No Signs of Control as Castaic Fire Grows

On the shores of Castaic Lake is a small town. It was built in three days.

It was built to fight a fire.

As the 18,000-acre Marple Fire raged Wednesday, threatening a trailer park and closing the Golden State Freeway northbound for the second time since the fire began Monday, the portable buildings and tent town continued to mobilize.

The fire, which consumed more than 2,000 acres Wednesday alone, had, at 28 square miles, surpassed in size the devastating 1993 Malibu/Topanga blaze.

“[The fire] is becoming a lot bigger with no signs of control,” said Inspector Henry Rodriguez of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

On Wednesday, officials said the Marple Fire was less than 20% contained, but because it was in a mostly remote area, only a handful of structures had been damaged so far.

The small loss in structures can also be attributed to the massive force brought into the area in a short amount of time. In only three days a total of 2,187 firefighters and support personnel had been mustered.

It takes a town to fight a fire this vast.

The first call came Monday at 12:30 p.m. when what was described as a small brush fire was reported.

Since the blaze began on Los Angeles County land north of Castaic, it was county officials who took the call and responded. When the fire quickly whipped out of control, crews and officials from Angeles National Forest responded, said United States Forest Service spokesman Robert Brady.

And the big ball of big-time firefighting was rolling.

Based on the size of the unpredictable inferno and the breakneck speed of its spread, top officials from the two agencies immediately began ordering not only fire crews but groups of specialists from around the county, state and country. These specialists arrived with their gear, which ranged from crates of pay vouchers to air tankers.

Workers’ compensation and claims experts rolled and flew in, as did paramedics, people to order parts for broken-down firetrucks and people to pick up those parts. The firefighting equivalents of bankers came to procure money for all those parts, as well as rentals and other needs.

There were mechanics and phone technicians, pilots and pumper drivers. There were well-spoken, if bleary-eyed, officials to deal with the curious media, camped under a bright red canopy. There were those whose sole purpose is to plot the nearly unplottable fire.

“The maps are constantly changing,” said the Forest Service’s Norman A. Noyes, who heads up the fire’s Situation Unit.

In a large trailer, Noyes and two dozen others sought Wednesday to paint a profile of the blaze in red and black grease pen.

They gathered information from field observers, crews returning from the fight, infrared scanning devices and satellite images. And on sheets of clear plastic, they plotted the always-morphing blaze.

As the group drew and redrew the lines of the fire, the 15-year-old San Fernando boy suspected of starting it was charged with arson of a structure and arson of forest land, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Laura Foland-Priver. He will be arraigned today at Sylmar Juvenile Hall.

Down toward the blue lake, which seems the only thing for miles not dry or burning, Anita Hyde was recuperating from the breakfast rush and preparing for the next meal.

An employee of Stewart’s Firefighting Food Catering, of Lakeview, Ore., one of many private contractors on the job, Hyde and her compatriots spent the morning slinging hundreds of hash browns and more: 60 gallons of coffee, 2,800 half-pints of milk, 4,266 eggs, 280 pounds of bacon, 300 pounds of sausage, not to mention staggering amounts of a half-dozen other goodies.

Even as she spoke, busloads of new, soon-to-be-hungry firefighters were arriving, the vital information of each one recorded and filed by another specialized group.

Many would soon be sent to the southwest corner of the blaze, which exploded in flames, closing the northbound lanes of the freeway most of the afternoon and evening, and threatening the Paradise Ranch mobile home park for the second day in a row.

Sipping a cold beer and watching some of the 10 planes and nine helicopters attack the advancing fire, park resident Bob Smith said he was all set to leave. “In the car I got some water for the dog, some water for the wife and a couple of bananas.”

Before the new arrivals mounted up--some of them highly trained “Hot Shots,” others prison inmates on a fire for the first time--many would swing by the open-air market of Glenn Root, the California Department of Forestry Supply Unit leader.

Root arrived here straight from another blaze and had worked 17 very long days in a row. Nonetheless, like the owner of the local hardware store, he could set the firefighters up with just about anything they needed, stocking “all the supplies to fight this fire.”

His crew had just offloaded two 1,500-gallon helicopter water buckets. Behind those are thousands of feet of well-coiled hose. To the right were boxes upon boxes of “Fusees,” the flare-like sticks used to light backfires. There were trash cans, bottles of sunscreen, flashlights, gas cans, batteries, jugs of concentrated fire-retarding foam. There were shiny new Pulaskis--an ax on one side, a heavy hoe on the other.

Many of the supplies came from a special warehouse in Ontario, packaged in a semi-trailer and ready to quickly outfit the first crews to get them on the fire line.

Earlier, when Brady, the Forest Service spokesman, had begun his day of dealing with harried reporters, he put his hands on his hips, gazed around the sprawling encampment and said: “It amazes me, too.”

Times staff writer Martha L. Willman and special correspondent John Gonzales contributed to this story.

* NO SCOOPERS: Firefighting planes are unavailable. B6