A Fiery Tale of Two Cities

By Ed Magnuson

In Los Angeles, the thick brush had been baked by temperatures above 100 degrees and swept by winds of 25 m.p.h. Suddenly, huge sections of vegetation were ablaze. According to witnesses, a man and a woman had jumped out of a white car and ignited the city's worst fire in 24 years. In San Diego, 120 miles to the south, some of the canyon brush had grown 12 ft. high and turned tinder-dry in the record heat. It too caught fire, starting the most serious residential blaze in the city's history. Investigators said it was almost certainly a case of arson.

Only last month officials had told residents of both the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles and the Normal Heights neighborhood of San Diego to cut back the dense growth. Too few responded. In the Los Angeles inferno, three people were found dead, 52 houses were destroyed, and the property loss was estimated at $16 million. No one died in the San Diego fire, but 64 homes were burned out and the damage reached at least $8.5 million.

In both cities, the flames started in lowlands and raced up steep hills to devour homes on the high ground, many valued at $200,000 or more. Baldwin Hills is an affluent, predominantly black neighborhood, sometimes called "the black Beverly Hills." Its houses are mainly sprawling stucco structures or split-level residences less than 35 years old. When the flames came, they fed voraciously off the wood-shingled, bone-dry roofs. Fireballs danced from rooftop to rooftop, driven by the winds and creating fire-storm drafts of their own.

Robert Allen, 54, and Mary Street, 76, were caught behind the locked doors and barred windows of the home they shared on Don Carlos Drive. "I could hear her hollering," said Neighbor Tyrone Tyler. "She had to be on fire." But no one could get into the house in time to save Street or her housemate. Near by, Marie Gladden, 62, filled a bathtub and jumped in to avoid the flames, but her body was found in the rubble of the house.

In Normal Heights, perched above San Diego's Mission Valley canyon, relatively new $250,000 Spanish-style residences with courtyards and swimming & pools often sit next to 60-year-old wooden bungalows and duplexes that initially cost as little as $10,000. The flames that leaped out of the valley and slashed through the overgrown chaparral made few distinctions when they reached the canyon rim. Abraham Nasatir, 80, a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University and an expert on California lore, watched the fire consume some 500,000 historical papers he had collected. He was working on a nearly finished history of the British in California, a manuscript that had occupied him for 16 years. "I put it down," said Nasatir, "and got out with only the clothes on my back." His consolation was that much of his latest book had been stored in a computer.

Each resident had his own priority on what to try to save. "I got my watch, my Levi's and my dog and ran," said one young man in the neighborhood. He complained that spectators who had come to watch the fire had parked their cars in front of his house, blocking any chance for him to save his Jeep or his parents' Volkswagen Rabbit. "We lost our cars because of those looky- looks," he said bitterly. Almost everyone involved, however, directed the most anger at the unknown arsonists. Said one Los Angeles fireman: "It's terrorism."

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Los Angeles