House Fire Causes $75,000 in Losses

Squatting on a curb across the street, the 10-year-old Johnson twins watched frantically as huge flames wrapped around their house and stabbed through the windows of the living room, where minutes earlier they had been watching “Grease” with two friends who had slept over.

The boys, Riley and Travis, had managed with their parents and 13-year-old sister to rescue the family’s dog and one of two cats after the blaze broke out about 10 a.m. Sunday.

But as dozens of firefighters swarmed the 4,200-square-foot house on Adams Circle, spraying jets of water at the walls and ripping layers of the roof away, the boys worried that a second cat, ironically named Embers, wouldn’t make it out.

“They were crying, all upset . . . they could hardly take it anymore,” said Kim Johnson, the boys’ mother. “And then here comes this fireman out of the house with their soaking wet kitty. It made everything OK again, just like that.”

The fire came an hour after a house in the 5000 block of Siesta Lane in Yorba Linda caught fire. As with the Villa Park house, gusty winds and dry conditions prompted Orange County Fire Authority officials to dispatch more than a dozen units to Yorba Linda. Both homes were nearly destroyed. Both had shake roofs, which are more vulnerable to fire.

“Where you have wood-shake roofs, you usually have more established neighborhoods, which means more vegetation around the homes,” Battalion Chief John Demonaco said. “It can be a bad mix in terms of fire.”

The Yorba Linda fire, investigators said, probably was caused by an electric short in the attic.

Fire officials said the blaze at the Johnson house began with a fire in the fireplace that the twins’ father, Craig Johnson, agreed “may have gotten out of hand.” The accidental fire caused about $75,000 damage to the home and its contents, but firefighters were able to save belongings worth thousands more, officials said.

The blaze took fewer than 40 minutes to contain, but firefighters patrolled the neighborhood for two hours, looking for hopscotching sparks and flames, officials said.

“We didn’t want another Lemon Heights on our hands,” said Fire Chief Charles “Chip” Prather, referring to the Tustin-area neighborhood where 10 homes were destroyed by fire and an additional 23 damaged during a wind storm last fall.

“In conditions like these we have to be aggressive,” he said.

Craig Johnson, whose family has lived in the Villa Park home for the last five years, said when the twins alerted him to the smoke, he ordered everyone outside and tried to use a garden hose on the ceiling. A next-door neighbor also dragged over a hose to help, he said.

“By then, it was just too much, though,” Johnson said.