Fire Victims Return to Scene of Destruction

Thalia Diamantopoulos stared at a 2-foot high mound of blackened debris in the middle of her apartment’s living room floor Thursday, looked at the sky through the spaces in the charred beams of what used to be her ceiling and thanked God for her good fortune.

A fire that Wednesday skipped through her building at 19916 Roscoe Blvd. and into an adjoining building, causing $350,000 in damages, had spared the lives of Diamantopoulos, her 6-year-old son, and everyone else in the two buildings, she explained. What’s more, she said, while some neighbors had lost everything, her most important belongings seemed to have been spared.

“It looks worse than I feel it is,” she said. “I came in last night and I just burst into tears because all the books that Billy had since he was a baby were not touched, and they were the most important part. They weren’t even dirty.”

Residents of the 64-unit, two-building complex made their way around the burnt wreckage that littered the two courtyards and tried to assess their losses Thursday, many of them seeing their homes for the first time since the blaze broke out the previous afternoon.

Fire officials said 36 apartments sustained fire and water damage during the blaze, which summoned 19 fire companies and about 100 firefighters to the Cordon Apartments. The complex managers, however, said the most serious damage was to five apartments in each building that were gutted by fire and four units in each building that suffered water damage.

There were no injuries in the fire, which was fueled by a wood-shingle roof and 25 m.p.h. winds, authorities said.

Fire officials said the cause of the blaze was still under investigation, although Assistant Fire Chief Jim Young said Wednesday that there were unconfirmed reports by neighbors that bottle rockets and other fireworks had been heard in the area.

Red Cross workers said 75 people registered Wednesday at an emergency shelter set up around the corner from the apartment complex, but only about 20 people ended up spending the night in the converted gymnasium. None of the roughly 250 tenants were allowed to return home Wednesday night, although some were escorted in by firefighters to retrieve essential items.

The shelter was expected to remain open at least through this morning, said Peggy Ayala, the Valley’s Red Cross area supervisor.

Tenants on the bottom floors who suffered water damage are expected to be back in their apartments by Tuesday, said Sue Smith, the complex’s assistant manager. Those who were burned out were relocated into vacant units at the same site or into another property on Saticoy Street that is owned by the same company, Smith said.

The burned apartments, however, could take anywhere from three to six months to renovate, Smith said, depending in large part on whether rain hampers repairs.

JoAnne Benson, who shared an apartment with her brother in one of the buildings, stopped by the center Thursday to see what kind of assistance she could obtain. She and her brother spent the night Wednesday in Benson’s daughter’s apartment but were unsure where they were going to stay during the coming weeks, while their waterlogged apartment undergoes renovation.

“We can stay probably tonight, but then I don’t know,” Benson said between bites of a submarine sandwich provided by the Red Cross. “She has a single (bedroom apartment) and there are already four people.”

Benson said she has no plans to relocate and hoped she would soon be allowed to move back into her home of two years. “I loved that apartment,” Benson said. “But what I loved about it is why it burned--there was so much wood.”

While Benson and other neighbors made alternate living arrangements, Irma Ruiz set up lunch for her husband and 4-year-old daughter in the family’s apartment, which was untouched by events of the night before. With the front door closed, the smell of jalapeno-topped pizza overwhelmed the burnt smell that still lingered around the complex.

But looking out the kitchen window, Ruiz could see the ravaged sections of roof on both apartment buildings.

“I feel thankful and lucky and I thank God we’re safe,” she said. “I don’t even want to remember yesterday. I was hysterical.”

Across the complex, Diamantopoulos brushed off her son’s remote control truck, and then tried to maintain her good humor by testing its climbing capacity, guiding it up a pile of burnt bits of wood and plaster. Then she pointed to a far wall of what used to be her kitchen.

“There was nothing left on this wall but the plaster handprint my son made in kindergarten,” she said. “I’m glad for the memories I’ll be able to keep. I’ll probably be upset later, but now I think it’s great.”