Opinion - News Analysis

A community loses 500 homes to California’s fires

David Grieb had just returned home three days earlier from a cross-country drive to be at the bedside of his dying mother when the order came for him to evacuate the Oakridge Park modular home development because of an approaching wildfire. Several weeks earlier, Mr. Grieb had been roused by a similar warning and he said he spent hours cramming as many of his belongings as he could into his car before fleeing.

When the alarm was raised on Friday, Mr. Grieb said he pretty much threw a few items into his car and drove off, leaving behind most of his possessions, including those he had only days before hauled from his late mother’s house in Philadelphia. “I just lost all the stuff I carted 3,000 miles,” he said.

Firefighters began to gain the upper hand with the blaze that destroyed the development in the Sylmar area of northern Los Angeles. Another fire in Montecito, a hillside enclave 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles where 111 homes have been destroyed since Thursday, was 75 per cent contained.

But a third wildfire burned along the Riverside-Orange County border. Battalion Chief Kris Concepcion of the Orange County Fire Authority said that firefighters were gaining control of the fire and that most of the 25,000 evacuated people were allowed to return to their neighbourhoods. A total of 168 homes, including 50 apartment units, were damaged or destroyed by the fire, which has burned 10,500 acres, Concepcion said. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared states of emergency in the Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Barbara counties.

The Sylmar fire was about 30 per cent contained, firefighters said, but any gains by firefighters meant little to the hundreds of families of Oakridge Park. Officials say the 500 homes that were destroyed make it one of the worst property losses from fire in the history of Los Angeles.

On Sunday, Mr. Grieb, 46, clustered with other Oakridge Park residents on a street corner, hoping to get into the development to see what was left. Residents were not allowed into the development. No remains were found in the initial sweep. Officials at the coroner’s office said their satellite office in the Sylmar area burned on Friday but workers were able to save the cars and computers. Mr. Grieb, too, was waiting to see whether there was anything to salvage.

“I want to get in, say goodbye and dig through a little,” said Mr. Grieb, a Hollywood teamster who works on the ABC television show “Dirty Sexy Money.” The only belongings he has left, he said, were in his car. “I don’t want to be more than 5 foot from the stuff I’ve got left.” Even without getting back to his home, Mr. Grieb was fairly certain that all is lost. He and his neighbours have seen aerial photos of the devastated development on the news and, in stark black and white, a chalkboard at an evacuation centre lists the homes, by lot numbers, that were spared. On the list are 124 out of 600 homes, and Mr. Grieb’s home is not one of them.

For the park’s residents, it was as if an entire village had vanished in the flames. “I used to refer to it as our little Mayberry,” said Tracey Burns, 47. She and her partner, Wendy Dannenberg, 46, lived in Oakridge Park for 15 years. Ms Burns’ parents lived nearby in a part of the complex that was spared by the fire.

“It was just a very nice community. Some place safe with a lot to offer, from the pool to the tennis courts to bingo on Tuesday nights. It was a very nice way of living. People waved not because they had to, but because they wanted to,” Ms Burns said. “We always took offence to people calling it a trailer park because you had a yard, a porch, a garage, a garden. It was a home, not a trailer.” Like many Oakridge Park residents, Barbara and John Harris said they were wiped out. “We lost everything,” Harris said. “How do you start over when you’re 66?”

Before this weekend, most Oakridge Park residents might have argued that there were few better deals to be had in the Los Angeles area. Living was affordable, and despite its sprawl, the development was a close-knit community of thrifty families and retirees nestled in the arid foothills of the Angeles National Forest. In the evenings, with the air made blustery by Santa Ana winds, many residents took walks, stopping occasionally to watch deer, coyotes and raccoons that wandered out of the adjacent wilderness. Other tenants played bingo or billiards at the clubhouse, played tennis, swam in the pool or soaked in the indoor whirlpool. Many of Oakridge Park’s residents are elderly or live on fixed incomes and have only a gossamer financial safety net of savings and fire insurance and very few possessions.

Firefighters said their efforts to douse the fire were hindered by failing water pressure. They also complained that the development had only one exit and entrance, which made it difficult to move fire crews in as residents tried to move out.

And some of the very things that made the community so appealing to many of its residents also made it vulnerable. The wood, aluminium siding and tar roofs of the modular homes provided ready fuel for the fire. The dry winds howling out of the canyons helped spread the flames.

At a news conference near the development, Mr. Schwarzenegger said that the devastation had convinced him that mobile homes should be required to include more fire-resistant materials. “The fire ran through the mobile homes so fast,” he said. “Like matches, they caught fire, one right after the other.” Los Angeles County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said he would push for better safety regulations for mobile home parks. “Somehow there’s an assumption that because these are prefabricated homes confined to a small area, they are somehow not in the category as other bigger homes,” he said. “But this was a community. These homes, however, were flammable and packed in like sardines on top of each other.” — New York Times News Service

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