13 Fires Sweep Southland : 200 Homes Burn; Laguna, Altadena Hard Hit : Inferno: Thousands of residences are threatened as winds whip brush fires. Hundreds of millions of dollars in damage expected throughout Southern California.

Fed by fierce Santa Ana winds and high temperatures, brush fires ran rampant over Southern California on Wednesday, damaging or destroying more than 200 homes, threatening thousands of others and charring more than 65,000 acres in far-flung portions of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Ventura counties.

Crowning the Southland in a virtual ring of fire, the infernos hit hardest in the affluent community of Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach and in Altadena, northeast of Los Angeles. No deaths were reported, but at least 14 firefighters and nine civilians were reported injured in 13 separate blazes, fire officials said.

Authorities said two fires were caused by arson and a third was set accidentally by a transient. A suspect was being questioned in a fourth fire.

Damage was expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars in one of the most sudden and devastating brush fire outbreaks in memory.

In exclusive Emerald Canyon, flames blamed on a “copycat arsonist” destroyed more than 100 homes, many of them multimillion-dollar estates. Schoolchildren were evacuated and Pacific Coast Highway was closed as firefighters fought desperately against stiff afternoon winds to halt the 10-mile swath of flames. By late afternoon, California Highway Patrol officers and local police were operating hoses because there were too few firefighters for the job.

At least 50 other homes were destroyed by an early morning fire that spread rapidly through 4,000 acres in the foothill community of Altadena, about 15 miles from the Civic Center, authorities said. Only hours after that blaze broke out in rugged Eaton Canyon, authorities arrested a transient who was booked on suspicion of unlawful use of fire.

The man apparently was camping in the hills and his campfire touched off nearby brush, a Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman said.

Other major fires charred 21,000 acres between Thousand Oaks and the Pacific Ocean; about 3,000 acres in Escondido, where homes were threatened and officials at the San Diego Wild Animal Park worked frantically to move endangered California condors and other species; and about 750 acres in the Orange County communities of Anaheim Hills and Orange, where nearly 30 homes were damaged, two of them seriously.

In Washington, the U.S. Senate interrupted its business Wednesday night to hear brief reports on the fires from California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

“There is a potential catastrophe in the making in California,” Feinstein said, adding that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was prepared to add more tanker trucks and personnel to the firefighting effort.

Boxer urged Gov. Pete Wilson to ask the federal government for disaster relief. Wilson immediately declared a state of emergency and flew into Burbank Airport, meeting other elected officials at a fire command center in Pasadena. Forecasters said winds were expected to diminish today but increase Friday; no rain is forecast for the next seven days.

Many of the most serious fires remained out of control late Wednesday as smoke darkened the skies and white ash fell on Southern California like mid-autumn snowflakes:

Laguna Beach

The fire that would cause the region’s most extensive damage broke out just before noon Wednesday, quickly jumped a ridge and spread south to Emerald Bay.

Dozens of homes were engulfed in the seaside community, where home values reach $10 million or more. Laguna Beach Unified School District officials immediately evacuated three schools--El Morro Elementary, Thurston Middle School and Top of the World Elementary. Children were shuttled by bus to Laguna Beach High School.

In downtown Laguna Beach, residents crowded onto rooftops and lined Pacific Coast Highway to gaze at the flames snaking down the hills toward the ocean. Traffic came to a virtual halt.

Overhead, helicopters dipped 150-gallon “Bambi buckets” in the Pacific, then headed back to drop the water on the homes burning in the canyons.

Laguna Beach veterinarian John Hamil, whose animal hospital rests on Laguna Canyon Road, ignored firefighters’ warnings to abandon his property and was hosing down shrubbery outside when flames roared down the hill.

He was just one of scores of people forced to make a hasty retreat.

“It was incredible,” Hamil said. “The heat was just so intense I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never been that close to a fire.”

Altadena

The Altadena fire, which began near dawn Wednesday, caught many residents still asleep or eating breakfast as it raced through expensive neighborhoods pushed by 50 m.p.h. gusts.

The fire covered more than 1,000 acres by 10 a.m., climbing canyon walls and spreading embers through the air, fire officials said.

Destroying homes almost as fast as terrified residents could flee, the Altadena fire spread to 4,000 acres by noon, and about 1,000 firefighters were struggling to contain it. By that time, water pressure to many parts of the area had petered out, leaving many frustrated residents unable to douse their own homes and firefighters unable to refill their pumper units.

“We didn’t have the water to fight the fire,” County Fire Department Battalion Chief Dave Horn said.

Officials attributed the problem to a five-hour power outage that occurred when fire burned up power poles and electrical lines. The outage shut down the electric pumps feeding the area’s water supply. Desperate firefighters were forced to fill pumper trucks from swimming pools.

When the power went out, enough water was left in the lines leading to each hydrant to fill a 500-gallon pumper truck.

“We’d send an engine to a hydrant to get water, they’d fill up and then it was gone,” Horn said.

Asked if the lack of water resulted in a loss of homes, Horn said, “I couldn’t say that. Someone might say it was a contributing factor.”

It was not until about 2 p.m., some residents said, that water again began to flow normally.

On Meguiar Drive, at least five homes were destroyed and others were badly damaged. Retired maintenance worker Earl Johnson, 65, was one of those who watched his home go up in flames.

“I built this myself, all by myself--and now it’s gone,” the soot-covered Johnson said as flames danced amid the rubble of the three-bedroom structure, surrounded by tranquil Japanese gardens.

Sandy Bohlen, a longtime resident of the street, fled her house shortly before the fire raged up close enough to damage the roof.

“You feel numb,” she said afterward, recalling the horror of her evacuation. “I thought, ‘What do I grab?’ But I didn’t know what to do. The fire was out of control.”

Laurel Magallanas of Kinneloa Mesa Road was awakened by a phone call from a relative who had heard about the fire. Looking out from her yard, Magallanas could see soaring flames. She ordered her children to put on their shoes, then threw her most cherished family pictures in a bag before driving away.

In the smoke-filled streets, an eerie scene unfolded as her neighbors led their horses to safer ground. One neighbor had tied his two horses to the door handles of his car, one on each side.

“I was scared to death,” Magallanas said. “People were running down the street with horses, trying to get them out.”

Pasadena resident Susan Seager, 37, who drove to Altadena at 8 a.m., hoped to catch a glimpse of distant flames on the mountain ridge. Instead, she and her husband and two children became engulfed in heavy smoke. They watched in horror as a palm tree half a block from them burst into flame, as if by magic.

“(This) palm tree was like a big red torch,” she said.

She said a strange scene unfolded as a nearby convalescent hospital began to disgorge its elderly residents, who were rolled on beds and in wheelchairs, clustering in the smoke-darkened parking lot.

To Seager it appeared “there was no one there to take them away. It was chaos. . . . It was a very frightening scene.”

Seager remembered seeing the residents of nearby homes packing cars and turning on sprinklers. Firefighters were scattered throughout the area, but there were no helicopters and no apparent front to battle the encroaching blaze, according to Seager.

“I knew that something bad was going to happen,” she said. “I just knew . . . that it was going to go crazy. My husband said, ‘We’d better get out of here.’ ”

At least 50 elderly patients were evacuated from the Marlinda Convalescent Home and Park Marino Convalescent Hospital, which sit side by side on Washington Boulevard.

At first, many patients were wheeled down the street in their beds and placed in an empty storefront. Later, they were taken to nearby St. Luke’s Medical Center, then transported--along with other patients--to Huntington Memorial and Arcadia Methodist hospitals.

St. Luke’s was shut down, except for a skeleton crew doing cleanup and preparing for injured firefighters.

Many residents who live above the Eaton Canyon Golf Course were angry because fire trucks did not show up until about 9:30 a.m., hours after residents were ordered to evacuate.

Eddy Looi watched helplessly while his neighbor’s home, two houses away, went up in flames, apparently touched off by airborne embers.

“Where is the fire engine? It’s been burning for two hours!” said the irate Looi, who lives on Villa Highlands Drive. “Why are we just standing here? Why not let the residents fight the fire with hoses and buckets?”

Firefighters finally arrived about 10:40 a.m. Their efforts in some areas were hampered by the low water pressure, authorities said.

A few residents complained bitterly to police that they should at least be allowed to try to douse the flames before evacuating.

Barclay Kamb, a geology and geophysics professor at Caltech, was handcuffed by police and escorted onto the street after he refused to leave his home at 3500 Fairpoint St., said his wife, Linda.

Her husband had wanted to remove palm fronds from his property because they catch fire easily, she said.

Evacuation centers were opened at nearby schools, where worried residents gathered to await word on the fates of their homes.

Mt. Wilson

Atop the 5,712-foot mountain, nervous scientists were keeping a close eye on the fire, one ridge to the south. The summit is the site of an observatory crammed with costly scientific equipment, as well as the transmitters for every major Los Angeles television station and most of the city’s FM radio stations and paging services.

If the fire crests nearby Mt. Harvard, scientists will begin work at Mt. Wilson’s two 100-foot solar towers, packing away irreplaceable mirrors and lenses and driving them to safety, UCLA astronomer Larry Webster said.

“We would not have the funding to replace them,” he said. “If there is smoke or even a small fire, it could damage the optics. If a fire moves through the solar observatory, there would be no hope.”

Ventura County

A day-old arson fire swept across 21,000 acres of Santa Monica Mountain back country to the Pacific Ocean. But but despite the enormous acreage, only four homes were lost.

Authorities arrested a person on suspicion of arson but would not reveal details.

The blaze continued to move steadily through dense brush south of Thousand Oaks, spreading east to the Los Angeles County line and west down the face of Point Mugu by noon.

“All we can do is juggle resources and hope we’re at the right place at the right time,” Ventura County Fire Chief George Lund said. “We can’t really prepare, we just have to react.”

Two Ventura County firefighters suffered minor injuries battling a section of the Thousand Oaks blaze that destroyed four houses at Deer Creek.

As the fire spread, officials evacuated the children’s unit at Camarillo State Hospital, west of Point Mugu, and officials scrambled to evacuate more than 100 exotic animals, including monkeys, birds and three elephants, from the Animal Actors ranch near Yerba Buena Road.

Pacific Coast Highway was closed at 6:30 a.m. just south of Las Posas Road as the fire reached a ridge overlooking the roadway.

“We watched it just sweep down the mountain,” said CHP Officer Mike Robbins. “If you can imagine it, the entire hillside was solid burning flame. It was incredible.”

Renee Groux was one of four firefighters from Point Mugu who battled to protect communications facilities on the hillside. “It came at us and it was intense and it was hot,” she said. “At one point we got real nervous, because it was bearing down on us. But we stood our ground.”

To the north, a fast-moving fire that broke out near Santa Susana Pass Road in Simi Valley at about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday injured four firefighters--one of them critically--and consumed more than 2,000 acres of chaparral-covered hillsides by nightfall, fire officials said.

The Los Angeles city firefighters were burned when flames overtook their engine as water pressure failed, the officials said.

The most seriously injured firefighter was taken to Northridge Hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery. Two others were hospitalized at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital Burn Center and the fourth was treated and released, said Phillip J. Weireter, spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Authorities were questioning a 27-year-old transient in connection with the blaze, but declined to comment further.

The fire forced the evacuation of about 400 residents and prompted officials to close the Metrolink railway line between the Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley.

“The situation has really deteriorated out there,” Capt. Norman Plott of the Ventura County Fire Department said Wednesday afternoon. “The weather is bad, the temperatures have gone up and the winds have come up.”

A fire that started about 2 a.m. Wednesday near Steckel Road in Santa Paula spread west toward the city of Ventura during the day, burning across 2,000 acres of remote hillsides by late afternoon.

The Steckel fire was moving through thick brush in Wheeler Canyon and Alison Canyon, prompting the closure of California 50 and forcing the evacuation of several dozen ranches in the area. About 60 ranch owners waited anxiously at a roadblock for county animal officers to bring out their horses and other livestock.

In Ojai, a fire that broke out about 10 a.m. had seared 800 acres of brushland by midafternoon.

“We’re doing what we can,” said R. Ranger Dorn, a Ventura County fire captain. “We’re about out of equipment. We were down to two engines in the Ojai Valley when we spotted this one.”

Orange and San Diego Counties

In Anaheim and Orange, 750 acres burned and seven homes were damaged, two of them severely. Twenty-two others had minor roof damage, officials said. The Anaheim fire was intentionally set, they said. About 350 firefighters battled to bring the blaze to 80% containment by midafternoon.

In the brush-covered hills of northeastern San Diego County, a fire that erupted shortly after midnight burned across 6,000 acres, destroying six homes and five other buildings near 1,800-acre Wild Animal Park in the San Pasqual Valley.

Twenty-six California condors and four Andean condors were evacuated from the “condorminium” to the park veterinary hospital two miles away, but none of the endangered birds were hurt. The park assembled trucks, vans and trailers to evacuate other animals if needed. Three cheetahs were crated up for evacuation, and keepers raced to the resting area for the Okapi antelopes because the area was in the fire’s path before the wind shifted.

Park spokesman Tom Hanscom said the park’s animals seemed more unnerved by the flights of tankers and helicopters than by the continual rain of smoke and ash. A seven-year program of controlled burning around the park was credited with helping slow the fire’s march.

About 750 firefighters from the state Department of Forestry, the U.S. Forest Service and local fire departments fought the blazes amid shifting winds. Air tankers and helicopters from nearby Ramona Airport were pressed into service.

The helicopters scooped water from an Animal Park watering hole normally frequented by European bison, water buffalo and several species of exotic sheep, deer and antelope. Keepers stood by to see that the animals were not injured.

A few hardy foursomes declined to leave the Eagle Crest Golf Course on the west side of the park even though flames came within a few dozen yards of the back nine.

“The safest place to be in a fire is in the middle of a golf course,” assistant pro Bill Hughes said. “Green grass doesn’t burn. Most of the guys just just stayed home but a few decided to play anyway.”