Sifting for Memories : Disaster: Treasure-hunting club helps Laguna fire victims find heirlooms and memorabilia that vanished in flames that took their homes.

They were once trinkets in a house filled with ancient Chinese artwork, antique jewelry and silverware.

One is a lumpy clay pencil holder covered with blue hearts, the other a ceramic four-leaf clover. Exhumed from the blackened rubble of Sigrid Kielty’s fire-blasted Laguna Beach home this week, they are now treasures of the heart for the fire survivor.

“Look at these,” said a smiling Kielty, holding out the charred knickknacks fashioned by her children several years ago. “These are memories that cannot be replaced. My daughters will be so excited.”

Finding lost valuables is a specialty of the West Coast Prospectors and Treasure Hunters Assn., whose members have spent the past week helping Laguna Beach residents dredge family heirlooms from the ashes of their destroyed homes.

With patience gained from countless hours spent digging through Old West ghost towns, they sift ashes by the spadeful through metal screens, closely inspecting each blackened lump that doesn’t fall through the mesh.

“This is a real treasure hunt,” said Sandy Crawford of Los Alamitos, a former club president. “That we’re doing it for other people doesn’t matter to us at all.”

So far, five homes have been searched by the club, which counts about 100 members scattered throughout Southern California.

They have found missing coin collections, jewelry and other family heirlooms that might otherwise have been forever lost--although often the gold and silver has melted into mere blobs of precious metal.

Club members were scheduled to work at four more houses this week and will keep on delving into the ashes as long as residents request their services, which are free. They’re willing to spend hours, even days, hunting for items.

The Laguna Beach effort, following the fire that destroyed 366 houses, is the first major search and recovery campaign coordinated by the amateur prospectors, according to club members. A few members helped out in the aftermath of a blaze in Glendale about three years ago and one person volunteered in Oakland after the 1991 fire.

From past disasters, members learned how to adapt their prospecting skills to fire recovery and protect themselves from hazards such as asbestos that may be contained in devastated houses.

“What we do is really pretty simple,” Crawford said. “It takes a lot of patience, but we’ve got that, plus about 45 people who are willing to spend time out here.

“Homeowners aren’t very well prepared, they just start plowing through the ashes,” she said. “Although our metal detectors don’t do much good--there’s too much metal junk out here--most of us have our own sifters. It’s slow and methodical but that’s the right way to do this job.”

Recognizing valuables is “real obvious. It’s easy to see a jar or piece of jewelry because everything has been burned and tends to disintegrate,” Crawford said.

For security reasons and to provide a guide to where valuables were located, the organizers require that the owner or a trusted friend or family member be present during the dig.

Crawford said the number of requests from fire survivors hasn’t been overwhelming, partly because many don’t know about the services, but also because of privacy issues. Disaster relief workers in the city agree that some property owners are reluctant to let strangers go poking around.

“Even the idea of a few strangers on their property is pretty overwhelming to some,” said Lisa Sauls, who supervises relief efforts for the Laguna Presbyterian Church. “But that may change after they hear from some of their neighbors (who work with the club) and get more comfortable with the idea.”

Anyone interested in reaching West Coast Prospectors can contact Sauls at the church, which is where Kielty found out about the group.

Looking at the piles of burned, twisted wood and shattered concrete at her Temple Hills Drive home, Kielty shook her head and grimaced at the task of finding anything.

“This is impossible,” she said.

But five volunteer prospectors, one of two teams working in Laguna Beach one day this week, began pulling burned-out water heaters and bathtubs out of the way. They broke out their sifters and began to work.

Within an hour, Kielty had a small pile of charred, partially melted jewelry and watches growing in front of her--each with a memory attached.

Picking out a red brooch, she recalled how “my mother used to have a black velvet dress with long arms that she wore this with. I used to admire this so much when I was young, I thought she looked so beautiful wearing it.”

Looking at her house, Kielty said she felt “better now that I’ve come back and found these things. I couldn’t let it go without looking.

“I thought it was a nearly impossible job,” she said, “but these people have so much enthusiasm. They’re amazing.”

As Kielty walked off with her family heirlooms, Crawford blinked away a little moisture that had formed in her eyes.

“These people have gone through so much,” she said. “Sometimes, I think the treasure we’re looking for are the memories these things hold for them.”