Hellbent Blaze Laid Waste to Firefighters’ Best Plans : Tactics: Crews knew the winds were coming. They knew when the fire started. But as flames devoured hills, all they could do was watch.

They were probably better prepared than ever before. And firefighters certainly had plenty of warning that the dreaded Santa Ana winds were on their way.

Yet the conflagration that began in Calabasas and raced across the Santa Monica Mountains to the Pacific Ocean in Malibu in only hours seemed unstoppable.

With all their training and expertise, firefighters might as well have been trying to control a raging flood.

“The fire was just seeking its own course,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman. “(It) was basically going where it wanted to go.”

That was true, officials said, almost from the moment the fire started Tuesday morning in Calabasas, possibly by arsonists.

Los Angeles County firefighters had extra personnel and equipment standing by, bracing for a return of the Santa Ana winds that had bedeviled their colleagues elsewhere in the Southland just a week before. And they had a jump on the fire thanks to some residents who said they saw two men loitering near the top of the Topanga Canyon ridge where the fire began.

Whipped by howling winds and eating up chaparral, the fire hopped Old Topanga Canyon Road and hopscotched down the hillsides. Suddenly, a small blaze went wildly out of control.

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

Over the next two days, the best efforts of firefighters often were not enough. The fire, whipped by strong and capricious winds, roared over 35,000 acres of brushy hillsides, engulfing homes and forcing evacuations along the Malibu coast.

In the wee hours of Wednesday, as frightened Malibu residents watered down roofs and peered at flames closing in on their homes, some wondered aloud if the tragedy somehow might have been prevented.

A few complained of water shortages that hampered efforts to save their homes.

But mostly there was a sense of inevitability about the lightning-swift blaze, which briefly breached fire lines and headed toward Palisades Highlands on Wednesday afternoon after firefighters had it contained.

For the army of 7,000 firefighters enlisted in the battle--some from as far away as Oregon--it was a horrible night of rolling last stands, with fire sweeping down mountain canyons and savaging everything in its path.

Fire officials said heavy winds, combined with the tinderbox conditions in the mountains, left them with no choice but to set priorities and draw lines to stand and fight. But they had to retreat again and again along more than 10 miles of coastline.

The first priority was saving lives by evacuating residents. Then came saving structures, followed by attempts to set up containment lines.

As the fires hopscotched from canyon to canyon late Tuesday, scores of firefighting crews sought to protect oceanfront houses along Pacific Coast Highway.

Unable to stop the march, a dozen fire engines retreated out of Big Rock Drive in Malibu at the last minute as flames nearly left them trapped.

The next line was Tuna Canyon, where pre-dawn efforts to halt the fire with a series of backfires appeared for a time to have worked. But when the winds shifted toward the Pacific, the fire continued.

Near Topanga Canyon Boulevard, firefighters made their strongest and most crucial stand in the early morning darkness, lining the boulevard for some 11 miles with firetrucks in an effort to hold the line at the intersection of Topanga and PCH. But Wednesday afternoon, the fire temporarily crossed the upper reaches of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

Fire crews were equally at the wind’s mercy on the fire’s western flank.

After setting up a line of defense along Malibu Canyon Road two miles north of PCH late Tuesday afternoon, they soon were forced to retreat.

The idea had been to prevent the raging inferno from slamming down onto Hughes Research Laboratory and Pepperdine University farther south.

But by 8:45 p.m., the firestorm had moved to within a quarter-mile of Hughes and ferocious winds were shooting embers over the road, sending a line of engine companies scampering back toward the lab.

Within minutes the flames were at the very edge of Hughes. “We couldn’t immediately contain it because it was on a steep hillside,” said one weary firefighter.

A last-minute shift of wind helped spare Hughes.

About 9 p.m., the fire leaped across Malibu Canyon and headed for Pepperdine. But again the wind turned the fire away.

“We felt, by and large,” said Freeman, the county fire chief, “that the key was going to be weather--and it was.”

Firefighters tried to guess the destructive path and behavior of the Malibu fire by mapping past fires.

In a command post trailer at Pepperdine, officials clustered around maps depicting in various colors the paths of fires during the past 23 years. There was the Wright fire in 1970, the Dayton Canyon blaze in 1982, the Piuma fire of 1985 and the Monte Nido burn of 1991.

The maps told the firefighters not only what direction the fire would most likely travel but also the age of the fuel available to the blaze in various locations. They also drew upon the experience of veteran firefighters who had battled similar blazes during the past 25 years.

“It worked well,” County Deputy Chief Richard Schiehl said. “It pretty much followed the same pattern.”

However, it was one thing to anticipate the path of a fire but another to halt it.

‘You don’t try to stand in front of it,” said Alice Allen, fire information officer for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. “You attack it from the flanks and try to direct it.”

Shortly after the fire broke out, Freeman appeared before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and predicted that the fire was going to burn to the sea because of the high winds.

Despite their inability to stop the fire, firefighters used predictions about its path to set up temporary defenses that saved some homes and allowed residents extra time to evacuate.

The fast-moving blaze did as expected, but it also forced fire officials to retreat from their initial command post at Fire Station 70 and set up shop in the trailer at Pepperdine.

In some cases, other problems frustrated the best of efforts even when firefighters were not forced to retreat.

Firefighter Brian Drevno of the Laguna Beach Fire Department said some Malibu houses were lost when water had to be trucked up steep hillsides because hydrants were dry.

“We had to go all the way down to the highway to get water,” he said. “By the time we got up there again, the houses were on fire. We had a chance to save two of them, but we couldn’t get there in time with the water.”

County officials blamed power failures that knocked out electricity to pumps that supply water in some Malibu canyon areas.

“That’s what created most of the problems with water pressure,” said Donna Guyovich, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. She said diesel-powered pumps were sent to Malibu on Wednesday.

City and county helicopters joined the fight, scooping up buckets of water from the ocean and dumping it on hot spots. In an unusual and potentially dangerous tactic, some county helicopters continued to drop water on the fire in Malibu late into Tuesday night.

During daylight, state and federal forestry officials coordinated the airplane attack. Within 15 minutes of the time the fire started, large private tanker planes began flights from the National Guard base at Channel Islands, dropping chemical retardant on the blaze. Military tankers joined the air attacks less than two hours after the blaze began--a considerable improvement over the 24-hour delay during last week’s wildfires.

In the end, it was the winds that controlled the fire. Without the hot, dry winds, fire officials said, there would have been no Malibu blaze.

“Maps are important,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Fire Chief Paul Blackburn, “but if the weather had been different, we wouldn’t be here.”