Laguna Enclave Won’t Be Same After Fire, Mud

Jim Eady’s dream house was all of 1,100 square feet. Better yet, it was in Canyon Acres, this city’s Bohemia.

“I lusted after this house for six years, driving by it every day,” said Eady, 47, a longtime Laguna Beach postal worker who finally bought the cottage 17 years ago.

Today, except for the fireplace, last month’s fire and this week’s flooding have left the dwelling in ashes and mud.

“Outside my window, I used to see peacocks pecking at worms, hear the sheep across the street. The people next door used to raise geese and guinea hens and give us goose eggs. Man, those eggs were rich,” Eady said.

Memories have become precious all over Laguna Beach in the days since the disastrous fire, but nowhere more so than among residents of Canyon Acres, one of the hardest-hit sections of a town.

Now, many of the 47 homeowners who lost their coveted canyon homes to the fire live with an even more wrenching reality: Their Canyon Acres neighborhood is probably gone forever. It can never be the same again.

In tony Laguna Beach, whimsical Canyon Acres was known as “old Laguna,” a 1940s-era patchwork of chicken coops, cottages and art studios, where a visitor was more likely to hear the Grateful Dead than Barbra Streisand emanating from open windows. It was a throwback to an era of pre-freeway, pre-gate-guarded Southern California, and that’s just how the locals wanted it to stay.

But as they pick through the rubble and mud of their burned out homes and shore up what’s left of their properties with sandbags, canyon residents cannot help but wonder what Laguna Beach’s notoriously strict building codes will do to the jerry-built community.

“There’s an overwhelming fear that the city will plug us into their red-taped bureaucracy,” said Jay Grant, an artist and Canyon Acres resident for 19 years. “That won’t work out here.”

Despite the fact that the city has promised to work with the residents, David Schmidt, an artist and 10-year resident, expressed the fears of many of his neighbors when he said, “Canyon Acres is going to be totally different when it’s rebuilt.”

Hidden away in a narrow, winding canyon behind the city’s downtown, Canyon Acres was an unplanned neighborhood that mushroomed over the years. That was its charm, said resident Pat Klotz, who mused about the canyon community as a work of art.

“Art is really a series of accidents,” said Klotz, as she and several squawking chickens poked at the rubble of her home. “It’s the randomness here that’s so wonderful. Nature is chaotic, and this is chaotic.”

The homeowners had been blissfully unorganized, and only rallied when someone tried to instill order in the canyon. Strongly resisted were the city’s efforts to widen two-lane Canyon Acres Drive and a developer’s suggestion to cut a road through to Top of the World on a ridgeline above.

All attempts to stall the forces of change ended last month when Canyon Acres’ luck in avoiding wildfires finally ran out.

Fire, a part of life in California’s brush-covered canyon communities, had somehow always avoided causing any major damage in Canyon Acres. But on Oct. 27, the firestorm jumped Laguna Canyon Road some time after 3 p.m. and burned southeast, ripping through the deepest part of the canyon before climbing up a ridge and burning Skyline Drive and the Mystic Hills area directly above.

Laguna Beach firefighters, some who live in Canyon Acres, were already battling another front of the blaze in Emerald Bay and Irvine Cove when Canyon Acres homes became threatened. The narrow arroyo of the canyon quickly became an inferno, with temperatures hitting 2,500 degrees, enough to disintegrate the homes’ concrete foundations and melt the zinc off the galvanized fences, officials said.

While there remains a lingering suspicion among Canyon Acres residents that their cottages were ignored by fire crews, it was just too hot and dangerous for firefighters to have much success battling the blaze there, said Deputy Fire Chief Rich Dewberry.

“Our hearts go out to those folks down there, and it probably does seem like we spent little or no time there,” Dewberry said. “But when the fire jumped the canyon, there was little or no time before the fire was up on Skyline. You can’t put people where you know they are going to lose their lives. It’s an awful thing, but it’s a decision we had to make.”

For most Canyon Acres residents, the focus has now shifted to the newest calamity--mudslides--and the process of rebuilding.

Canyon Acres residents got a taste of how bad the mudslides might be Thursday when the first post-fire rainfall doused the arroyo, touching off a flood of muck and ashes that gathered force as it made its way toward Laguna Canyon Road.

“People are really panicked. They’re sandbagging like crazy. I am too,” Peter Ott, 49, an artist and 40-year Canyon Acres resident, said Friday. “It looks like we’re preparing for the worst. Maybe that one rain Thursday was a nice indicator so people can understand what could happen here.”

With only one road in or out of the canyon, the rebuilding of Canyon Acres will take an organized engineering effort, said Bob Carey, a former resident and part-owner of Village Builders, a downtown contracting firm.

“What I’ve told people is to sit tight, sift through the ashes and try to get some plans drawn up of their homes,” Carey said. Because of the neighborhood’s age, in many cases there are no architectural plans.

But now is the time to make the changes that will prevent another catastrophe as destructive as the Laguna Beach fire, Carey said. Drainage ditches, fire breaks--created possibly with fire-resistant avocado trees--and modern home building materials will have to be factored into the new Canyon Acres lifestyle, he said.

“You are going to lose some of the haphazard mix, Carey said. “I know they don’t want to look like Aliso Viejo, but a cleanup effort will have to be mixed in with these new things.”

Ott agreed that the time has come to modernize.

“Canyon Acres is like Laguna was in the 1940s,” he said. “We can keep a lot of that, but now it is going to be changed.”