TV REVIEWS : ABC’s ‘Firestorm’ Docudrama Tells Oakland Family Stories

The numbers tell one story: 1,600 acres torched, 25 people killed, 3,354 houses destroyed and 456 apartments lost at a cost of more than $1.5 billion.

“Firestorm: 72 Hours in Oakland” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) tells others: the dumb things people do when their homes are endangered by fire, the hunger to pin the blame for the catastrophe on firemen, the whimsical nature of uncontrolled fires, the rebuilding of new dreams from the ashes of the old.

Combining realistic re-creations with some video footage from the October, 1991, fire that swept through the rustic hills above Oakland, producer and visual effects expert Sam Grogg is the apparent star of this docudrama, shot on location in Oakland.

The human side of the drama, framed through the stories of three families, is comparatively uneventful next to the fire itself. In fact, the ordeal of a wheelchair-bound mom played by Jill Clayburgh and an Asian-American family that gets separated in the rush to flee the area is only a thin device on which to hang a story of nature gone amok.

The drama, written by John McGreevey and helmed by Michael Tuchner, treads softly on the question of human carnage; none of the characters lose their lives. What the drama does illustrate is the stupidity of residents nearly killing themselves in an effort to save a special motorbike or to protect the family’s second automobile.

More laudable were efforts to save pets--as it was, the bodies of 12 pets were found in the ashes.