Emerald fire stokes memories of 1993 Laguna Beach blaze that displaced hundreds
With a swift and coordinated response by city officials and first responders, a brush fire that broke out Thursday in north Laguna Beach was met with full force and brought largely under control with no threat to property or lives.
But for longtime Laguna Beach residents, the smell of smoke and the red glow of flames at the ridgeline above the Emerald Bay and Irvine Cove communities conjured the specter of a much more disastrous conflagration nearly three decades earlier that threatened to wipe the city off the map.
Unlike Thursday’s Emerald fire — which scorched approximately 145 acres in the span of 12 hours thanks, in part, to a speedy response and favorable Santa Ana wind patterns — the blaze that broke out the morning of Oct. 27, 1993, would not stop until it had burned 16,684 acres and ravaged 366 homes, resulting in $528 million in property loss.
Laguna Beach Mayor Sue Kempf said Thursday she was approached by several longtime residents who lived through the earlier Laguna Beach fire and experienced a kind of trauma response.
“I had four or five people come up to me today, saying it reminded them of the ’93 fire and that they were really scared,” Kempf said. “One staff member, when I was walking out of City Hall, she said, ‘Sue, I was in fourth grade during those fires, and I can’t even smell smoke anymore without getting afraid.’”
Laguna Beach imperiled
The first signs of fire in 1993 were first reported at around 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 27, as flames were spotted in the vicinity of the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park off Laguna Canyon Road, according to the Los Angeles Times. In a matter of minutes, embers from the blaze reportedly jumped a firebreak and spread into Laguna Beach and Emerald Bay.
By 12:15 p.m., police officers in patrol cars were shouting through loudspeakers to warn nearby residents of the need to evacuate, The Times reported. Some 24,000 residents citywide were ordered or advised to seek refuge. Vehicles packed with pets and valuables were gridlocked on Pacific Coast Highway as multimillion-dollar homes were left to burn.
Laguna Beach Mayor Pro Tem Bob Whalen recalled sitting at the desk of his Newport Center law office when he first heard the news from a co-worker.
“Someone broke into my office and said, ‘Laguna Beach is on fire!’” he said Thursday. “I saw a huge plume of smoke going out over the ocean — I literally dropped my pen and started to go home.”
Braving his way past roadblocks, Whalen saw fire issuing forth from over the ridge “like flames coming out of a jet engine.” His three young children were attending El Morro Elementary School at the time, a campus that was evacuated during Thursday’s Emerald fire.
“My wife had the [minivan] packed to the gills,” he said. “El Morro School was right in the path of the fire. We didn’t know what was going to happen with the kids.”
As the fire crept perilously close to the city’s downtown area, locals climbed to rooftops to watch the devastation, The Times reported. Rabbits and deer could be seen fleeing the burning countryside as boulders loosened from vegetation set ablaze crashed into canyons below.
Amide a wholesale evacuation, then-Mayor Lida Lenney told a Times reporter as she hastily packed her belongings into a car, “The city is going up in flames. God, what next?”
Southern California on fire
The local blaze was one of 14 wildfires that broke out almost simultaneously across Southern California within the span of about a week in late October that year, exhausting firefighter resources as it spread across 173,000 acres in six counties.
The business of the U.S. Senate was interrupted by reports of the Southern California inferno, The Times reported. “There is a potential catastrophe in the making in California,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein commented from the Capitol at the time.
Laguna Beach may have suffered the worst, as hot, dry Santa Ana winds shifted south toward City Hall.
“That was a devastating fire,” Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy recounted Thursday in a news conference on the Emerald fire. “We didn’t have time to get up ahead of steam on it — air resources were scarce, there were other fires burning. We didn’t have coordination that we do now.
“I think one of the key differences today is this is the only fire in the state,” he continued. “‘We need more’ is simply a phone call. We will get more right away.”
Lessons learned, tragedy averted
By the time the Laguna Beach fire was extinguished on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1993, hundreds of Laguna Beach residents displaced from their homes were left to sift through ash for precious valuables and mementoes. Utility crews worked around the clock to restore lost power as residents learned to navigate state and federal assistance.
“This will be one of the legends of our city and how we responded to it,” then-Councilman Robert F. Gentry said. “We probably have lost some institutions in out community … but we have not lost a Lagunan, and that overshadows all the property devastation to me.”
It would take years for some to recoup their losses. But in the decades that followed, and as more wildfires and natural disasters threatened public safety, Laguna Beach city officials began to build their defenses. An Emergency & Disaster Preparedness Committee — formed in 2011 following a massive flood — today advises the City Council on how to respond in a crisis.
Kempf served as the first chair of the committee and would later partner with Whalen in a council-convened group responsible for drafting a wildfire mitigation plan that would ultimately improve the city’s fire response. They traveled to fire-ravaged Paradise and Malibu to learn from those disasters.
Many of the systems and ideas put forth in the document likely played a role in successfully combating the Emerald fire, current Emergency & Disaster Preparedness Committee Chair Matt Lawson said Thursday, citing the use of new public alert systems and increased enrollment in emergency response trainings.
“We were very fortunate today, but it’s another wake-up call that underscores our vulnerability,” Lawson said. “What happened in Paradise can happen here — we just have to be very vigilant and proactive.”
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