Firefighters Return to Ground Zero

CALABASAS — Maybe if he and his men had arrived at the fire scene a minute earlier, Capt. Michael Johnson lamented Wednesday, things might have been different. Or if they hadn’t turned their backs to the flames for a moment to save a burning man.

Maybe then, the little fire believed to have been started by two loitering men at the top of the Topanga Canyon ridge wouldn’t have gotten away from Johnson and his crew from Station 69 and screamed down the hill toward the faraway sea.

But it did. Whipped by howling winds and eating up chaparral, the fire hopped Old Topanga Canyon Road and hopscotched down the hillsides in all directions.

And suddenly, a small blaze that firefighters for a moment thought they had put down instead turned into a conflagration.

“The fire went over us and around us. We couldn’t catch it,” Johnson said. “We were merely spectators.”

Witnesses told arson investigators Wednesday that they had seen two men near the fire’s flash point.

One said the men sped off in a blue Ford Ranger or similar vehicle after they realized he had seen them.

Arson had not been confirmed, but was suspected.

As the firestorm raged on elsewhere Wednesday, Johnson and his weary and grimy crew of Los Angeles County firefighters returned early in the morning to the awful little hilltop spot they now call Ground Zero, just below a pair of water tanks along a fire road on the Mount Calabasas ridge.

“It just took off,” said Johnson, surveying the road that on a luckier day might have stopped the fire. “It was too much fire.”

When firefighters had arrived minutes after the call came in at 10:45 a.m. Tuesday, Johnson and his men thought--at least some of them--that the fire could be contained.

The blaze was swirling about a small patch of scrub just below the twin water tanks.

And firefighters had already posted extra men and equipment in the area, bracing for the return of the Santa Ana winds that had bedeviled their colleagues a week before.

Fire crews were called to the scene by members of the local arson watch group, which in turn had been alerted by a resident with a two-way radio because his phone lines were down.

“When it first started, it was small,” recalls Robert Selman, 44, who lives just 100 feet from the water tanks. “Then I turned around and it was out of control.”

Selman stayed long enough to watch the first crew on the scene put down the flames that were roaring to within 10 feet of his house.

Then he fled with his wife and young son, and nearby neighbors did the same.

Within seconds, chaos spread as fast as the flames.

The fire trucks stationed on Old Topanga Canyon Road were running low on water--and waiting for help--when the flames began “kangarooing down the hill, this way and that,” fire company engineer Terry Sparks said.

Although it appeared the fire could be contained at first, some firefighters thought it would race off before they could get there to stop it.

Fire engine driver Art Moreno remembers riding up to the fire in silence.

“We knew that this time,” Moreno said, “Topanga would burn.”

Soon, the fire had breached the road, a demarcation firefighters hoped would contain it.

A second alarm was called, and then a third and a fourth.

Fire Capt. Joe Montoya’s company from nearby Agoura Hills was one of the first to arrive to back up Johnson’s crew. “Fire was everywhere,” and Johnson and his men were overwhelmed, Montoya said. “They almost had a handle on it, but they couldn’t be in two places at one time.”

Within 10 minutes of the start of the blaze, Deer Creek Ranch was on fire, just across Old Topanga Canyon Road and down the hill.

And one man, Duncan Gibbins, was found in a swimming pool, where he sought refuge after being caught in the fire.

The British screenwriter-director was in shock, crying out for the cat he had tried to rescue by dashing back into the flames. Smoke was pouring from his mouth, and the 41-year-old Gibbins was talking in the high-pitched squeal, a sign that his lungs were scorched, paramedic Jim Goodwin said. Gibbins died Wednesday night.

Another man, carpenter Ron Mass, 40, was seen running up a long dirt driveway toward the road. Burnt so badly, flesh was hanging from his limbs, Goodwin recalled. Mass was stopped, and treated by paramedics, and when firefighters found a spot for a helicopter to land, both were airlifted to the Sherman Oaks Hospital Burn Center.

A day later, as the sun was rising over the Santa Monica Mountains, the men from Station 69 returned to Ground Zero, as had some residents who snuck past police barriers and warily drove past to see if their homes had survived the night.

All was quiet, save for the chattering of a few helicopters in the distance and some birds heading back to charred nests. There were some jack rabbits, but most lay dead and burned along the many fire roads off Deer Creek Ranch.

As the motorists passed, they looked mournfully down the canyons and toward far-off flames. But for a few brief moments, the firefighters of Station 69 rested against their trucks, and looked in the other direction, uphill and to the east, up to where they first saw the fire.

The path of the blaze had left an ever-widening V-shaped imprint of blackened earth. “We felt very, very helpless,” Johnson recalled, shaking his head slowly. “We’re here to stop these things. And we prepare and prepare and prepare all year long. But it was all just too much.”

Investigators also returned to the area to look for clues, while sheriff’s deputies searched for looters. One deputy carried water to Gibbins’ house; his beloved cat was burned, and under the house, afraid to come out. Others looked around, and one whistled at the stark and smoking landscape.

“It looks like a bombing,” Deputy Ernest Bedoya said.

For the firefighters who returned, they were saddened but believed they were right to turn away from the flames, however briefly, to help Gibbins and Mass.

“You do what you can,” one of Johnson’s men said softly. “We’re only human.”