Ordeal by Fire Storm

Up in the Laguna Mountains, the flames were barely visible at first. Franklin Greene, 59, a court reporter who lives in a hillside house near the town of Jamul, east of San Diego, watched the distant flickerings with little concern, then took some relatives out to dinner. Just before 6 the next morning, a group of hippies from a commune farther down the mountain roused Greene and warned him to flee.

Greene was still thinking in terms of creeping brushfires. He packed his car with some clothes and paintings. His visitors drove the car down to Jamul. After 8 a.m., smoke turned the sky to midnight. In gathering panic, Greene walked, then ran down the road toward the town, dropping the large pendulum clock that he meant to save. "I fell down," Greene remembers. "I had a flashlight, but I still couldn't see a thing. Sparks were falling all around me. I got lost in the chaparral. Finally I found a water pipe and followed it down."

Immoderate Disasters. At 9, the fire storm rushed down the mountain, not feeding on brush but moving almost preternaturally five feet off the ground and stretching 40 feet in the air. At the crest above Greene's house it took on new oxygen from the valley's updraft. Truck Driver Andrew Board, whose house just down the road was almost miraculously spared, recalls: "It came with a great rumbling, deafening roar. I never knew they roared like that." Riding hot, dry winds of up to 70 m.p.h., the fire blasted down on Greene's $70,000 house, vaporized the commune. James Parnell, 82, one of the original settlers of the valley, lost his house and 27 of his 28 Maltese cats. With their driveway blocked by flames, Bud and Blossom Sniveley jounced across the fields in their car just ahead of the fire that turned their farm to cinders. Much of Jamul itself was incinerated.

All over Southern California fires burned for over a week. They charred 525,000 acres of brushland, destroyed 400 homes and 300 other buildings, and left eleven dead and 350 injured. In a state prone to immoderate disasters of flooding, earthquake and fire, it was the worst conflagration in history. Figuring that each acre of chaparral brush contains up to 30 tons of highly combustible fuel, the heat energy generated by the fires amounted to that of 12,500 Hiroshima bombs.

Natural conditions conspired at combustion, with occasional assists from man. There had been no significant rain for 200 days, humidity was down to 5%, and temperatures climbed over 100DEG. Hot, seasonal Santa Ana winds swept in from the desert to the northeast. To make it worse, heavy rains two winters ago had nourished an unusually heavy undergrowth, now dust-dry. Police reported that there were some instances of arson as well.

The first ignition occurred in the Malibu area above Los Angeles, apparently the result of careless trash burning. Sparked high in Las Virgenes Canyon, the flames spread across 50 acres in five minutes and were soon rushing toward the sea, consuming the $100,000 houses of movie stars and businessmen. Another fire broke out to the north near Newhall, in the dry foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains. The two blazes later joined at the Ventura Freeway. Among the casualties were beach houses owned by Tuesday Weld and Angela Lansbury, Dale Robertson's spread, part of Spahn's Movie Ranch, where Charles Manson's tribe used to live, and some acreage belonging to Governor Ronald Reagan.

Floods Next. The overriding demands of disaster forged some improbable alliances. Longhairs joined policemen and firemen in fighting the fires at Malibu. But there were also hippies who staggered into the sheriff's station after working the fire lines and said that they could not get eye drops to ease their smoke irritation. Sheriffs arrested one longhaired man in front of his endangered house, where he had gone to rescue his mother. He was booked for reckless driving and resisting arrest, and was jailed for two days before charges were dismissed.

When the fires were spent, people returned to the blackened foundations of their houses. In Chatsworth, Mrs. Ray Klein shoveled through the ashes of what was once her bedroom, sifting until she came up triumphantly with a diamond ring. Many of those who had been burned out were determined to build again on the same sites, though they know that by a perversity of nature the fires, having burned off so much ground cover, were likely to bring on a disaster of floods.

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