Recalling the Day No Home Was Safe

The fire advanced at a ferocious pace, growing as it devoured the trees and shrubs of Laguna Canyon. It seemed that nothing would stop it short of the ocean itself.

Orange County had never encountered such a wildfire, exploding with fireballs and cloaking Laguna Beach in a sickening, hot cloud of ash and embers. Residents, awestruck by the sight, rushed home from work and from errands with their minds racing: Where is the family? Will a garden hose embolden us to stay? No, we’ve got to go. But where? How much time do we have? Clothes. Scrapbooks. Old income-tax returns. Mom’s jewelry. The oil paintings. Business files.

For too many, the memories are as fresh today as they were 10 years ago when fires ripped across Southern California but saved most of their wrath for Laguna Beach.

The blaze started, most likely by an arsonist, in Laguna Canyon between El Toro Road and the San Diego Freeway, just before noon on a Wednesday.

More than 300 firetrucks swarmed to Laguna. But it was a change in the weather that ultimately subdued the monster.

Entire neighborhoods -- 347 homes in all -- were destroyed: mobile homes at El Morro, million-dollar estates in Emerald Bay, rustic cottages in Canyon Acres and tract homes in the unpretentious, 30-year-old neighborhood of Mystic Hills.

In that subdivision of curving, romantically named streets and handsome ranch homes, the toll was stark. Sixteen of the 24 homes on Tahiti Avenue were destroyed. On Caribbean Way, 18 of the 19 homes were gone. On Skyline Drive, only one of the 47 homes survived.

All in about 45 minutes.

No one died in the fire. But as if reacting to death, homeowners dealt with their loss with denial, anger and, in time, acceptance.

Some took their insurance money and left, selling their lots to affluent newcomers who erected Mediterranean-like villas and sleek, modern mansions that -- for better or worse -- changed the flavor of the neighborhood. Others stayed, took stock and rebuilt. Some of the new homes are much bigger. Others are similar to those that were lost.

In the months after the fire, neighbors said they bonded as never before, supporting one another through the trauma of lives upended. Then, over time, a sense of normalcy -- even suburban anonymity -- returned and lives found their routine.

Following are the stories of a few Mystic Hills residents whose lives changed on Oct. 27, 1993.

*

Bob and Nancy West, Coral Drive

They were flying home from a three-week vacation in Italy. Approaching Los Angeles International Airport, they could see ominous plumes of smoke, the line of orange flames.

Maybe Camp Pendleton was on fire, they thought.

Once in their car, they learned the fire was in Laguna Beach. Their stomachs tightened; the drive home seemed interminable. As they pulled into town, the plumes were towering over them, turning day into a menacing dusk. They headed for Park Avenue and their Mystic Hills neighborhood. But they were turned back by a police roadblock and booked a room at Hotel Laguna.

They hunkered in front of a television set, waiting for news of what was unfolding in their hillside neighborhood just about a mile away.

The TV showed their neighborhood, the camera panning up the block. Three houses on their street were OK.

“We felt great,” Bob West said.

“And then they kept on going and they hit our lot and we could see everything was gone.

“All we could see was the chimney,” Nancy West said.

Today, 10 years later, they’d rather not talk about it.

“We don’t want to go back there,” Nancy said of the memories.

“We lost a lot of personal effects,” said Bob, an artist. “Photographs, pictures I brought back from my mother’s place in Pennsylvania that had been hanging on my grandfather’s living room wall. Things that you can never replace.”

Lost too were about 300 of his own oil paintings, mostly landscapes. He wouldn’t take up painting again for several years. “I just wasn’t in the mood,” he said.

The Wests had bought their 2,000-square-foot tract home in 1964 and decided to rebuild on the same lot. Laguna, they said, was too important to abandon, but starting over was bittersweet.

“You know how excited people are when you’re building a new house?” Nancy asks. “Well, we had to. We would have been perfectly satisfied with what we had.”

Their new house is a bit larger. More modern and brighter, with walls of windows opening onto the ocean.

And this house has an art studio.

*

Eivor and Jerry Cohen, Skyline Drive

Jerry Cohen had been playing tennis at a municipal court in the nearby Top of the World neighborhood, and Eivor, baking banana bread, had run to the grocery store, only barely aware that a fire had begun burning five miles away.

Leaving the store with her groceries, Eivor Cohen realized the situation was more ominous and rushed home. Jerry left the tennis court for home too.

Sooner than they could have imagined, the fire was almost upon them.

“It was like a tornado in the house,” Jerry said. “Fireballs were coming up the hill from the canyon.” After a futile attempt to protect the house with a garden hose, they fled.

Two days later, when they finally were allowed to drive back into their neighborhood, they encountered only ruins where their home had stood. Bicycles had melted, toilets exploded. Jerry, a mechanical engineer, opened a steel cabinet to retrieve files, unwittingly introducing oxygen to smoldering papers. “Flames shot out four feet,” he said.

And then he grew mad, as much at himself as at the fire.

Angry, he said, “for being so stupid, for wasting time. We had plenty of time to load up and get out of there but I was on the roof watering. It was an absolute waste of time. We could have gotten stuff out that was really valuable.”

They found a shovel and a hoe and the couple started sifting through the ashes, hoping to salvage something.

They found a coin collection. Eivor found a diamond.

And for hours at night, Jerry tossed and turned, asking himself the most basic question: “What am I going to do now?”

“I was thinking about the insurance and what kind of problem we’re going to have with them. I was thinking of my business. I had customers; how am I going to help them?”

The Cohens, of course, were not alone and the once-inactive homeowners association stirred with new urgency.

“After the fire it was a real community. It became a real homeowners association, a support group.”

There were weekly meetings to discuss contractors, insurance, cleanup.

“There were people much worse off than us,” he said. “Old people who really didn’t know what they were going to do.” The chance for neighbors to gather, advise and empathize “was an important part of recovery,” he said.

The old house looked mostly out onto the canyon, from where the flames had roared up. Sitting in their new home today, the Cohens’ view is mostly of the ocean.

*

Ed and Kit Drollinger, Caribbean Way

They were home together on the day of the fire, thinking the blaze wouldn’t reach them. But word spread that the flames had jumped Laguna Canyon Road and were headed toward Mystic Hills, and neighbors encouraged the Drollingers to flee.

Ed Drollinger, a retired salesman of electronic instruments and longtime president of the Mystic Park Neighborhood Assn., quickly started collecting years of paperwork, from his career and his community work.

“Don’t you think you should take some clothes?” his wife asked.

Kit Drollinger forced Spunky, their cat, into a carrier and put it in the car. Then she grabbed jewelry, left to her by her mother.

Two days later they returned to the devastation. Kit said she was numb. Shocked.

“We just walked around, picked up all the stuff on the ground. I saw some dishes my father had given me in the ‘60s,” but they were in pieces.

“My neighbor next door was crying like a baby,” Ed said.

The couple had bought the house 17 years earlier. Rebuilding would be a struggle, they said, but they wanted to remain in Laguna Beach. They set out to recreate their old home, with just a few alterations.

The ceiling is now vaulted. And Kit said she got something she had always wanted -- one big sink instead of two little ones.

*

Doris and To Bui, Tahiti Avenue

Anyone who has seen photos of the Laguna Beach fire has probably seen pictures of their home.

It was one that survived -- a white, three-level home surrounded by ash and barren concrete pads where their neighbors’ homes once stood.

To Bui, a structural engineer by training and a contractor by trade, had built the home almost single-handedly, with memories of fires his family lived through in his native Vietnam.

He wanted this home to withstand such fires, so in a neighborhood of wood shake roofs and wood-siding, he built his home of tile and stucco.

But it did more than withstand the flames. It was almost untouched, as if it had an invisible shell.

Maybe because as the couple and their four children fled ahead of the flames, they grabbed a statue of Buddha and rubbed its stomach.

“Please, Buddha, please save our house,” they prayed.

And the house was saved.

Seeing it for the first time after the fire, the couple was overcome. “Everything was like it was before,” said Doris Bui. “I started laughing, I started crying.”

The only damage was three windows broken from the heat, some smudges left from firefighters who had entered the home, and ants. “They were everywhere,” Doris said. Like humans, they sought refuge from the fire.

But their neighborhood was gone. The other homes, the birds of paradise, the tropical palms, everything she had loved about the place.

There were hurt feelings too. Neighbors sought advice from To about how to build fire-resistant homes, but none would actually hire him, and he was insulted.

“It took him years to move forward,” Doris said. “It was sad to see a loved one not happy, depressed.”

But To is moving forward. For the last two years, he has been building, again almost single-handedly, a new home twice the size, in a neighborhood about a half-mile away. They may sell the old one; they’re not sure.

They hope to move into the new home in about 10 months, and plan for their daughters to be married there.

The foundation of the new home rests on dozens of caissons, two feet in diameter and up to 30 feet deep. To said he is building his home to withstand not just fire, but a different kind of disaster -- earthquake.