From the Ashes : Porter Ranch Residents Say Last Year’s Blaze Led to a Sense of Community

A year after a wind-whipped fire charged out of the Santa Susana Mountains and into a sleeping neighborhood in Porter Ranch, the physical scars are healing.

The blackened slopes north of Granada Hills have given way to brown winter brush. On Beaufait Avenue, where the fire exacted its greatest toll, nearly all of the 36 damaged homes have been rebuilt or repaired and most families have returned.

Construction crews and trucks still arrive each work day and the last houses to rise from their ashes are just a few months from completion.

But the emotional damage from the blaze has been harder to repair. The victims of the Porter Ranch fire say they find solace in one another, in a neighborhood closeness forged in the shared experience of the disaster.

Ann Friedman last week surveyed the new house built on the spot where her old house had stood for 18 years. But in the new one--bigger, with high ceilings, polished wood floors and electrical outlets exactly where she and her husband wanted them--there are few personal belongings. They were all lost in the fire. So, to Friedman, the house doesn’t feel much like home.

“It just doesn’t feel right,” she said. “I don’t know when it will. We lost almost a whole lifetime of belongings. Maybe it will take another lifetime until we feel at home.”

Despite that uncertainty, Friedman and other residents on Beaufait Avenue look back on the past year and can easily find a positive note in that the fire left them with something they didn’t have before: a “real” neighborhood, a place where superficial waves and hellos have been replaced with actual bonds of friendship among residents.

“We have a sense of place now,” said Eric Struthoff, who lost his home to the fire and is still waiting for rebuilding to be completed. “It was a fire that brought it on, unfortunately, but there is a sense of belonging now. The fire has given us a spirit of community.”

It was that neighborhood closeness and spirit that was toasted Saturday at a community dinner organized to mark the first anniversary of the fire. About 75 Beaufait Avenue residents--casual acquaintances before, close friends now--met at a local restaurant to begin the second year after the fire together. The media, which have closely chronicled the neighborhood’s destruction and rebuilding, were not invited.

“Just residents,” said Friedman. “We want to start getting some of our anonymity back. We want normal lives.”

The residents’ anonymity was lost at dawn on Dec. 9, 1988, when Santa Ana winds up to 70 m.p.h. pushed flames over the hills northeast of the neighborhood.

Along the way, the fire of unknown origin scorched 3,200 acres--including nearly all of 714-acre O’Melveny Park--and then destroyed 15 houses and damaged 25 others. All but four of the houses were on two blocks of Beaufait Avenue, an exclusive neighborhood of $400,000 homes built above Aliso Canyon in the 1970s.

Since the fire, the natural environment and the residents have rebounded from the destruction--though slowly.

Don Mullally, on-site manager and senior gardener at O’Melveny Park, said the park may still be years away from a complete return to its pre-fire level of natural chaparral, sagebrush and other vegetation. But already the hills are covered with new brush and, last spring, wild flowers bloomed along park slopes.

Except for charred stumps of some larger shrubs that still poke through the new ground cover, there are few visible reminders of the fire. “If you look at the ground in some parts of the area, you can’t even tell there was a fire,” Mullally said.

But the cover can be misleading. Drought conditions this year have hindered regrowth of chaparral and shrubs in the park and the slopes of the surrounding Santa Susana Mountains, Mullally said. Wildlife populations also remain down since the fire, he added.

“It is coming back very slowly,” he said of the environmental recovery. “It takes time.”

Time has moved painfully slowly for many of the families displaced by the fire on Beaufait Avenue. Many have had to deal at once with insurance adjusters, home designers, builders and other contractors, and the recurring presence of the local news media. It was hard, many said, to keep up the semblance of normal life.

“It was a nightmare,” Friedman said. “We have always been in control of our own lives. But for the past year we have lost that control.”

There have been construction setbacks and delays while families rented homes and waited to return to their neighborhood. It was eight months before the first family moved back in. Only one family decided not to return. And now only five families still wait for construction on their homes to be completed.

“We are on our fourth insurance adjuster now,” said Brian Oliver, whose home is still being rebuilt. “But once you are through with the insurance company, then it’s on to the rebuilding and other kinds of stress. It doesn’t seem to end.

“We hope to be able to move back in the 29th,” he added. “But I’m sure it will be pushed back to January. There are always delays.”

Work on Eric and Linda Struthoff’s home is two to three months away from completion. They live in a rented home nearby and make almost daily visits to the construction site to check the progress. After the foundation slab was poured and the first framework went up, they brought chairs with them one evening and sat in what would one day be their den. “It made us feel more at home than where we are living now,” Linda Struthoff said.

It was out of the shared uncertainty of the future that bonds were formed among the residents on Beaufait. In the past year, there have been monthly brunches at residents’ homes that were undamaged by the fire. Neighbors have traded advice ranging from dealing with insurance adjusters to renting furniture.

“It was a frightening time for everybody,” Linda Struthoff said. “Some lost a lot. Some lost everything. Some just lost a tree. But everyone was thrown into this situation without any choice. Nobody had a clue to what to do at first. But the whole neighborhood pulled together.”

The neighbors believe the closeness will last long after the physical scars of the fire are gone.

Linda Pogacnik, a resident whose home was not damaged, helped organize neighborhood get-togethers. She and her husband, Hank, were considering moving from the neighborhood before the fire struck. Since then, they have decided against the move because of the neighborhood unity.

“Most of us did not know each other before the fire,” she said. “Now we are so close. We finally started meeting after 18 years.”

But even with the support of friends and neighbors, some residents are finding it difficult to return to the lives they enjoyed before the fire.

“There has been terrible stress,” said Oliver. “The mental adjustments, the dealing with the hassles, have been the hardest to take. It has been like a year without a home. We have a rented house with rented furniture but that’s not a home. We never put up pictures on the walls. We never unpacked the boxes of what few belongings we salvaged after the fire.

“It’s been like living out of a suitcase. It gets depressing.”

Those who have already rebuilt their homes or are waiting for construction to be completed said the decision to return to the neighborhood came easily, despite the delays and the prospect that a quirk of nature could bring another devastating fire at any time.

“I figure that fires like this come about every 20 years,” Oliver said. “So I think we’ll have a lot of good years before it happens again.”

“We have always loved the canyon and the hills,” added Linda Struthoff. “We know it could happen again but we want to come back. This is our home.”

Still, the dreadful memory of the fire and the fear that came with it has brought changes.

Last month, just a few days after Ann Friedman, her husband and two sons moved into their rebuilt home, a brush fire broke out in the hills above Sylmar. Friedman got the word from a neighbor who called. She then ran across the street and up the stairs of an empty house still being rebuilt. From the top floor, she could see across Aliso Canyon and spotted the smoke above Sylmar.

Friedman ran back to her home and began gathering up legal documents, important papers and photographs--things she did not have the time to save when the fire struck last December. This time she was ready to evacuate. But she need not have bothered. The fire never came close.

“It was weird,” she said. “I started freaking out. It was like, ‘here we go again.’ I ran around and got ready and the fire was probably 10 miles away.”