Scars From Laguna Fire Still Fresh : To Cong Bui: Engineer’s home outlasted his luck. He’s planning to move.

The Miracle House that came to symbolize the whims of the wildfire is a home that To Cong Bui no longer wants.

Bui’s rambling hillside-structure, with its thick, white concrete walls and tile roof, endured the fire like Gibraltar in an eerie moonscape of ravaged Mystic Hills houses.

But instead of rejoicing over his luck, Bui is planning to move.

Bui, a Vietnamese-born civil engineer, estimates it will take another two years to build himself a home nearby that will be even more secure and spacious than the one that survived the fire. He said he hopes the new home will be an example of fire-safe construction to his rebuilding neighbors.

Bui expected his construction business to flourish in the aftermath of the fire, but it hasn’t. “Unfortunately, they are building the same way they did before. And I was disappointed in this. I got no sales.”

Bui considers this year “the worst in my life, even worse than some times in Vietnam.” He suspects that some of his neighbors resented his luck. His wife, Doris Bender, took a different approach, volunteering to help the local fire relief coalition.

“We had a lot of conflict,” Bui said. “For example, I think ‘What is the point of talking to them?’ They don’t want anything to do with me. And after (that), I don’t want anything to do with them. But my wife tried to talk.”