Wild Like the Wind

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Al Miller has come back for the cat. The flames are only a few feet away. They look like something alive -- a platoon of flames, no, a battalion, marching across the brush toward the house Miller has lived in for five years in the El Morro Beach trailer park on the outskirts of Laguna Beach, California. His wife evacuated their trailer hours earlier, but when Miller heard the cat was here, he returned, hiking two miles when the police forced him to get out of his car. Now he can see the fire heading for his house, and not a fire fighter in sight. "It's gonna go," he mutters. His eyes are on the ground, dejected, but his hair dances in the fierce wind, and shadows flicker across his face. Suddenly he spies the cat -- a black beauty named, of all things, Santa Ana Winds -- and stuffs her in a small cage. The animal is frightened, moaning. Miller is not much better. He begins to cry. "I don't know what to do now," he says to a reporter. "Can you give me a ride back to my car?"

The reporter gives him a lift. Sitting on the side of the road when they arrive is Gary Pattengill, in some sort of shock. BOOOM! The fire from the hills is devouring the trailer homes one by one, and each time it hits a propane-fuel tank, a tremendous explosion sends flame and shrapnel into the air. "That's incredible," says Pattengill, 53, a recently laid-off sales manager, raising an eyebrow. He too was stopped at the roadblock, and stayed, mesmerized by the destruction. BOOOM! Finally, a piece of shrapnel lands a few yards from Pattengill. "I think it's time to get out of here," he tells the reporter. "Can you get through to Laguna Beach? I heard from my wife that the high school near our house is burning."

Southern California can be seen as a huge fire trap. If it were a building, it would fail inspection. Every year for five months virtually no rain falls. And every year from mid-September to November the weather system overhead jerks into reverse -- instead of blowing from the Pacific landward, it blows westward, from Utah to the sea. The winds superheat in the Mojave Desert. Then, in hundreds of canyons leading coastward from the mountains, they can accelerate up to 75 m.p.h. If California is lucky, the Santa Anas, as they are called, merely annoy, ushering in what author Joan Didion has called "the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread . . ." If the state is unlucky, a spark, man-made or natural, will strike the canyon vegetation, thick and green in the damp months but now dried to tinder. The spiky brown chaparral brush will ignite like old Christmas trees, and a canyon will become a fire corridor through which flames roar faster than a man can run, burning at temperatures high enough to melt metal, billowing to start yet more fires $ and driving walls of flame to the ocean's lip. And if California is especially unlucky, this will occur in more than one canyon at once.

Until last Tuesday morning, 1993 had seemed a lucky year. November, with its providential rains, was near. And while in an average year fires consume 130,051 acres statewide, this year they had burned less than half that: 52,151. Certainly, the danger was not yet past -- temperatures on Tuesday were close to the 90s and the humidity was a sagebrush-shriveling 7.5% -- but there was reason to hope that Southern California, which certainly has enough other problems, had got off easy this time.

The first flame was reported at 1:19 Tuesday afternoon, off the 16th tee of a golf course in Thousand Oaks, north of Malibu. Authorities suspect arson; in any case, the fire moved through the canyons in classic fashion, licking the resort community's border and eventually destroying 35 homes on 35,000 sparsely populated acres. Then early the next morning, 60 miles east, it seems a homeless Chinese immigrant named Andres Huang lit a campfire to warm himself at the edge of the Angeles National Forest. An ember set off brush, and Eaton Canyon was awash in waves of flame. By noon, they charred 4,000 acres and immolated hundreds of houses in the mountainside suburb of Altadena, sending families fleeing for their lives. Frustrated, endangered fire fighters, working with little or no water pressure, began bulldozing to fill up their tankers at swimming pools.

And suddenly, it was as if both man and nature were possessed throughout Southern California. A copycat arsonist is suspected of igniting a flame near Irvine in Orange County. Downed power wires set off the chaparral in Yucaipa and Cahuilla. Unknown causes started conflagrations in Riverside County and outside San Diego. By nightfall on Wednesday, it was clear that the region was being visited by another of its many afflictions, this one nearly biblical in scope. Within two days, 100 fires raged through the state, 13 of them major. Flames shot 70 ft. in the air and made 50-ft. leaps across canyons and roads. Palm trees exploded; $1 million homes seemed to combust spontaneously. At the beach, black smoke hung over the surf, and in downtown Los Angeles a steady "snow" of flake-size ash fell. Elsewhere the embers glowed red and started new blazes. In many areas, day became night as soot obscured the sun, while a permanent "sunset," the orange glow of not-so-distant flames, eerily lit the horizon.

About 6,000 fire fighters scurried around the state, using every method from pumper trucks to air-dropped flame retardant to 100-gal. buckets slung under helicopters and dunked in the Pacific for refills. But they could not stop the flames while the ill winds blew. Before the week was out, the 1993 acreage devoured by fire would jump by 187,000; President Clinton would declare six California counties federal disaster areas; and California Governor Pete Wilson would say, "It's pretty heartbreaking to look down from a helicopter and see these little orange squares glowing in the blackness of the night -- because you know that's somebody's home." The smoke was visible to astronauts 172 miles above in the space shuttle Columbia.

With infernos raging over 150 miles, from L.A.'s northern exurbs to the Mexican border, there was no typical experience. Fires threatened the bedroom communities of Simi Valley and Chatsworth; they reached deep into Altadena, only eight miles from central L.A., and scorched the northern San Diego countryside. But their most surreal and spectacular foray was into Laguna Beach. A pristine, smog-free enclave bordered by cliffs and water, the 24,800- resident paradise for surfers, artists and environmentalists, is, along with the adjacent community of Emerald Bay, home to some of the richer people on the Pacific Rim. It was here that the Irvine fire, traveling at 20 m.p.h., finally arrived, forcing the evacuation of the northern half of the town and wreaking some of the week's most stunning destruction.

By Wednesday night, the road to Gary Pattengill's house in Laguna Beach looks like something out of a Balkan war zone. The Pacific Coast Highway is wreathed in billows of ebony smoke. "My God!" Pattengill exhales, watching flames engulf a nearby luxury residence that had once boasted a killer view of the Pacific. Along the highway stand some of the Laguna Beach refugees. They have packed all the belongings they could salvage and are now stranded -- in their Mercedes-Benz and Cherokees.

Pattengill hears that a house a few doors down is ablaze, but his split- level on Wendt Terrace is still untouched. A bowl of apples and bananas sits spotless on a kitchen counter. Unfortunately, like many homes in a town proud of its rustic flavor, Pattengill's is made of wood. Within minutes, his tennis shoes can be heard trudging the roof, accompanied by a slight hiss of water. Then he comes down again. "There's hardly any water pressure," he laments, a fact that has been hampering official fire fighters all day. Outside on his patio, an ember alights on a flower and incinerates it. The phone rings. It's his wife. "Yeah," he says. "I have it under control right now, but I'm in trouble. O.K. . . . I'll call you back." He fills a bucket in his basement and heads back to the roof.

On the street outside, Ralph Lucero passes by, wet T shirt in hand to use as a mask against the smoke. The 35-year-old general contractor has just come from saving a stranger's house. "I saw this wall of flames," he explains, "and I saw no one doing anything. I ran toward it, and then this 25-year- old guy started coming over and said, 'Hey, dude, you need some help?' And about five other guys came over and started helping too." He gazes through the haze and flames at another building, still standing. "That belongs to a friend of mine. It's worth more than a million dollars. Have you ever been to Laguna? It's one of the most exclusive areas to live in."

On Temple Hills Drive, Lois Aldrin, wife of Gemini and Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, is dressed in a smart lounge outfit and brown sandals. Their house in Emerald Bay was evacuated at 2 p.m. "Emerald Bay has its own fire department, and I thought surely they would stop it," she says. Aldrin has no way to know whether she was right. She had time to grab only one item other than a billfold. "See, this is what I took," she says, opening up a shirt box from Neiman Marcus. Inside there are miniature flags, first-day stamp covers, letters and a few items stuffed in envelopes. "These are the things that Buzz took to the moon," she explains. "Everything else we have is replaceable, but not these."

By Wednesday night, it has become obvious that California builds foolishly but evacuates well. The toll in buildings destroyed or damaged is approaching 700. The projected cost: at least $550 million. The numbers suggest that the state has not learned all the lessons of its previous great fire, in Oakland in 1991. After that terrible conflagration destroyed nearly 3,000 homes, state legislation was passed forbidding construction in high-risk zones with certain flammable materials, such as wooden shingles, and requiring a 35-ft. brush- free perimeter around each structure. But enforcement was left to local authorities.

The Oakland fire killed 25 people. Through skill and luck, this outbreak was different. Police in Laguna Beach avoided traffic jams through a "cascading" system of evacuation in stages, and made sure to route people down the safest roads, rather than the shortest ones. The communities threatened this time were smaller than Oakland, the logistics easier. Thus by the end of the week, although the fires had made 25,000 Californians homeless and injured 84, they seemed not to have claimed a single life. "By God," sighs Laguna Beach Police Captain Bill Cavenaugh, "we didn't lose anybody."

Night has come to Laguna Beach, and with it, cool, wet breezes from the sea. Although more Santa Anas are predicted and many of the state's fires continue to rage, this particular furnace has been banked. That is small solace to the groups of people, who, at 1 a.m., are already dodging police blockades to sift through the ashes and weep. A nighttime wanderer seeks out Skyline Drive -- once a noble address -- and finds a row of unconnected stone chimneys, naked and alone as tombstones and lit by the bluish flames of broken gas mains.

But past the husks of homes on the Pacific Coast Highway, down a little farther, life resumes. On Wendt Terrace, the only thing burning now is a lamp in the living room of Gary Pattengill's home. The house is safe; the master is home. The garden hose, vessel of hope and defender of one slice of the American Dream, lies quietly on the roof.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Altadena and Patrick E. Cole and Elaine Lafferty/Laguna Beach