Blazes Rekindle Reporter’s Memories of Past Disasters

Monday afternoon I stood alongside the neighbors in both Lemon Heights and North Tustin as they stared at the charred ruins of half a dozen homes.

Susan Jackson kept busy handing out soft drinks to firefighters and friends from the back of her house, just a few feet from the disastrous fate of a neighbor’s home. She said aloud what many must have been thinking:

“You vacillate in your mind. You feel so bad for what happened to them, but then you think how very lucky you are that it didn’t happen to you.”

Her neighbor Frank Karcher’s house had burned to nothing. You couldn’t even tell where the doorway had been. Beautiful palm trees outside his home were left jet black. And it was hard for me not to think back to a similar scene in Laguna Beach, three years ago almost to the week.

On Oct. 27, 1993, I had stood on a hillside watching dozens of expensive Laguna homes in roaring flames. Almost everyone around kept saying, “So this is what the burning of Atlanta was like.” None of them had a point of reference from their own experience; they had to reach back in the history books to think of a comparison.

That night, and again on Monday, I thought of what a good friend of mine had told me before I’d even moved here: “When it comes to natural disasters, Orange County gets it all.”

The first time my wife and I ever came to Orange County, to visit friends, we had a hard time believing anyone lived here, let alone 2 million people. It was night out with a fog so dense and eerie we wondered what we were getting into. It was February 1979 and this happened to be one of the worst fogs the county had seen in years; local residents were smart enough to stay off the roads.

That’s when our friend told us: Orange County gets it all. When we moved here a few months later, we learned how true that was.

One of my first assignments was to cover massive mudslides in the Laguna Canyon area. I’ll always remember one beautiful home with a breathtaking view perched precariously on a slope, the earth underneath it simply missing from the ocean side of the house.

The people of this county have had to deal with floods, earthquakes, fires, storms and dangerously fierce winds. When the county’s bankruptcy came along, it was just one more disaster with which to cope.

When you work for a newspaper and there’s a natural calamity, everyone gets involved. So I got caught up in each disaster to come along. But nothing compared to that night in Laguna Beach. Reactions from the victims varied: Some had pain etched so deeply into their faces you wanted to reach out and hug them. Others were amazingly upbeat, relieved and happy they made it out alive. Rebuilding, in their mind, was just another challenge to be faced.

Because the anniversary of that fire was fast approaching, it was on the minds of most of us here in the newsroom when word reached us of Monday’s fires in the Lemon Heights area. And as I stood among the latest ruins, I vacillated just like Susan Jackson: You’re so sorry for what happened to these people; you’re so very glad it didn’t happen to your family.

Daniel Sheppard lives in a house off Redhill Avenue in Lemon Heights that he built himself, a magnificent, two-story stone mansion. Sheppard, who owns his own construction company, said he was waiting for an order to be delivered to his home Monday morning when he heard a loud pop on the hillside just above his house--a broken power line--right at 9 a.m. A few minutes later, he smelled smoke, and saw flames on the hill above him. He gathered a few workers who were landscaping his grounds and they took hoses and tried to control the flames they saw.

“The neighbor up the hill has a whole lot of wood piled up, and the fire hit that wood and started spreading,” Sheppard said. But instead of heading toward Sheppard’s stone home, it jumped the road to the two houses across from him, structures far more vulnerable to fire.

“At first we actually thought it looked like we could keep it under control,” he said. “But then we saw a huge ball of flames shooting out of an attic and there just wasn’t anything we could do to fight it.”

He had called the fire department when he first smelled the smoke right after 9 a.m. Sheppard said he checked his watch when the first house caught fire and it was 9:20. The first firetrucks, he said, did not show up for at least another 20 minutes.

“If they could have been just 15 minutes earlier, I really think they could have saved one house,” he said.

Sheppard said he and his wife, Loretta, moved in last December. He explained that they built on that site “because we always wanted a home with a great view.” He wanted the home in stone, he said, because he knew in a wooded area there was always the danger of fire. He just didn’t know it would come so soon.

Something else made a tremendous impression on me the night of the Laguna Beach fire. It was the night I discovered why I wanted to be a journalist.

I was in my mid-40s, had been at this business for 25 years and not at all unhappy at the time that I had a job that kept me in the office and usually got me home in time for dinner.

When the fire broke out I was assigned to take rewrite from our two reporters on the scene calling in notes. One of them was Gary Jarlson. Just a side note about Jarlson: The first day I came to work here in 1979, I was assigned a seat next to him. Just what we need in Southern California, Jarlson said, another hillbilly from Kentucky. Immediately I knew we’d be friends.

Jarlson was no longer a reporter; he was an editor who worked in the composing room late at night. But because he lived in Laguna Beach--and no one else at the time could get into the city--much of the early reporting fell on his shoulders.

As I took notes from him, I interjected: “Gary, isn’t all this right in the neighborhood where you live?”

He shot back: “Yeah, yeah, my house is gone. Let’s get back to the story.”

He tirelessly worked throughout the night covering those events as a reporter, not knowing what, if anything, at his own home had survived the fire. It turns out he lost almost everything.

I begged the assignment editor to let me go to Laguna Beach that night. Jarlson had really jarred my system. When there’s a natural calamity, that’s where we’re supposed to be.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com