Fire Scorches 1,021 Acres of Brush in Agua Dulce : Blaze: The wind’s changing direction and breaks cut by firefighters spare a mobile home park and other buildings. No injuries are reported.

As temperatures soared after a week of milder weather, a fast-moving brush fire engulfed 1,021 acres Saturday and for a time threatened a mobile home park and several other structures in the north county rural community of Agua Dulce.

No one was injured, and no structures were damaged by the blaze. But about 350 county and U.S. Forest Service firefighters were needed to contain the fire as winds in excess of 20 m.p.h. helped spread the flames.

A spokesman for the L.A. County Fire Department said a downed power line had been found at the site, but that the cause of the fire had not been determined.

Firefighters kept the blaze from reaching homes in Bee Canyon and a mobile home park after clearing away brush by hand and with bulldozers. Nature played a hand too.

“The winds are kind of squirrelly here,” said Capt. Steve Valenzuela.

“They can change in either direction. In this case, they helped us by blowing the other way.”

By 7 p.m., the fire was 80% contained, firefighters said.

Strong Santa Ana winds are expected to continue today, which is typical for this time of the year, although they will be calmer than they were Saturday, said Kris Farnsworth, a meteorologist at Weather Data Inc.

Authorities were notified of the fire at 10:08 a.m. Saturday. It started near Agua Dulce Canyon Road, about one mile south of the Antelope Valley Freeway--and headed west toward Santa Clarita.

The freeway was closed from Via Princessa to Red Rover Mine Road for several hours, backing up traffic for miles.

Residents in the brush-covered, sparsely populated canyons handled the crisis calmly, even as the blaze roared down the west side of Agua Dulce Canyon Road.

Richard Kurich saw the fire coming his way and prepared for an exit.

“I had a couple bags packed and had my dog ready to leave,” Kurich said. But the firefighters’ actions reassured him.

“They lit some backfires and when it got down to here, they had all kinds of equipment on it,” Kurich said.

His closest neighbor, Stewart East, who lives about a mile down the road, was in town having his poodle groomed when the fire started.

East, an 81-year-old retired movie stand-in, was caught for two hours in the tie-up caused by the freeway closure. He reached home about 1 p.m., just as fire crews were preparing to defend his property.

“They assured me that if it did get over the hill, they would come and backfire, which they did,” East said.

“I wasn’t really worried that much.”

One of the day’s most dramatic incidents involved a county Fire Department bulldozer that crawled up and down the rugged ridges east of the freeway cutting fire breaks.

At the foot of one slope, operator Steve Oldaker came upon a nearly vertical slope and couldn’t back away from it.

For the next 20 minutes, with a rapt audience of Fire Department brass, sheriff’s deputies, camp crews and reporters looking down from the otherwise empty freeway, Oldaker used every trick in the bulldozer’s repertory to ease the giant machine down safely.

First planting the blade in the dirt, he repeatedly lifted the whole tractor into a horizontal position on the blade’s hydraulic arms, and then spun the steel tracks to cut dirt away from behind him.

Little by little, the loose dirt filled in under the front of the rig, building a pad from which to launch the next step.

Later, asked how steep a grade the tractor can descend, Oldaker said, “That was too steep.”