Terror and Chaos Rekindle Memories of Past Disasters : Trauma: Residents recall their experiences during 1988 Porter Ranch and 1961 Bel Air/ Brentwood fires.

For Tom Hillman, the firestorms that swept the Southland Wednesday brought back memories of his own nightmare--when he too lost nearly everything.

“This brings back some real bad memories,” Hillman said as he watched televised coverage of the fires. “I probably shouldn’t, but it’s hard to stay away.”

It was five years ago in December when Hillman, now 58, and his wife were forced to flee their home as Santa Ana winds pushed flames through his Porter Ranch neighborhood and eventually across 3,200 acres.

“We were all together and we got out with our two animals, our dogs and our cars,” Hillman said. “Fortunately, I grabbed some important papers but that was pretty much it.”

When the couple returned the next morning, they found their house razed, their belongings reduced to smoldering rubble. On Beaufait Avenue, where Hillman lives, 36 homes were damaged or destroyed in the 1988 blaze.

“The house was pretty well destroyed as were many of our neighbors’,” he said. “The street was in chaos, hoses all over the place, fire engines, LAPD.”

Then the real struggle started, the rebuilding and replacing. The hardest part was “trying to find out where do you start.

“That’s what bothers me about seeing this is the trauma these people will go through and they don’t even know it yet,” he said. “Reality is going to hit them in the face and then the struggle to put it back together.”

The Hillmans finally moved into their new home, built on the same lot, in time for Thanksgiving, 1989.

“It took us too long,” he said.

Hillman remembers watching coverage of a June, 1990, blaze that swept through Glendale.

“It brought tears to my eyes,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re going to go through until you go through it.”

Hillman said there was little chance that the fire in the Chatsworth-Box Canyon area would reach his northern valley home, but he turned on his sprinklers just in case. “When the winds come up here every year, it’s still kind of scary,” he said.

Kris Wolfe, who lives a few blocks away on Kilfinan Street, checked news of the fire every hour or two Wednesday, just to make sure that it wasn’t coming close to the home where she lives with her parents.

“We pack up every time there’s a fire nearby,” said Wolfe, 26, who remembers when the flames passed dangerously close to her home in 1988. “It’s totally scary and it’s hot. I was amazed at how hot it is. You can’t breath. I’m just so glad I’m not dealing with it.”

Marlene Oliver, another of Hillman’s neighbors, also remembers the Porter Ranch fire, waking to a neighbor’s screams, knowing she had minutes to get her family out before the fire raced through her back yard and into her house.

“We had 10 minutes to get out,” she said. “My husband started to grab a suitcase. I said, ‘Forget the suitcase, just throw everything in the cars.’ ”

She put her daughter and dog in her car and drove away as “the trees in the back started catching fire and the junipers started exploding.”

Hillside residents were also on edge Wednesday, reminded of the terrible destruction possible in a firestorm.

“I was immediately thinking about the house and what we could take,” said Marty Gale, a Brentwood resident who rebuilt after his home burned to the ground in the 1961 Bel Air/Brentwood Fire. “I mean it’s ‘apprehension’ in capital letters.”

Gale lost almost everything in that blaze, which started near a Sherman Oaks construction site before being pushed south by gusting Santa Anas into some of Southern California’s most affluent enclaves.

“I was able to get into my house and get my dog under my arms, and grab a couple of artifacts and that was it,” said Gale, a Hughes Aircraft employee. “Nov. 6, 1961, is etched in my mind. It still brings tears to my eyes.”

In all, the Bel Air/Brentwood fire, and another that began simultaneously in Santa Ynez Canyon to the west, burned more than 16,000 acres, destroyed more than 600 residences and structures and cost an estimated $30 million.

No one was killed, and at least 200 firefighters were injured battling the two conflagrations.

Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn., lives in the hillside subdivision where the 1961 fire started.

“Every time there are Santa Anas and there are fires, everyone is watching and everyone is aware,” Close said.