioters’ attacks.

Under a roiling black funnel of smoke, a corner of South Los Angeles was in chaos. Fire was pushing up through the roofs of small shops while police blocked off a section of Vermont Avenue where storefronts were already burned to rubble. Against a backdrop of smoke and water and bumper-to-bumper traffic, looters were whisking away furniture in a pickup truck.

This was the scene Thursday during the 30th hour of Bob Clements’ work shift. After being out all night, fighting perhaps the worst outbreak of fires in the city’s history, the veteran Los Angeles City firefighter stood near a cluster of fire engines and gestured to the south, toward a fire that he and his colleagues had been forced to abandon.

His voice carried a note of futility.

“We were down the street,” Clements said. “We saw this one escalate . . . and came up and got it. We’re not completely extinguishing anything--just knocking them down, trying to make sure they don’t spread. That’s all we’re doing.”

As public furor over the Rodney G. King verdicts raged through the city for a second day, arson consumed chunks of the inner city at a rate that seemed unimaginable even to veteran firefighters. By nightfall Thursday, Los Angeles fire officials said more than 1,000 structural fires had erupted across the region, most involving stores and businesses in South Los Angeles and downtown.

Thirty fires were still burning, and the fire toll was expected to escalate throughout the night.

“There’s a lot of fire out there--they’re lighting them as fast as we can put them out,” said a weary Scott Taylor, 34, as he dragged in from a 20-hour shift. “I’ve been to a lot of brush fires, things like that, but this is a whole new ballgame.”

To the firefighters on the front lines, the sheer number of fires was overwhelming, but it was only a part of their problems. As new calls came--three or four every minute during the busiest hours of Wednesday night--exhausted crews also found themselves facing assaults and threats from angry mobs in the streets.

Some were pelted with rocks and bottles; others were shot at. Many firefighters said they were happy to make it through their long work shifts alive.

“We were clearly overwhelmed,” Fire Chief Donald Manning said. “We had numerous situations where there were attempts to kill firefighters. . . . They tried to kill them with axes. They tried to kill them with gunshots. They tried to kill them in a number of ways.”

Although injuries were relatively few, one firefighter was shot in the neck Wednesday night and was listed in stable condition at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. On Thursday, a Santa Ana city firefighter was reported shot in the thigh and a Los Angeles battalion chief en route to a blaze was hospitalized from glass wounds after his vehicle was hit by a shotgun blast.

Other firefighters talked of seeing street thugs drop into a “shooting stance,” sometimes on darkened streets where it was impossible to tell if they were wielding guns. For most, it was a horrifying aberration, a grim departure from the unusual situations in which firefighters are considered saviors.

“We’re not used to this atmosphere,” said Los Angeles fire information officer Phil Weireter, whose auto windows were smashed out Wednesday night during a protest downtown. “We’re used to people waving, saying hi.”

To cope with the catastrophic number of arson fires, Los Angeles firefighters adopted a “knockdown” strategy--respond in limited numbers to as many fires as possible to prevent them from spreading to adjacent buildings.

“We can’t dispatch a large number of personnel to structural fires that would normally demand 20 companies because other fires are developing of the same magnitude,” said Fire Department spokesman Jim Wells.

“We are sending limited numbers of people to incidents to try to control them and stop them from spreading to adjacent buildings.”

City firefighters are also relying on aid from at least 70 fire companies from other departments including Los Angeles County, Inglewood, Beverly Hills and Orange County.

In normal fire situations, crews often spend two to four hours at a badly burned structure, ensuring that all smoldering material is extinguished. But under the knockdown approach, firefighters were dealing with some major blazes in less than an hour, leaving behind red-hot debris that often would flare again.

Unconfirmed reports said that six youths were caught setting fires and toting 12 gallons of gasoline. Although saying that he was unaware of any arson arrests, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said that some individuals, possibly gang members, could be responsible for setting multiple fires.

Throughout much of South Los Angeles, structures were burned on virtually every block. Even firefighters such as Capt. Vance Boos, 41, a 15-year city Fire Department veteran, admitted feeling the raw heat of fear as he tried to keep up with the blazes Wednesday night in that part of the city.

With darkness falling, with angry crowds having thrown rocks through the windows of his home station in Glassell Park, Boos was well aware of the dangers as he and three others in his engine company went to work.

Teamed with another engine and a hook-and-ladder truck, Boos’ engine helped form a task force that numbered 10 firefighters as they took off for their first inner-city destination--where a man shot in the chest was evacuated to a hospital. From there, the units moved to a mini-mall fire at 41st and Main streets, where the night began to go sour.

Already, a radio report had mentioned the firefighter who was shot in the neck, and similar incidents--many without details or confirmation--also were crackling over the air, Boos said.

“The radio was constant,” he said.

While the mini-mall fire raged, more calls for help resulted in the task force being split up. One engine and the hook-and-ladder were dispatched to one of the raging fires on Vermont Avenue. The four members of Boos’ engine found themselves alone, without police protection, trying to stop the mini-mall blaze in the dark while motorists went by hurling taunts and flashing weapons.

“I saw guns in cars five or six times by myself,” Boos said. “We were really scared. We were ready, at the drop of a dime, to abandon (our equipment) and leave.”

Half a dozen men carrying two-foot machetes seemed to lurk at the fringe of the blaze, adding to the firefighters’ fears, Boos said. But those men turned out to be neighbors who were afraid of being burned out and who were there to ensure that no firefighters were hurt. “I was thankful for that,” the firefighter added.

The real threat, it turned out, was on Vermont, where Capt. Carl Butler’s half of the task force had gone after leaving Boos and his engine behind. A report on Boos’ radio told him that Butler’s men were in trouble.

“They said: ‘We are being shot at. . . . We are under attack,’ ” Boos recalled.

A silence followed, leaving Boos to wonder what might have become of his colleagues. Later, alarmed fire officials learned that a group of street thugs carrying what appeared to be AK-47 assault rifles had accosted the firefighters, threatening to kill them on the spot.

“Their eyes were glaring,” Butler later told Boos, who recalled the conversation. “It looked like they were just as mad as hell at the world.”

By bartering away a pair of $3,000 radios, the firefighters were able to escape, Boos said. Running through the night, they somehow found a family that gave them refuge about a block from the scene of the threat. The firefighters remained there until a police SWAT team was able to clear the area and free them.

After that, Boos said, Butler’s group returned to Vermont to continue fighting the fire--only this time with the protection of LAPD officers.

Later, 25 bullet holes were found in the side of one of the trucks, Boos said.

As incidents mounted early Wednesday night, police began providing a regular escort to fire crews, who were not going into fire areas without accompaniment.

Times staff writer Paul Feldman contributed to this report.