Remains of the Blaze

Nearly two years since walls of flame roared through the city and torched hundreds of homes, many fire victims who have rebuilt their houses are unhappy about the haunting and eerie ruins that still surround them.

In places, chimneys reach up like tombstones in memory of the October, 1993, firestorm. Dead trees stand, bony and burned. Rubble litters empty lots where homes once stood.

“It still looks like a cemetery,” Dick Baxter said while workers painted his new Caribbean Way home.

Residents whose homes survived the blaze say they too are weary of living amid the ash and debris of this city’s worse disaster.

“I’m dying to see everything cleaned up and rebuilt,” said Skyline Drive resident Rosette Koorajian. “Look at those charred trees,” she added, gesturing impatiently toward one lot. “To see it still like this is psychically damaging. It’s just a constant reminder.”

In response to such complaints, the City Council recently gave property owners three months to remove the debris, an edict welcomed by many returning residents, including Barbara Norton, who recently moved back to Caribbean Way.

“We’ve had enough trauma in our lives without having to be reminded of it,” she said, adding that her son finds it “unsettling” to walk to school past dark skeletons of trees.

“It’s like the Wicked Forest in ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” she said.

The fire damaged or destroyed more than 400 homes in and around Laguna. Within the city limits, 286 homes were lost.

As of mid-July, 213 property owners had applied for building permits and 57 have moved into new homes.

However, another 73 property owners have not filed building plans with the city. City officials say most who haven’t rebuilt are either stalled in negotiations with their insurance companies or have decided to sell the vacant lots and move elsewhere.

Hoping to remove safety hazards from neighborhoods that are again filling with families, city officials say they notified absent property owners that their lots must be cleared. They have gotten little response.

So by Aug. 1, the city will send letters warning property owners they must clear all but the foundations from their lots by Nov. 1 or the city will do it for them and send the bill. Those who have not settled with their insurance companies can appeal to the City Council for more time.

Mayor Kathleen Blackburn said the city’s motivation came largely from burn area residents.

The frustration is most evident in the heavily hit Mystic Hills community, where construction is at a fever pitch and the contrast of fresh hope and residual tragedy is especially glaring.

Fire victims say they accept the chaos that has accompanied their homecoming--streets clogged with construction trucks, the chatter of hammers. These are sounds of hope, they say, neighborhoods being reborn.

“I’ve gotten kind of used to all the people, all the trucks, all the noise,” said Maggie Amador, leaning on the fence at the front of her rebuilt Skyline Drive home. “It’s nice to have people on the street.”

It is silence that makes these residents shudder, the stillness where homes are not being built.

At a typical vacant lot near Amador’s, a brick chimney stands at one side of the property while at the other is a swimming pool with slimy green water in the deep end. Weeds poke from cracks in the foundation, upon which rests the jagged remnants of a toilet. Rusted pipes rise here and there.

“It bothers us, the chimneys and everything,” Amador said. “It just looks horrible.”

“We just want to start fresh,” Joyce Whitegon, who lives a block away, said in echoing her sentiment. “On both sides of me I have disaster still. That’s what I look out at from my kitchen window. That’s what I look out at from my view window.”

City officials are keeping up the pressure.

Within the next couple of years, property owners who are not rebuilding probably will have to uproot their foundations, City Manager Kenneth C. Frank said.

“At this point, we don’t want them to have to incur that cost,” he said.