60 People Are Left Homeless in $1.5-Million Atwater Fire

About 60 people--most of them Mexican immigrants renting cramped apartments or houses--were turned out of their Atwater homes early Monday by a blaze that started in a neighboring apartment development and spread quickly to their homes, destroying almost everything they owned.

No one was injured in the fire that began about 11:55 p.m. Sunday and devastated a 24-unit complex under construction, three adjacent houses and at least five apartment units in three buildings in the 3000 block of Chapman Street. As many as 12 families, some of whom shared single- or double-bedroom dwellings, reported losing all of their furniture, possessions and savings to the blaze.

Damage was estimated at more than $1.5 million and the cause of the blaze was undetermined, a Fire Department spokesman said.

All the victims found temporary shelter Monday morning, mostly with friends or neighbors, authorities said. The Red Cross announced Monday afternoon that it would open a shelter for about 40 of the victims and provide food, clothes and some financial help.

But hours after the fire, many of the families paced around the wreckage and said they had little idea where they would stay.

“I don’t know where we’ll go. We don’t really have family here,” said a shaken Gloria Iniguez, who leaned against the doorway of her family’s ravaged one-bedroom apartment and surveyed the crumbling ceiling and soggy wreckage. “We lost everything.”

While Iniguez mourned in broken English the loss of pictures of her 1-year-old baby and two other children, her husband, Noe Fernandez, stood near a charred cabinet and grimaced over other property lost to the flames. Fernandez, a used car dealer, said he had $4,000 cash from his job and dozens of car titles and other important documents stored in the cabinet.

Los Angeles Fire Department officials said the blaze began in the apartment structure, made mostly of plywood with some steel girders. The fire, with flames reportedly up to 75 feet high, spread to the three houses and three apartment buildings that surrounded it, officials said.

About 60 people evacuated their homes after the fire began, authorities said. Some residents said they awoke when they smelled smoke or felt the heat, while others responded to urgent knocks on their doors and shouts by neighbors.

It took more than 100 firefighters and dozens of trucks and equipment about an hour to contain the blaze, which also gutted several cars.

Fire Department officials on Monday said an arson team had been dispatched to the scene, but the cause of the blaze had not been determined by Monday afternoon. Area residents, however, said the construction site was a popular playground for children and a convenient, unmonitored haven for late-night drug users.

“The kids are in here all the damn time, and there’s not much you can do,” said Bill Jewell, whose construction company was building the apartment complex for Great American Developers. The burned complex was Great American’s fourth development in progress on that block, Jewell said.

Residents of Chapman Street, a narrow corridor framed on the north by a tall wall enclosing Forest Lawn Memorial Park, said the blaze was merely the latest in a series of troubles.

“This area has high gang activity--graffiti, shootings and drug dealing,” said Ivan Solares, a Guatemalan immigrant whose apartment window was shattered by the heat. “Kids race their cars down the street. That and the drug selling makes it a freeway.”

On Monday, the victims of Chapman Street wandered through the wreckage, shaking their heads in disbelief and searching--largely in vain--for property that had survived the flames or smoke.

“My mother had just bought a new TV, a new bed, a stereo about two weeks ago,” said Carmen Herrera, 15, whose five-member family rented one of the homes gutted by the blaze. “Now everything’s gone. Our landlord said we could stay in another apartment. But it doesn’t have anything--no lights, no nothing.”