Fires Ignite Curiosity as Many Come to Sightsee

Kurt James considers himself an aficionado of disaster.

While on vacation in San Francisco a month after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, he made it a point to tour the devastated areas. When visiting his sister in Santa Barbara three years ago, he asked her to drive him through the neighborhood where hundreds of homes were destroyed by a wildfire. And after the Los Angeles riots last year, he gave friends from Delaware a tour of burned-out buildings.

So on Thursday morning it was not surprising to find James cruising on a mountain bike along New York Drive in Altadena, surveying the aftermath of a fire that destroyed more than 100 homes and ravaged more than 5,000 acres.

“I don’t think I’m ghoulish. . . . I’m just interested in historic events,” said James, a computer programmer who lives down the hill from the fire, in Pasadena. “And these fires and riots and earthquakes are some of the major events in California history.”

The rubberneckers and looky-loos gathered from Altadena to Malibu to Laguna Beach to gawk, photograph the damage and chronicle the spread of fire with video cameras.

Some were shocked by the damage. “This was so incredible I had to record it,” said Yvonne Randall of Glendale after videotaping the destruction in Altadena.

Others were intrigued. “Look at this one . . . it was burned to a crisp,” said Joe Brosius of Pasadena, who was photographing shrubs in Altadena and studying how they fared in the fire.

A few were angry. “They’ve been doing everything . . . for the expensive homes in Malibu and forgetting about people like us,” said Arnold Farran, watching the blaze from a road near his home on Decker Canyon, which also was threatened by the wildfires.

In the aftermath of any natural disaster, residents can always count on a crush of contractors clogging the roads, hoping to pick up some business. They can count on media crews searching for tears, pathos and gritty residents resolving to stick it out.

And they can count on the sightseers. Many residents are mystified that droves of people find it fascinating to line up, cheek by jowl, straining against yellow crime scene tape to stare at charred houses and smoke-filled canyons.

Kurt James finds the answer in television.

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“Every station has these somber-looking commentators discussing every aspect of the fire, showing dramatic film footage over and over until you’re whipped up into a frenzy of curiosity,” he said, parking his mountain bike. “So the next day, when television isn’t showing the fire any more and it’s back to soap operas and ‘Oprah,’ you’re still curious about what happened and what things look like. So you go out and find out for yourself.”

In the Altadena area, it was not so easy to check out the action. Virtually every street leading to the fire-ravaged areas was blocked off by law enforcement personnel, who let only residents pass. A few gawkers slipped through, but the rest could only huddle in the distance and study the plumes of smoke drifting over the hillsides.

“The looky-loos keep trying to get in,” said California Highway Patrol Officer L. J. Vicino, who was stationed near New York and Altadena drives. “They’re trying to get in by foot and they’re trying to get in by car.”

Laguna Beach was not much better for the curious. They, too, were kept well behind a police perimeter that circled the charred houses.

Malibu provided the best vantage points. The turnoffs on most of the windy two-lane roads connecting the San Fernando Valley to the beach were filled. Visitors stood next to their cars, with cameras and binoculars, studying the columns of black smoke billowing in the air.

“I could see the smoke from my balcony so I had to come up here and see what was happening,” said John Hidalgo of Westlake Village, who was parked on Westlake Boulevard. “On the news, all they were showing was Laguna.”

In Laguna Beach, the charred homes on terraced hillsides above downtown were still smoking. In the distance, helicopters swooped down, dipped buckets into the ocean and headed back into the canyons.

Rick Martin cruised around the downtown area on his bicycle and photographed houses in the fire area. “I’m an architect and I’m interested in how to protect homes,” he said. “I want to find out what worked and what didn’t.”