Losses Climb as Fires Still Burn : 554 Homes Hit; Crews Contain Some Blazes : Inferno: Weary firefighters still battling in Altadena, Malibu. President declares disaster area. Injuries climb to 84.

Devastating brush fires continued to scorch hillsides in Laguna Beach, Altadena and other dry corners of the Southland on Thursday, spreading destruction to new regions even as firefighters managed to partially contain the worst of the infernos.

Total losses climbed to at least 554 homes destroyed or damaged and more than 137,000 acres burned.

Weary firefighters were winning the battle to save hundreds of threatened homes in some areas, but late afternoon sea breezes droves flames into upscale neighborhoods in Ventura County, where more homes burned and residents scrambled to evacuate.

Weather forecasters raised fears of new outbreaks, predicting that dry Santa Ana winds will grow stronger today.

No deaths were reported in any of the 14 major fires, but the injury total climbed to 84, including 67 firefighters. President Clinton declared the region a federal disaster area to help speed reconstruction efforts.

Meanwhile, relief agencies continued to organize shelters for an estimated 25,000 people displaced by the fires, and law enforcement agencies pressed their investigations into fires believed set by arsonists.

In major developments:

* More than 1,000 firefighters working overnight managed to contain the fire that had raged through the seaside artists’ colony of Laguna Beach on Wednesday, destroying 310 homes and causing the evacuation of the city’s 23,000 residents and some in nearby areas. Tearful families began returning to damaged homes and smoldering lots, and Marines began picking through rubble to look for possible fatalities. Beloved tourist spots--such as the Laguna Playhouse, Laguna Art Museum and Sawdust Festival grounds, where the yearly Pageant of the Masters is staged--were spared.

* Near Thousand Oaks, a two-day-old fire that had consumed 33,000 acres of brush and destroyed 33 homes started racing eastward through Ventura County’s Carlisle Canyon, threatening the gated community of Lake Sherwood Ranch and setting two homes ablaze on Stafford Road. Residents were being evacuated from Lake Sherwood Ranch and from some of the western subdivisions of Westlake Village.

* The fire that destroyed 115 homes in Altadena and Sierra Madre, forcing the evacuation of more than 2,000 residents, continued to burn out of control after blackening more than 5,000 acres, but officials said the blaze posed no immediate threat to more homes.

* In Riverside County, two fires that had burned 6,000 acres of brushland were declared fully contained, and a third blaze was brought largely under control.

* Authorities glanced nervously at forecasts calling for the return of warm, 20- to 40-m.p.h. winds.

“If the fires aren’t fully contained by Friday night, the embers will begin blowing again,” warned WeatherData Inc. forecaster James McCutcheon. Although the winds were expected to be less severe than those that drove walls of flames through many areas Wednesday, gusts once again could reach 60 and 70 m.p.h. below some canyons, McCutcheon said.

Today’s temperatures are expected to peak in the upper 70s to the upper 80s, somewhat cooler than Wednesday.

Arson investigators, who held virtually no clues to who might have set the most costly fire in Laguna Beach, said it might be weeks before they can pinpoint a cause. Gov. Pete Wilson, who toured the charred community Thursday with local elected officials, offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of “the sick animal who did this thing.”

Orange County

Government officials gathered Thursday morning at Laguna’s Main Beach to watch fire helicopters lift off from the sand into smoke-filled skies, battling the region’s most serious blaze in a scene reminiscent of the movie “Apocalypse Now.” Absent was Laguna Beach City Councilman Bob Gentry, whose home and a rental property had been destroyed. City Manager Kenneth Frank, who also lost a home on Skyline Drive, struggled to concentrate his attention on getting officials onto tour buses.

“This is unbelievable,” Councilwoman Ann Christoph said.

Firefighters had reached a turning point in battling the fire about midnight Wednesday, thanks largely to a cool marine layer that brought moisture and still air to the picturesque seaside enclave, an Orange County Fire Department spokesman said.

By the time the fire was contained Thursday afternoon, it had consumed more than 8,000 acres, mostly at Emerald Bay at the coastal north end of town and along Laguna Canyon Road in the rugged hillsides overlooking town. Laguna Beach police placed the damage toll at 330 homes lost or partially destroyed--from $10-million estates to modest structures at the El Morro mobile home park.

The wind-whipped flames came within feet of Laguna Beach City Hall, but it was spared, along with virtually all of the downtown area shops and galleries.

With about 1,400 firefighters still working the fire, another 1,000 were en route to try to fully extinguish the blaze, authorities said.

Throughout a hellish night, Laguna Beach residents bedded down in emergency shelters, jammed the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel and, in some cases, flouted evacuation orders by staying home and dousing their roofs with garden hoses. One such man was Mike Helin, an Emerald Bay resident who bypassed police officers to enter his burning neighborhood Wednesday after work.

Discovering that his roof was on fire, Helin doused it with a garden hose and toiled through the night to keep the flames away. At dawn, he limped away on a twisted knee to survey the smoldering homes of his neighbors. The inferno had claimed homes next door, across the street and around the corner. But Helin’s stood intact.

Others were not so fortunate. Laguna Beach resident Julian Wilson left Wednesday morning to try to save his ranch near Temecula, where a brush fire near California 79 destroyed more than 100 acres.

That property was undamaged, but Wilson returned home late Wednesday night to find his Laguna home destroyed.

Sandra Longnecker, who lives on winding Temple Hill Drive on a hillside above town, found her $1.6-million home a smoky wreck Thursday morning. Only the foundation, brick entryways and four chimneys remained, along with a burnt set of box springs, a charred statuette and two mismatched shoes.

The hand-tiled pool was scorched and her 1953 MG sports car was burned and crushed by debris.

“It’ll hit me when I go to put on my shoes,” she said, “and there will only be one” color.

Orange County Fire Capt. Dan Young said efforts to conduct controlled burns near Emerald Bay to reduce the amount of dried brush and combustible material have been rebuffed in recent years because of concerns about air quality, wildlife habitats and other factors. “It could have made a difference in this fire,” he said. “It could have stopped it.”

Meanwhile, a group of 112 Marines had the thankless job of searching for bodies amid the smoldering rubble, but found none. As cleanup efforts began, embattled Orange County firefighters had to contend with another major blaze that remained out of control near the Ortega Highway in the southern county.

By Thursday afternoon, that fire had charred 8,000 acres in the Cleveland National Forest and burned 15 homes, said Norm Machado of the U.S. Forest Service. About 200 firefighters were battling the blaze, which was “zero percent contained,” Machado said. Because of difficult terrain, firefighting efforts were limited to aircraft, another Forest Service official said.

The fire was encroaching on the upscale community of Coto de Caza, but no homes had burned there and none were considered seriously threatened. Some residents of Coto de Caza and nearby Trabuco Canyon were voluntarily evacuating.

Ventura County

Two houses in the affluent Lake Sherwood area burned and dozens more were threatened Thursday night as three fires burned out of control in and around the county.

Fanned by stiffening sea breezes, the two-day-old Thousand Oaks blaze, which had consumed 31,000 acres of brush and destroyed 33 homes and 23 other buildings, began to race eastward through Carlisle Canyon during the afternoon, pushing toward Lake Sherwood Ranch and setting nearby two homes ablaze on Stafford Road.

At 4 p.m., Ventura County sheriff’s deputies began evacuating the Lake Sherwood community and some dense subdivisions of western Westlake Village.

Within 30 minutes nearly half the residents on Stafford Road were gone.

Others remained, some spraying their roofs with garden hoses while others stuffed belongings and clothes into their cars in preparation to flee.

Joe Miskinnis stood casually in the middle of the street, beer in hand, watching helicopters shower a flaming ridge with water scooped from Lake Sherwood.

“We just moved here in July,” said Miskinnis, who had loaded his Jeep with tax and mortgage records. “We’re hoping for the best.”

Alice Berson, a longtime Lake Sherwood-area resident, said she had seen plenty of fires.

“I have a lot of faith in the Fire Department,” she said. “If it’s going to go, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

About 60 residents of Carlisle Canyon were evacuated as the fire continued to expand, but at least six refused to leave, insisting they had cleared enough brush from around their property to make it safe to stay and help defend their homes.

A young panther and a lioness at the Animal Actors of Hollywood ranch on Carlisle Canyon Road had to be shot because they were too mean to be moved safely, fire officials said.

Three 14-man California Youth Authority inmate crews cut firebreaks through dense brush with chain saws and axes, while other firefighters lit backfires during a lull in the winds to deprive the fire of fuel that could help it jump to houses.

Los Angeles County Battalion Chief Mike Balzano said the fire was threatening rugged, densely populated hillside neighborhoods along Mulholland Highway.

Back in the burned areas along Deer Canyon and Yerba Buena Road, neighborhoods were eerily quiet as a wet ocean breeze washing over the rubble of homes that had burned the day before. Their owners were nowhere to be seen.

Overnight, three homes on the ranch of Donald Scott--the millionaire who was fatally shot by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies a year ago during a fruitless drug raid on his house--had gone up in flames.

Three chimneys partially built with stones from a nearby creek were all that stood after the fire burned through the Mulholland Drive site.

“It reminds me of the Alamo in Texas,” said Scott’s widow, Frances Plante Scott. “I feel just like the last one standing in the Alamo fighting.”

John Gutierrez, 33, was another who felt it important to stand his ground.

“I made it through the last one--the fire in 1989,” said Gutierrez, 33, a resident of Decker Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. I’m not leaving.

“What are your choices? L.A.? The city? Hell no. You take your chance every few years here. It’s the quality of life.”

Meanwhile, the stubborn Santa Paula blaze continued to rage out of control after charring more than 20,000 acres of chaparral on the rugged hillsides north and west of town.

The city of Ventura awoke beneath a dense shroud of brown smoke and a constant rain of fine ash from the Santa Paula blaze, but fire crews managed to stop the fire from sweeping south into Ventura and were able to block the flames’ advance at the outskirts of Santa Paula.

To the north, a fire in Ojai had burned 1,650 acres of brush around Wheeler Hot Springs resort and into Matilija Canyon residents’ back yards by dusk on Thursday, but there were no reports of structural damage.

Overnight, only a single helicopter had been available to dump water on the Ojai fire, but air tankers finally arrived Thursday to begin dumping pink clouds of fire retardant into the fire’s path.

The Simi Valley-Chatsworth fire, which severely burned four city of Los Angeles firefighters Wednesday when it engulfed their firetruck near the Ventura County-Los Angeles County line, was thought to have been fully controlled by noon Thursday after blackening about 1,500 acres. But a small flare-up was reported at nightfall.

Altadena-Sierra Madre

A day after it broke out in Eaton Canyon--destroying 115 homes in the foothills north of Pasadena--the Altadena fire continued to move slowly up the steep mountainsides, pushing ever deeper into the heavy chaparral and timber of Angeles National Forest.

Capt. Steve Valenzuela of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said about 1,000 firefighters manning the lines had managed to contain about 20% of the 5,500-acre blaze, but there was no estimate of when more complete containment would be achieved. No additional homes were in immediate danger.

Big Marine helicopters taking off from a staging area near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena were being used to drop fire-retardant chemicals on hot spots.

Firefighters who came down the mountains to the command post said the fire was dying down but still fierce.

“It reminded me of the riots,” said Firefighter Herb Marroquin, 27. “Everywhere you look, there’s nothing but fire and devastation.”

At the command post, volunteers from Robin’s restaurant in Pasadena manned an outdoor grill, serving up 600 half-pound burgers, 200 Polish sausages, 1,200 scrambled eggs, 50 pounds of bacon and 200 pounds of hashed browns. Owner Robin Salzer, 40, said many firefighters and law enforcement officials assigned to the disaster were regulars at his restaurant, so he wanted to do what he could to help.

“With all these trials and everything and the adversity, this is the time people can come out to help,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Meanwhile, as residents of the fire-ravaged Kinneloa Canyon area began returning to salvage what they could from their devastated homes, Pasadena police and sheriff’s deputies patrolled the area to prevent looting.

Gerry and Sal Bonaccorso came home to the canyon from a trip in Mexico to find the house Sal had built with his own hands gone and his Jaguar burnt to a crisp in the driveway.

The county Fire Department had affixed red and white tags to the mailboxes of razed homes in their neighborhood reading Condemned.

By midmorning Gerry Bonaccorso had found only two items in the ashes her home--a crucifix and a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Gerrie Kilburn watched disconsolately as her husband, clad overalls and wielding a pitchfork, poked through the rubble of what once had been their comfortable home. On Thursday, nothing was left standing but their brick fireplace and chimney.

She said that when she fled the flames Wednesday morning, she had to leave everything behind--her silverware, her family pictures and a collection of antiques that included a 15th-Century letterpress.

Only two things made it to safety--”me and the cat--that was it,” she said.

Pausing for a moment, she gazed at the destruction around her.

“A lifetime of living,” she said softly.

Andres Z. Huang, 35, the transient Chinese immigrant accused of accidentally starting the Altadena blaze early Wednesday morning, told detectives he had built a campfire in the brush-covered hills because he was chilly, according to Deputy Gabe Ramirez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“Then he got scared and fled when the flames began to spread,” Ramirez said.

Huang was arrested Wednesday near the ranger station at Henniger Flats.

“He was disoriented and confused,” said Deputy Irma Becerra.

Huang will be arraigned today on felony charges of recklessly starting a fire.

He was being held in lieu of $7,500 bail in the jail ward of County-USC Medical Center, where he was being treated for cuts and bruises suffered when he tumbled down a hillside before his arrest.

Riverside County

Three fires that had raged Wednesday in largely uninhabited portions of the county were brought fully or partially under control by Thursday night.

A blaze that had raced across 21,350 acres of grassland and chaparral, destroying or damaging 29 homes, was largely contained, but some residents whose neighborhood was devastated blamed federal wildlife officials for restricting the mowing of thick brush that is home to two endangered species.

The residents of Winchester, a rural, unincorporated area northeast of Temecula, said they had been told to leave the dry scrub around their homes untrimmed because it is inhabited by the Stephens’ kangaroo rat and the California gnatcatcher.

“To them, that rat is more important than any of us. Think about it, that rat is more important than people,” said an angry Esther Sandoval, 41, whose home was spared by the flames.

The 3,500-acre Box Springs fire, which broke out north of Moreno Valley in the city of Riverside, had been 100% contained by Thursday afternoon, according to Ray Shultz, a spokesman for the state Department of Forestry.

The same was true of the so-called Tribal fire, which had consumed 2,500 acres of the Cahuilla Indian Reservation near California 371, Shultz said.

Sherman Oaks

The arms he normally uses to wield fire hoses and carry children to safety were burned and swathed in gauze. But Cleveland Tipton, one of four Los Angeles firefighters severely injured while combatting a stubborn blaze in the Santa Susana Pass near Chatsworth, still had the strength to raise one of them to shake the hand of his commander-in-chief.

“Thanks for putting your life on the line,” Mayor Richard Riordan told Tipton at his bedside in the Sherman Oaks Community Hospital Burn Center.

Tipton said he was anxious to get back to the fire lines.

“I was sitting here watching the news, watching a lot of people losing their homes, and I feel like I should be out there,” the firefighter said, tears filling his eyes.

Fighting back tears of his own, the mayor said: “I’m particularly proud to be the mayor over these young men who put their lives on the line.”