Stiff Winds, Raging Fires; It Must Be Fall

As thick smoke from a Calabasas wildfire hung over Thousand Oaks on Monday, the first stiff Santa Ana winds of the season blew through Ventura County, knocking down tree limbs, campaign signs, power lines, even rescue mission tents that housed homeless men.

Weather forecasters expect the high winds, which whipped up to 45 mph in some valleys and canyons, to continue through today.

As fire burned more than 9,000 acres from Calabasas to Malibu and shut down the Pacific Coast Highway at the county line, Ventura County reported no major damage. But fire crews and public works officials here remained on guard throughout the day.

“We’re in a red flag alert,” said John Tucker, a firefighter with the Ventura County Fire Department.

“It’s an extremely high fire danger,” he said. “We’re monitoring conditions and we have a special team of engines roaming the county so that if anything does break, we’ll be able to respond that much faster.”

Nearly 50 firefighters from Ventura County rolled to Calabasas on Monday to help control that wildfire. Later in the day, the Fire Department dispatched firefighters to the Piru area to assist their Los Angeles counterparts with a blaze southeast of Lake Piru.

“We went out to Piru because we thought a fire was going to burn our way. But it was contained in L.A. County,” Tracy Valencia said.

When PCH shut down at midafternoon, Tom Dellner of Corral Canyon was among dozens left stranded.

“I called my landlady and she told me to come home, because otherwise I wasn’t going to make it,” said Dellner, a golf magazine editor.

Dellner tried for more than an hour to reach his home, but gave up and hunkered down at Neptune’s Net restaurant, wondering if his house would withstand the fire. “I’m just calling my answering machine every five minutes, hoping it still picks up,” he said.

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Joe and Katharina Ivey, who live on Yerba Buena Road in the remote hills between Thousand Oaks and Malibu, watched the smoke from the Calabasas fire with an uneasy suspicion.

Three years ago, their home was in the path of the devastating Green Meadow fire, but was spared any damage. This season, they dug up the dry brush and cleared a path 30 feet around their home.

“These winds can shift, so yes I’m concerned,” Katharina Ivey said. “But right now it appears to be blowing to the south.”

Joe was less fearful. “If the wind does switch, we’ll have an engine at every house again,” he said. “The firefighters saved us last time.”

Winds helped destroy two huge tents at the Ventura County Rescue Mission, shelter to 44 homeless men.

Early in the afternoon Monday, a strong gust swooped beneath the olive-green canvas, pushing the steel poles through the fabric and rendering the Navy-donated tents useless.

“It’s sad to see something like that happen, but then you see how people come together in situations like this,” said Sal Romo, who has lived at the mission for the past three months.

“What can you do?” he asked. “You place one foot in front of the other and keep going.”

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Mission directors planned to ask the Navy to donate another tent while a permanent shelter is under construction. The former building burned four years ago.

“It’s been like three plagues,” associate director Carol Roberg said. “They lost their homeless shelter and now they lost their tents. It breaks my heart.”

More than 6,000 homes and businesses across the county lost power at some point Monday, but work crews from Southern California Edison were able to restore service to most of the customers by late in the day.

“The wind is blowing and tree branches have been pushed into the lines,” Edison spokesman Steven Conroy said. “That hits the relay and disrupts service to the customers.

“But we have many, many service crews in the field at this time,” he said. “And we’re anticipating being very active through [today] based on our reports from the National Weather Service.”

A small fire started in a street median along Wooley Road in Oxnard when power lines were struck by wind-blown tree branches. In Camarillo, the canopy over a roadside pumpkin patch collapsed under 45-mph gusts.

Forecasters said the weather pattern was not unusual for this time of year.

“We’ve got high pressure to the northeast and low pressure to the south-southwest,” said Dedric Walker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Oxnard.

“The pressure centers are close, and when the high pressure meets the low pressure, you get wind,” he said. “It’s not moving much. We’re expecting it through [today].”

City and county officials braced for the worst throughout the day Monday, but by early evening the wind had died down and no major damage resulted.

“We had a few branches down, a couple of small trees blow over,” said Bill Byerts, the Ventura parks manager. “But we’re not aware of any real property damage. Overall, we’ve come up very lucky.”

Butch Britt, the Ventura County assistant public works director, said his crews spent Monday clearing branches from roadways and doing other wind-related maintenance.

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With two weeks to go until the general election, many of the political signs that cover Thousand Oaks street corners were toppled. Several small trees crashed onto fences, and broken limbs cluttered streets and sidewalks.

Along Thousand Oaks Boulevard, a runaway gas cap apparently from the Mobil station across the road was among the objects that bounced by onrushing traffic.

Some people along the office parks in Westlake stood outside at lunchtime, braving the winds to watch the large clouds of smoke drift southward over nearby Calabasas.

But when it came time to eat, the work crowd was definitely heading indoors, at least according John Smiley, who has run a popular hot dog stand off Townsgate Road for eight years.

“It’s killing me,” he said of the wind. “Where is everyone?”

Smiley said he has learned to weather the wind, weighing down his napkins and tying down his wooden sign with a bungee cord.

But customers have not: Only a handful of his most loyal patrons showed up for chili dogs and Polish sausage Monday.

“I’m used to the winds myself, but they don’t like them,” Smiley said of his customers. “When it’s windy like this, the customers drive by with their soups and sandwiches and wave.”

Times staff writers Lorenza Munoz and Miguel Bustillo and correspondent Scott Steepleton contributed to this report.