Fireplace Ember Blamed for Blaze That Hit 4 Homes

A fireplace ember that smoldered on wood shingles and ignited into wind-whipped flames was tentatively blamed by authorities Friday for the devastating fire in the View Park section of Southwest Los Angeles.

The Thursday night blaze consumed one luxurious home, heavily damaged two others and scorched a fourth before more than 100 firefighters extinguished it 90 minutes later. There were no injuries.

The winds that fanned the fire on Thursday night began to ease Friday, with gusts no higher than 25 m.p.h. reported in most areas of the Southland.

‘Looked Like a Flame-Thrower’

Thursday night’s wind gusts approached 50 m.p.h., laying flames virtually sideways, bridging from one home to the next, witnesses said.

“It looked like a flame-thrower, going from the eaves of the first house to the second,” said Dr. Lloyd Hunter, who lives across the street from the four homes in the 4000 block of Kenway Avenue. “I’m amazed it didn’t spread any further. It was like an inferno, and the rapidity with which it spread was just amazing. I didn’t think our own home was going to make it.”

Structure damage in the View Park fire was estimated Friday at $1.5 million, with another $200,000 loss in contents, said Battalion Chief Gordon Pearson of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Some residents along the street, which provides commanding views from Marina del Rey to downtown Los Angeles, said Friday they experienced low water pressure in the hours before the fire and believed that it may have hampered the fire-fighting effort. But Pearson said on Friday there were no unusual problems.

“The water pressure in the area is designed to fight a single-structure residential fire,” Pearson said. “When the first battalion chief on this fire was pulling up, he asked for an increase in water pressure. And we had our own pumpers there, anyway.

“The fire system was taxed to its maximum--the most it could give us--and there was congestion on the street because of its width and the amount of fire equipment responding,” Pearson said.

“But the bottom line is, there was enough water, we kept the fire from spreading and the fire loss was kept to an absolute minimum,” he said. “One-and-a-half-million dollars doesn’t sound like a minimum loss, but it’s a very expensive area. I’m real proud of what our firemen did.”

Pearson also discounted remarks from neighbors who believed that firefighters seemed undirected in the first minutes of the battle while the fire quickly jumped from the first home to a second and third.

When the first firefighters arrive, “they don’t look at where the fire is, but where they think the fire will be in the next couple of minutes and where they can best shut the fire off,” Pearson said. “You don’t want to prematurely throw a defense line up where you’re going to lose it. You want to throw up your defense where you can stop the fire from spreading.”

In Thursday night’s case, the fire already had spread to a second home and was moving toward a third when the first units arrived, seven minutes after they received their first call about the blaze, Pearson said.

Altogether, 50 firefighting units were at the scene from Los Angeles County and city stations as well as Inglewood, including three helicopters that hovered over the scene to watch for spot fires on other shingle rooftops in the neighborhood.

Pearson said investigators were not sure from which fireplace the ember originated, but they were checking chimneys to see if all were equipped with requisite spark arresters.

The View Park neighborhood is about a mile east of the Baldwin Hills, where a disastrous fire destroyed 48 homes three years ago.

Thursday night’s winds caused relatively few problems elsewhere in the region. Department of Water and Power spokeswoman Dorothy Jensen said:

“We got through this windstorm in very good shape, and we attribute it to our tree trimming program. We’ve been alert to this for the past couple of years, and now it’s paying off.”

Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this story.