Santa Ana Winds Fan Ventura County Blaze : Fire: Arson is suspected as at least two homes are destroyed and 900 acres charred. No injuries reported.

Fierce Santa Ana winds fanned a suspected arsonist’s flame into a towering 900-acre brush fire that raged across rugged mountains south of this Ventura County city on Tuesday, destroying at least two mountaintop homes and forcing the evacuation of dozens of residents.

The blaze roared through dense brush that had not burned in more than 25 years, confounding efforts by about 400 firefighters from Ventura and Los Angeles counties, the city of Los Angeles and state and federal forestry agencies who battled the blaze with hand tools and fire hoses.

Tanker planes from the U.S. Forest Service swooped low over the blaze to dump bright pink fire retardant on 50-foot-tall flames that licked up from ridges south of the Los Robles Golf Course.

No injuries were reported. But officials said the fire still was not under control late Tuesday night, and they predicted that they would be bedeviled by 15- to 20-m.p.h. winds from a Santa Ana condition until Thursday night.

A golfer reported spotting the fire at 1:19 p.m. just south of the course’s 15th and 16th greens. By the time the first firetrucks arrived, hot, dry winds gusting to about 20 m.p.h. had spread the blaze to five acres, and it quickly raged out of control.

By 7:30 p.m., Ventura County arson investigators were interviewing witnesses who reportedly saw someone start the fire at the golf course, said Sgt. Martin Rouse of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

The fire razed a house and a converted mobile home owned by the Rasnow family atop Rasnow Peak, where flames also knocked out a radio transmitter, cutting short a Thousand Oaks station’s reports on the blaze.

Harman Rasnow, 61, said he began calling the Fire Department about 2:30 p.m. to report the fire, but said that firefighters did not arrive at his home until after 4 p.m., when the house was ablaze and the family had fled.

He complained that fire officials never gave him a chance to tell them about a 20,000-gallon holding tank and his swimming pool equipped with special attachments for fire hoses, which could have been used to save the house.

“We left only with the clothes on our back,” said his 65-year-old wife, Eleanor, who helped rush her 101-year-old mother, Helen Herz out of the house. “My mother was terrified. Everything is burned to the ground.”

Fire Capt. Norman Plott, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department, said of the loss: “Sometimes the fire wins, and unfortunately when the fire wins, people lose. . . . It’s very disheartening for us as firefighters.”

All along the northern side of Potrero Road in the exclusive neighborhood of Hidden Valley, flames came within a few feet of million-dollar estates Tuesday evening. Plumes of black smoke covered the area as sheriff’s helicopters showered the fire with water picked up from Lake Sherwood.

Dozens of horses were evacuated from ranches in the valley by neighbors and state animal control officers.

Anke Magnussen, owner of Royal Oaks boardinghouse in the valley, rescued more than a dozen quarter horses from the homes of her neighbors, actors Tom Selleck and Richard Widmark.

“The flames were right there in their pastures in the paddocks right by the houses,” Magnussen said. “The flames were real close.”

She said she first noticed the fire in the hills about a mile north of her property about 2 p.m.

“Because of the wind, it moved real fast,” she said. “Within 10 minutes it came right down the hill . . . I have seen fires before, but never so close.”

On Ventu Park Road, residents filled their cars with clothing, jewelry, photographs and other possessions.

“They told us to pack up and have our cars pointing down the hill,” Donna Schiller said. “I’m nervous, but we’ve been through this before.”

Evacuees were directed to a Red Cross shelter set up at nearby Newbury Park High School, but the shelter was closed just before 9 p.m. after no one showed up to claim any of the 200 cots.

While many stayed home hosing down their roofs and anxiously watching the flames, some left for friends’ houses or hotels.

Janice Johnston, who is six months pregnant, said she had just spent $200,000 to remodel her two-story home near the top of Ventu Park Road, but she would leave with her child and dog if necessary.

“There’s nothing in the house that’s worth my life,” she said. “I’ll just pack up and leave.”

Johnston said she had a premonition Tuesday morning of impending trouble: “When I woke up I thought this was earthquake weather. It turns out it was calamity weather.”

By 7:30 p.m., firefighters had all but stopped part of the fire’s southeasterly march at Potrero Road by lighting a controlled backfire to consume brush that otherwise would have helped the blaze jump the road, said Ventura County Battalion Chief Kevin Nestor.

Dean Jones, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., said a massive high-pressure system over the Great Basin was pushing air rapidly toward an area of lower pressure off the coast of Southern California.

“The air over the High Desert, north and east of the San Gabriel Mountains, is spilling down the canyons and into the Los Angeles metropolitan area,” he said. “As the winds move downhill, they are heated and dried out by compression. With the heat, the low humidity and the winds, the fire danger will continue to be very high until Thursday.”

Fires also erupted elsewhere across wind-whipped Southern California, but there were no reports of structural damage. Riverside County reported 29 small fires; San Bernardino County had five; San Diego County fire crews battled a 50-acre blaze near the Mexican border hamlet of Tecate.

Fire officials in Los Angeles, concerned about the high fire danger, moved firefighters from other assignments to seven brush districts in the San Fernando Valley on Tuesday afternoon.

Jones said the Santa Ana winds of 35 m.p.h. to 45 m.p.h. are expected in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys today, with gusts of up to 50 m.p.h. in some of the major mountain passes north and east of Los Angeles.

Temperatures should remain warm today, with highs in the low 90s near the Los Angeles Civic Center and top readings close to 100 in some of the inland valleys. The high in Downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday was 89, following an overnight low of 58.

Tuesday’s fire was the second serious blaze in Thousand Oaks in two years, and it chilled residents who remember the 1978 conflagration of eight fires that destroyed 230 structures from Agoura to Malibu and Mandeville Canyon.

Those arson-caused, late-October fires charred 26,000 acres, destroyed 197 houses and 33 more mobile homes while injuring 50 people and killing one. They burned for four days and caused $71 million in damage.

A fire on Oct. 31, 1991, scorched 150 acres of brush-covered hills in the North Ranch neighborhood and came within a few feet of a 120-unit condominium complex before being fought back.

As families filled their autos Tuesday with belongings, bulldozers cut through thick brush behind the hillside homes in an attempt to keep the fire away from residences.

At one home on Larch Crest, a dozen teen-agers from Thousand Oaks High School grabbed shovels and hoses to try to protect the house of a classmate.

“We want to do everything we can,” said Heather Wilson, 15. “We’re not going to let it burn down. It’s my friend’s house.”

Times staff writers Fred Alvarez, Dwayne Bray, Sara Catania, Daryl Kelley, Carlos V. Lozano, Eric Malnic, Jeff Meyers and Stephanie Simon contributed to this story. Also contributing were correspondents Maia Davis, Brenda Day, Julie Fields, James Maiella, Jeff McDonald and Matthew Mosk.

* BATTLING WILDFIRES: How firefighting crews work in rugged terrain. B2

Dangerous Blaze

A wildfire pushed by strong Santa Ana winds raced across hundreds of acres of coastal brushland in Ventura County on Tuesday. Some structures were destroyed, and dozens of residents were forced to evacuate as the fire moved toward homes in Hidden Valley and secluded Lake Sherwood.