Firestorms Rage in Malibu, La Costa and Orange County

Firestorms fueled by furious winds blasted capriciously across Southern California on Monday, destroying more than 50 homes in northern San Diego County and 10 in Orange County, while firefighters and residents fought fiercely overnight to save homes as flames roared to the Pacific Ocean in Malibu.

The widespread destruction conjured up the harrowing images of fires that ravaged the region just three years ago.

As with the tumultuous firestorms of 1993, emergency workers found themselves simultaneously fighting fires along several broad fronts:

* In the northern San Diego County community of La Costa in the city of Carlsbad, at least 50 homes were destroyed in a fire that charred 4,500 acres. The fire, whose cause was unknown, broke out about 2 p.m. in the Elfin Forest and Harmony Grove areas. More than 1,000 people were forced to evacuate.

* In the Orange County community of Lemon Heights and surrounding areas, 10 homes were destroyed and 16 were damaged by a fire believed to have been caused by a downed power line. Three firefighters suffered minor injuries before the fire, which caused about $3.5 million in damage, was declared out by late afternoon.

* In Los Angeles County, fire raced from Calabasas to the Pacific Ocean, breaching Pacific Coast Highway in three places by 9:30 p.m. More than 12,000 acres were burned and hundreds of residents were forced out of their homes. Despite flames that dramatically filled the skies, only two homes and several sheds had been destroyed by late evening. The cause of the fire had not been determined.

The blazes--striking almost three years to the day after the devastating firestorms of 1993--drew hundreds of firefighters to the arid Southern California hills, along with helicopters and water-dropping airplanes.

“We saw these huge flames,” said John Asaro, a painter from the northern San Diego County enclave of La Costa, who might have spoken for many in the Southland. “The smoke was so thick you could barely see. The ashes were falling everywhere. We took our paintings and our cats and nothing else. We hope we have a house to come back to.”

San Diego County

As midnight approached, it appeared that the last of the day’s fires would prove to be the most damaging.

In La Costa, residents trying to escape the flames ran down the street to their cars with paintings and jewelry boxes under their arms. Cadillacs, Mercedes and other luxury cars, parked in driveways of million-dollar homes, were melted down to the rims.

Phil Bostrom lost one of the nine homes burned along a section of Esfera Street and marveled at the fire’s random nature.

“It was really strange,” Bostrom said. “There was no explaining it. The fire took some houses but not others. Firefighters told me they couldn’t stop it. There was nothing they could do.”

Along both sides of Cadencia Street, east of the La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, the firestorm swept up the hillside and burned some homes to their concrete slabs, while neighboring houses remained unscathed.

As the fire spread on several fronts within a five-mile radius, utility workers labored furiously to turn off gas lines as flames hissed from pipes at house foundations. Their efforts were lit by the flickering lights of emergency vehicles and a backdrop of glowing orange flames.

The fire gave emergency crews little chance to relax, dying out suddenly in one area only to leap forth elsewhere, like the Torrey Pines mesa. That small flare-up was quickly brought under control, though, before endangering the rare Torrey pines that grow in the area and the nearby biomedical facilities, including the renowned Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation.

“We’ve lived here 18 years and never have seen anything like this,” said Peter Rosenberg. “One of my neighbors was hysterical. Fire moved so quickly and came over the ridge. We only had a few minutes to leave.”

Rosenberg said he saw five homes in his neighborhood on fire. His wife Ronni said, “We grabbed all our pictures and our dogs and our tennis trophies as quick as we could.”

By 8 p.m. stiff winds were pushing the fire toward Encinitas, San Marcos and Lake San Marcos. One man was taken to UC San Diego Medical Center with burns over 45% of his body, said nursing supervisor Tom Banaszak. He was brought in about 5 p.m. with inhalation burns and burns on his feet, legs, arms and back.

Orange County

The day of anxiety, frantic packing and desperate firefighting began in Lemon Heights in Orange County.

Officials believe that the fire began near Oakridge School on Mardick Road about 9 a.m., when a palm tree snapped a power line. The fire destroyed one house and then hopscotched to several other streets before firefighters used helicopters, planes and trucks loaded with water to quell the blaze.

“I feel like I’m in a movie, a really bad movie,” said Gail Neuman, a 43-year-old mother of four as she stood outside her smoldering home. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

As with the 1993 fires, Monday’s blazes did some of the most serious damage in woodsy, upscale communities such as Lemon Heights. The community near the city of Tustin is an enclave of homes valued at up to $1 million.

“It’s a slow burn,” said Sherman Fairbairn, as he watched his house go up in smoke. “I wish it would go quick. It’s just punishing.”

Residents used everything at their disposal--from garden hoses, buckets, shovels, trash cans and ice chests to their hands in desperately flinging water on their homes and the flames. Many seemed to have learned from the region’s last bout with wildfire--rigging swimming pool pumps to be prepared to apply even more water to hot spots. But in a cruel irony, the pumps were rendered useless by the power outage that blanketed the area.

Other precautions were more successful, though.

Kathy Klitzner, 34, and her husband Erik installed a new fire retardant roof three weeks ago because of fire concerns.

A medical supply worker in Temecula in Riverside County, Klitzner rushed home from work when she got an emergency call from her son’s school. When her husband arrived with two friends, they got on the roof and began hosing down the house. The roof held, as did the rest of the house.

“I’m going to call my roofer,” Klitzner said. “And go kiss him.”

The fire that rushed into the neighborhood caught many residents by surprise. Some were at work, others were in bed. By the time many residents recognized the danger, it was too late.

“I didn’t try to save my furs or my jewelry or any of my husband’s things,” said Maryam Boyce, whose house was leveled on Stockbridge Road. “All I had time to do was get my photo albums, my pictures, that’s it.”

Neuman, a nurse, had just put the cats out when she smelled smoke. She rousted her children from bed, dialed 911 and took her 8-year-old to a neighbor’s house two streets away.

“By the time I got back, my house was on fire,” Neuman said. “I started grabbing baby pictures.”

She had planned for just such a day. With two parents who were heavy smokers, Neuman had learned to store her coveted baby pictures and children’s report cards in paper sacks in the closet, ready to go. Still, she barely made it out in time. The only thing left standing was a pine tree.

Afterward, with her house reduced to embers, Neuman said she couldn’t believe what she was living through.

“This isn’t supposed to happen to you,” she said. “It’s supposed to happen to your neighbors.”

In fact, it did. The house just across from Neuman’s was gutted, its interior walls black and peeling away. Yet just inside, a floor-to-ceiling grandfather clock still stood, seemingly unscathed.

Lemon Heights was last hit by a major fire in 1967, losing 21 houses, said Tustin Mayor Tracy Worley. “You never forget that feeling,” Worley said. “It’s a feeling of being out of control. Like it’s happening so fast. It’s very scary.”

Los Angeles County

In Malibu, the situation remained tenuous late into the night, with one fact of nature working in its favor. As Malibu city spokeswoman Sara Maurice said: “Malibu has a natural, built-in firebreak. Unfortunately, it’s the Pacific Ocean.”

As flames leaped at times hundreds of feet, they skipped and dodged mostly between populated enclaves like Monte Nido, Malibu Bowl and Pepperdine University.

The only homes that were reported destroyed were one along Mulholland Highway, near the fire’s origin in Calabasas, and another at Soka University, near Mulholland Highway and Las Virgenes Road.

As dusk fell and the fading light revealed the jack-o-lantern-like glow of scattered embers, Lloyd Smith, 56, stood shaking his head beside the ruins of his former family home in Solstice Canyon.

“I’ve never been so frustrated in my life,” he said after describing the helpless feeling of watching his home being consumed by flames. “I was shouting obscenities. That house had been in my family since the 1940s. I felt absolutely helpless.”

The couple who bought the house from Smith’s father weren’t home when it was destroyed.

Smith, who lives up the road from the old house, managed to save his own residence by dousing the flames with water and even a bottle of apple cider.

“Every year I got nervous when the Santa Anas start blowing,” he said. “I got knots in my stomach. . . . I guess it’s the price you pay for living in paradise.’

Los Angeles County Fire Department officials were concerned about 50-mph wind gusts, expected to continue or even increase during the night. They were unable to predict an end to the conflagration.

“We wanted to get it while it was small,” County Fire Capt. Steve Valenzuela said about the fire that started in Calabasas. “But Mother Nature is in control of this fire.”

A massive deployment of at least 1,500 firefighters, 13 helicopters and water-dropping airplanes, including many units that had already fought the Orange County blaze earlier in the day, were helpless against the high winds and 5% humidity. They chose, instead, to let brush burn while stacking their defenses around a series of mountain enclaves in Malibu and Corral canyons.

Hundreds of homeowners in the Monte Nido community and Malibu Bowl, in Corral Canyon, were asked to leave their homes, and 120 teenage inmates at Camp David Gonzales, a county probation camp on Las Virgenes Road, were bused to other probation camps. Three schools were closed--A.E. Wright Middle School, and Calmont and Viewpoint, two private schools. Pepperdine University continued regular day classes, but canceled night sessions and opened its emergency operations center.

In Monte Nido residents described the frantic rush to safety.

“It was crazy. There were accidents on the road. It was horrible. It was a madhouse,” said Veryan MacKay, a student at Calabasas High School and a Monte Nido resident. “The people were watching the fire, not the road.”

The onrushing flames, and the continuous television reports that accompanied them, fueled memories of the 1993 firestorms. In that series of 26 separate fires from Malibu to Orange County--many of which began Oct. 27--three people died, 159 were injured, and more than 1,000 structures were lost across 202,000 devastated acres.

“It’s like a volcano just blew up behind my house,” said record producer David Tickle, surveying the charred hillsides around his home off Mulholland Highway. “Now it looks like the back of the moon.”

Monday’s blaze prompted feelings of deja vu, as it also started in the Calabasas area before rushing toward Malibu and the coast. Once again, mountain roads like Malibu Canyon and Corral Canyon were clogged with fleeing residents, as was the Pacific Coast Highway, which was closed to nonresidents from Topanga Canyon to Ventura County.

Actress Shirley MacLaine, after packing her car on Old Malibu Road in preparation for an evacuation, said: “I think they ought to change the area code and make it 911.”

At 3:45 p.m., with the fire a quarter of a mile away, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies drove through the Malibu Bowl enclave. “The fire is imminent,” they announced. “Please evacuate.”

Mark Dantoni, 42, his wife Elizabeth and their 8-year-old son David frantically filled the family Volvo station wagon and a pickup truck.

“We got the pictures,” Mark Dantoni said, panting with exertion. “We got the computers. We got the TV. We’ve got art. This is the second time we had to do this. We did it in ’93.”

As the flames erupted on a ridge on the other side of Corral Canyon, David said, “The flames are right there.” The family had located its pet beagle, but couldn’t find the cat when Dantoni decided it was too dangerous to continue the search.

“That’s it,” Dantoni said as the flames leapfrogged down the hills. “That’s it. We’ve got to go now. . . . We’ve got to get out before we get cut off.”

The sun at this point had been reduced to a pink disk, and the blaze roared like rushing water as it tore across the hills.

Like many others who faced the flames, Tickle believed that he had learned valuable lessons from the 1993 fires. He credited brush clearance with stopping the fire at his property.

Proper clearance saved many homes in the area, said Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Jim Gandee, whose company, based in Norwalk, began the day fighting the fire in Orange County before they were summoned to the Calabasas blaze.

At Pepperdine University, some horse stables were lost but the stucco and red-tile-roof structures that make up the campus appeared to be spared, with firefighters at one point holding off flames that skipped right to the edge of a faculty housing complex.

Alyssa Thomas, 27, a law student at the university, was studying at the campus law library when she looked out the window to see bright orange flames jumping over a ridge. Minutes later, about 4:30 p.m., the library went dark. Outside there was pandemonium: students running from their dorms, computers in hand.

Malibu residents seemed variously bemused, terrified, inspired and exhausted by their latest brush with disaster.

“We’ve been blessed. Three years ago, that fire really scared me,” said actress Amy Ash-Zimmermann, who stood on Pacific Coast Highway with a home video camera taping the fire and a row of fire engines from Santa Barbara County. Asked if she had learned anything from that experience, she answered. “Learned anything? Obviously not. I’m still here.”

* CONFRONTING TERROR: Flames invade quiet hillside streets, destroying homes. A3

* PLAN PUT TO TEST: Fires present first test for protection plan adopted in 1993. A3

Contributing to fire coverage were Times staff writers Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Blankstein, Bettina Boxall, Steve Byrd, Henry Chu, Miles Corwin, Sam Enriquez, Dexter Filkins, Abigail Goldman, John Gonzalez, Tom Gorman, Michael Granberry, Chris Kraul, Matt Lait, Robert J. Lopez, Solomon Moore, Peter Noah, Tina Nguyen, Anne-Marie O’Connor, Bob Pool, James Rainey, Cecilia Rasmussen, H.G. Reza, Lisa Richardson, Carla Rivera, Kimberly Sanchez, Eric Slater, Hector Tobar, Julie Tamaki and Nona Yates and special correspondents John Canalis, Mimi Ko Cruz, Matea Gold, Hope Hamashige, Bonnie Hayes, Miguel Helft, Jill Leovy and Sylvia Oliande.

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1993 Blazes

Almost three years ago, a savage firestorm driven by powerful Santa Ana winds raged from Malibu to Altadena to Laguna Beach, burning about 200,000 acres across five Southern California counties in less than two weeks.

The sweep of fires was actually 17 separate blazes, the first of which ignited when a power line fell near Escondido on a blustery October morning, followed that same day by fires in Thousand Oaks, Chatsworth and the hills of Altadena. At the height of the storm, flames roared from Calabasas and Malibu to Laguna, flinging golf-ball-size embers into the brush and toward oceanfront homes.

The worst blazes, in Malibu and Laguna Beach, were ignited by arsonists. More than 10,000 firefighters battled the wildfires, which left three dead and 159 injured, burned more than 1,000 homes and businesses and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage.

* CONFRONTING TERROR: Flames invade quiet hillside streets, destroying homes. A3

* PLAN PUT TO TEST: Fires present first test for protection plan adopted in 1993. A3

* IN VENTURA COUNTY: Strong winds knock down tree limbs and power lines. (Ventura County Edition, B1