Wind-Driven Fires Raze Costly Homes

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30393, 18 March 1964, Page 17

Wind-Driven Fires Raze Costly Homes

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

LOS ANGELES, March 16.

Fanned by the worst March winds in local history, two brush fires swept out of the Los Angeles suburban foothills to bum an unknown number of houses and force hundreds to flee.

The two main fires by early afternoon destroyed a total of more than 3000 acres. There was no hope of controlling the fires because of the increasingly high winds which made it difficult and sometimes impossible to use borate bombers.

A small fire department helicopter crashed in an abandoned school yard, but the pilot escaped injury. The accident was blamed on the wind. The fires covered a wide area of Hollywood and west Los Angeles to the ocean with a brown pall of smoke and soot that obscured the sun.

One new section of suburban Burbank was evacuated early this afternoon when an extension of the Whiting Hills fire threatened it. Persons in the Chevy Chase and Verdugo Hills area of Glen-

dale, adjoining Los Angeles, loaded belongings into their cars and fled, but some came back to douse roofs of houses with hoses. “It looks like the whole mountain is on fire,” said one resident. Warm winds from the Mojave Desert, howling through canyons at up to 90 miles an hour, blew down thousands of trees, unroofed houses, broke scores of windows and caused power failures that lasted hours. At least 16 houses were known to have been destroyed by early evening. Two of them were in the 100,000 dollar class and at least four others were valued between 50,000 and 70,000 dollars. As evening came, a pall of smoke obscured the setting sun, creating a bizarre orange effect. In Los Angeles itself, about 12 miles from the fire, debris and soot drifted to the earth.