Forging Bonds Amid Ruin

Abruptly, residents here have been divided into two camps--the haves and have-nots.

Some still own homes with ruffled curtains, lush green lawns, bougainvillea vines.

Others watched their dream houses reduced to ashen rubble when Monday’s wildfires seared a haphazard path through this quiet neighborhood.

Still, in the tragedy’s wake, stories circulate of neighbors helping neighbors, as if the fire has forged a more urgent sense of community here.

There’s the story of the DeBerrys of Deborah Drive, left homeless when fire whipped through their neat home.

But within hours of the disaster, David DeBerry was approached by a former neighbor around the corner whom he barely knew.

The Burtons, who had recently moved out of their house and put it up for sale, asked if the DeBerrys would want to stay temporarily at the still-furnished two-bedroom home on Rebecca Lane.

The offer meant David and Cindy DeBerry and their children, ages 4, 6 and 10, could stay in the neighborhood instead of undergoing more trauma and relocating to a sterile hotel.

“It was a godsend for us,” said DeBerry, assistant city attorney in Orange. “The house is destroyed, but the kids wake up and they’re in the same neighborhood.”

Gary Burton said his family’s home went on the market only 10 days before, and that its wood-shingle roof was damaged slightly in the fire. It seemed only logical to invite the DeBerrys to live in the vacant house. So he went to his real estate agent and “sort of put a hold on the sale,” said Burton, newly named Orange County assistant chief executive officer.

On Wednesday, as residents literally sifted through ashes and continued the grim cleanup, they passed along other stories of heroism and goodwill.

They recalled how 14-year-old Cory Hunter clambered up a ladder Monday to help douse a roof fire at Burton’s house.

“I’m very proud of him. He just got up there, didn’t hesitate and was ready to go,” said his mother, Lori Hunter of Rebecca Lane.

Just down the street that day, the Hoags moved fast when they saw flames start to engulf their neighbor’s palm tree and bamboo thicket.

Jack Hoag, 75, grabbed his hose and aimed it at the bamboo, while his wife, Jayne Alice Hoag, 69, searched out the neighbor’s hose and doused the burning palm.

“If it weren’t for them, there could have been a lot more fires,” said their grateful neighbor, Linda Thauer.

Throughout Lemon Heights on Wednesday, signs of normalcy were returning.

A postal truck cruised down Afton Lane, the driver handing out forms to burned-out residents so they could have their mail put on hold.

And around a ruined home’s charred foundation, two workers constructed a new irrigation system to channel water to the surviving vegetation.

But for those who lost their homes, the nightmare continues.

Lorraine Fairbairn, 44, stood outside her burned home recounting to a friend how she rushed inside during the fire to rescue her family’s treasures.

She reached under the bed and pulled out a watercolor painting of her two boys, totally forgetting that the family silver lay beside it.

Her bed would burn right to the floor, and the silver was tarnished in the fierce heat, some pieces melded together.

Still, she had saved the painting.

Gary Marshall and his wife also lost treasures in the fire, in which they were caught only by happenstance--they were staying with relatives in Lemon Heights while they closed on a new house in Rancho Santa Margarita.

On Monday, only an hour after Marshall did the final walk-through on his home-to-be, his boss would tell him, “You’d better get home. The house you’re staying at is on fire.”

In a cruel irony, the Marshalls had stored their valuables at the house instead of a storage unit. It seemed safer, Gary Marshall said.

For some, the specter of burned-out homes brought back memories of other fires, other losses.

Sixteen years before David DeBerry’s house was engulfed in flames, his mother lost her home to fire in San Bernardino. And when her son called this week with news of the fire, all the horror came flooding back.

“I went ballistic. I just started crying,” said Jenny Overton, 62, who traveled to Lemon Heights on Wednesday to help her son.

She brought brand-new stuffed animals for her grandchildren, and she helped sift through the rubble.

Then she visited the borrowed house where the DeBerrys are staying, looking approvingly around the living room where her 4-year-old grandson sat absorbed in a video about trains.

“Fire makes you see what’s important,” Overton said.

“This looks like a home.”