The Southland Firestorm: A Special Report : The Recovery : VOLUNTEERS : Taking Some of the Pain Away

In all ways weird and wonderful, community spirit is alive and well in supposedly narcissistic Southern California.

Motivated by compassion or grim memories, volunteers are offering their skills or services--some unusual, some not--to help people rebuild. There’s mystery writer Serita Stevens, 44, who is offering a free room in her Granada Hills condominium to any fire victim willing to put up with Edgar Poe, Charley Dickens, Mark Twain, Sasha, Golda Meir, McIntosh and Ralph Waldo Emerson--her five cats and two dogs.

Stevens also keeps a kosher household, so no bacon or other traif, please, though you needn’t convert.

“Jewish law says you’re supposed to help people in need and I take it to heart,” said Stevens, who is also a psychiatric nurse.

Guilt is what’s motivating Peter Baggs, 60, of Seal Beach to enlist his skip-loader, moving van and muscles to help people clean up after the fires.

“I feel kind of guilty that nothing like this has ever happened to me,” Baggs said. “I’ve never been involved in a firestorm, earthquake, flood or other natural disaster.”

But for dozens of other volunteers from Malibu to Reseda, the fires have rekindled memories of similar losses.

There’s insurance agent Ted Silverberg, 34, a Malibu resident who rented five hotel rooms at his own expense for local teen-agers Tuesday and then helped reunite them with their families after the fire subsided. He was taking breaks Friday from work to buy toothpaste and other sundries for those who lost everything.

“Years ago, my mobile home was damaged in a fire and I couldn’t move back in for a month,” Silverberg said. “A lot of people helped us out. A Santa Monica store even gave me a surfboard and a wet suit.

“What goes around comes around.”

Photographer Bruce Fier, 43, of Reseda is offering his services free to anyone who needs either pictures of the destruction for insurance purposes or just wants to replace burned photo albums with new family portraits.

“I figured I could give them an ongoing sense of history,” said Fier, whose first wife died. “I know how long it can take to recover from a loss.”

And not all the beneficiaries of these efforts are human. Consider the charges of Savannah Brentnall, 26, of Burbank, who has helped organize a network of equestrians to care for hundreds of horses left homeless after the Calabasas/Malibu blaze.

“Someone has to muck out the stables,” she said.