Blaze chars Westside home

COSTA MESA -- A Westside family won’t return to its Wallace Street

home any time soon, after a fire gutted the one-bedroom apartment

Wednesday night.

Four of the seven family members living in the apartment were home

at the time of the 10:21 p.m. fire; they were quickly evacuated after

firefighters arrived and saw flames shooting out of the windows of

the apartment in the 2000 block of Wallace.

One of the family members was sleeping when the stucco apartment

caught fire, Costa Mesa Fire Capt. Herb Ohde said.

“The people in [the apartment] lost everything upstairs,” Ohde

said. “There were no smoke detectors.”

The blackened exterior walls of the apartment on Thursday told the

tale of the blaze, as neighborhood children played outside the

building. Black swaths of burned stucco showed on both sides of the

10-apartment complex.

After the occupants were evacuated from the building, firefighters

went to work on the blaze, soaking the building in a cascade of water

from their hoses. On Thursday, the water-soaked interior stairway in

the burned unit provided a route from the largely non-burned lower

floor and torched upper floor.

Shards of broken glass and burned wood lay in the alley behind the

apartment and in the communal area outside the front doorway.

American Red Cross workers swept in Wednesday night to help the

displaced family, providing clothes and other assistance, Ohde said.

The fire did not damage the two units on each side of the burned

apartment much. They did suffer smoke damage, though, Ohde said.

They were evacuated because their electric power was on the same

electrical circuit and could not be safely turned on.

One Costa Mesa firefighter suffered minor burns on his foot, after

his leg fell through the second-story floor of the burned unit. He

was treated at the scene and released. More than 40 firefighters

initially responded to the fire to battle the blaze.

In addition to firefighters from Costa Mesa, units from Newport

Beach, Huntington Beach and several other cities helped extinguish

the flames.

Officials are still trying to determine the cause of the blaze

Ohde said.

* PAUL CLINTON covers the environment and politics. He may be

reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail at paul.clinton@-latimes.com.