Lull in Winds Aids Crews as Blazes Near Containment

Taking advantage of a lull in Southern California’s lethal Santa Ana winds, firefighters Wednesday gained near-complete containment of wildfires in Malibu and San Diego County, but remained vigilant against dangerous weather conditions expected to return this weekend.

Weather forecasters predicted winds gusting up to 100 mph below some canyons and mountain passes beginning Saturday, lasting through Monday.

As the series of fires that consumed 37,000 acres and destroyed more than 100 homes continued to smolder, President Clinton declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, making the region eligible for federal disaster relief.

Fire officials said they had the Malibu blaze 63% contained by 5 p.m. Wednesday and expected to make more progress throughout the evening.

In San Diego County, officials claimed similar success against the devastating firestorm near Carlsbad, the most disastrous in county history. Officials said they hoped to have the blaze, which destroyed 76 homes, controlled by today.

“We have started a general demobilization,” Los Angeles County Fire Dept. Capt. Steve Valenzuela announced at the Malibu command post. “This is the turning point of this fire. We are now in the mop-up stage.”

At its peak, 4,049 men and women were assigned to fight the Malibu blaze, which began Monday in Calabasas. By Wednesday afternoon, several hundred firefighters had been sent home.

Sheriff’s deputies, meanwhile, closed off a section of Corral Canyon as investigators combed the site where quick-moving flames trapped and injured six firefighters, including Bill Jensen, 51, of the Glendale Fire Department. Jensen clung to life at a Sherman Oaks burn center with burns over 70% of his body.

On the streets of Malibu, the mood was one of returning normality.

Pacific Coast Highway, closed since Monday afternoon, was reopened to through traffic Wednesday afternoon. Immigrant day laborers returned to their usual hiring site near Malibu City Hall, though there seemed to be few offers of work. Nearby, a group of firefighters relaxed in T-shirts and sunglasses, liberated from their heavy yellow coats for the first time in three days.

Although the air assault on the Malibu blaze continued Wednesday, much of the firefighting effort shifted to the ground as crews with shovels and axes worked alongside bulldozers to put out the remaining embers and hot spots, including the last major trouble area, a remote mountain site near Castro Peak.

Throughout the day, crews were also dispatched to fight small flare-ups on the edges of the burned area, which encompassed 14,950 acres. Officials said they were using infrared camera equipment on helicopters to search for hot spots that were not readily visible to the naked eye.

Among those on mopping-up duty on the ground was Capt. Keith Hall of the Ontario Fire Department, part of a five-engine strike team that spent Wednesday inspecting the blackened brush around the Pepperdine University campus.

Hall and his crew had been assigned to Pepperdine on the fire’s first day, working from 4 p.m. to midnight to keep the flames away from faculty and staff housing along Baxter Drive.

“We’re trying to make sure everything is cold, make sure we don’t have anything that is going to flare up tonight,” he said. “We’re literally going in using water when we need to, putting water on stumps that are still burning.”

Respite in Malibu

For the first time since Monday the skies were free of clouds of billowing smoke and ash, and the seaside community began to show hints of the natural beauty that is its principal lure.

“It won’t be long before we get this over with,” said Novato firefighter Jim Jensen, squinting up at a blue sky.

“You work a good many houses, and you get real tired, but you try and get out and take a rest break whenever you can,” said Glendale firefighter Ron Gulli, who had been dispatched to Malibu on Monday.

With the fire nearing containment, Gulli had taken time to call his parents, who were worried about him because another group of Glendale firefighters had been caught and injured by the fire Tuesday.

Having survived their own close encounter with the firestorm, employees at the Malibu Beach RV Park began taking reservations again Wednesday afternoon.

The park had been evacuated Monday and all but 10 or 12 of the park’s 50 mobile homes had been able to move out of harm’s way by the time the flames came to within yards of the park.

On Wednesday, employee Becky Ball returned to see just how close the fire came to destroying the park: Two canvas tents were eaten up by the flames, the only damage.

“It’s very nerve-racking,” Ball said. “It just sent chills up my body. No matter how you think you’re going to feel when you do see it, it gives you a new perspective on life.”

Still, most Malibu residents were keeping a close eye on the weather, knowing that the safety of the community can turn as quickly as the direction of the wind.

Fire officials received hourly reports from the U.S. Weather Service and used a complex system of monitors to calculate the “burn index,” a sort of Richter scale of fire prevention based on humidity, wind speed and other factors.

At the fire command center in Malibu, county fire department meteorologists prepared maps--as they have every day since the fire started--that illustrated the projected movement of the blaze over two-hour intervals.

“The Santa Ana winds tend to throw a monkey wrench into the system now and then, because they’re so irregular and unpredictable,” said Martin Gubrud, a forester with the department. “But so far, we’ve done pretty good.”

The meteorologists draw their maps with the aid of computers, using data compiled by field observers scattered throughout the areas where the fire is still burning.

“They take relative humidity, temperature, wind speed and wind direction readings that are site-specific,” Gubrud said. “Those readings are extremely important because the local topography can affect what a fire will do in a particular area.”

More general data is taken from weather stations in brush areas around the county. It includes “fuel stick” readings, which measure the changing moisture content of dead brush and trees. Fuel stick readings range between 1 and 30, with anything below 5 considered “extremely flammable,” Gubrud said. The readings in Malibu this week have ranged between 2 and 3.

“You breathe wrong on that stuff, and it will start to burn,” Gubrud said.

Relative humidity is a factor in the fuel readings, Gubrud said. If the relative humidity is above 30%, vegetation absorbs moisture from the air. If it’s below 30%, the air draws moisture from the vegetation.

When the Malibu fire broke out Monday, the relative humidity there was less than 10%. That figure crept slowly upward to 14% on Monday night and 25% on Tuesday night. The first readings comfortably above 30% were not expected until shortly before dawn today.

Power Line Blamed

Investigators traced the origin of the Malibu fire to an arcing power line that ignited brush next to the eastbound lanes of U.S. 101 in Calabasas.

In San Diego County, officials assessing the Carlsbad fire said it could have been worse if not for precautionary measures taken in recent years, such as brush-clearance and mutual-aid agreements between fire departments.

“Without our preparation,” said Carlsbad Councilwoman Ann Kulchin, “I think the fire would have burned all the way to the sea.”

Fire officials said they hope to have the fire in the northern part of the county that destroyed 60 homes in La Costa and 16 in nearby communities controlled by tonight. A fire that destroyed six homes near the Rincon Indian Reservation was considered contained after burning 1,800 acres.

Carlsbad, like other communities in northern San Diego County, has taken steps in recent years to guard against brush fires: an ordinance requiring fire-resistant roofs on new homes, an aggressive brush clearance program and strategies for mutual aid from other fire departments.

Similar measures were credited with limiting damage in Malibu.

The Carlsbad fire broke out around 2 p.m. Monday about eight miles east of La Costa. It spread south and west but it was not until around 5:30 p.m. that homes in the La Costa section of Carlsbad began to burn.

Officials say three factors came together to create catastrophe: The wind picked up speed, water tankers had to be grounded because of darkness and the fire reached a ridge just east of La Costa.

“When a fire is being pushed by winds at 45 mph, you can’t lay down hose fast enough to get water on it,” said Tom Kelly, deputy fire chief with the California Department of Forestry.

The result, according to Michael Burner, deputy fire chief in San Diego, was “a fire that was hurling fireballs at homes a quarter-mile away.” Most of the La Costa homes were demolished within 90 minutes to two hours of the fire cresting the ridge.

When the fire jumped Rancho Santa Fe Road into Box Canyon, which runs down the middle of La Costa, “I knew we’d get creamed,” said state battalion chief Chuck Howell.

Once established in the canyon, the fire ran toward the ocean and swept furiously up the canyon ridges. Flames licked 50 feet and higher up the canyon wall.

Brian Watson, the Carlsbad Fire Department division chief, said the overall fire was so widespread, and moving so quickly in different directions--toward San Marcos on the north, La Costa to the west and Encinitas and Olivenhain to the southwest--that fire strategists did not know where to best position their relatively few resources.

The winds, he said, proved the wild card. “Every wind condition I’ve ever read about in the fire texts, I saw in an hour,” he said. Gusts were so strong, he said, he saw the back end of a car moved 20 feet by the wind.

A First for Carlsbad

La Costa was jammed Wednesday with curious sightseers, with some filming the devastation through car windows with video cameras. Parked along the streets were news media, insurance agents, industrial cleaning servicemen and contractors who put out signs noting that they specialize in insurance repairs.

In the 44 years since it has been an incorporated city, Carlsbad had never had a home burn down due to a brush fire, until La Costa. “What you learn [from a big fire] is how helpless you are,” said Kulchin. “It’s unreal.”

As with many fires, probably the main reason that homes burned were the wood-shake roofs. Most of the homes were built before the city imposed new standards.

“We build buildings to burn and put them in the middle of the most flammable material available [wild brush] and then we wonder why they burn,” said Rancho Santa Fe Fire Chief Erwin Willis, head of the county fire chiefs association.

Meanwhile, in the Otay Mountains near the Mexican border, there was no prediction of containment for a blaze that has burned 14,000 acres of brushland. No structural damage has been reported.

Times staff writers Hector Tobar, Carla Rivera, Jeff Leeds, Tony Perry, Abigail Goldman and Jeffrey L. Rabin contributed to this story.