 Design for disaster, the story of the Bel-Air Conflagration. Santa Ana, Indians named it Santana, the Devil Wind. When it blows, plants wither, trees and brush become crackling dry. Atmosphere grows tense, oppressive. People tire easily, argue more. Even the suicide rate rises during the months of the Santa Ana. Warm, dry. This climate plays an important part in attracting over 3,000 people a month to the city of Los Angeles to become permanent residents. To settle into hotels, apartments, homes along the coast, inland throughout the central residential sections to the far reaches of the valley areas. And some move up to the scenic secluded hill areas, where lush California vegetation softens the ridges and valleys for miles in every direction and breezes blow clean through native growth. And increasingly strong during the late fall months of the Santa Ana and dangerously dry when there has been no rain. It is during this unstable period that firemen most fear the potential. The potential of 134 square miles of thick, dry chaparral and oak all within the city boundaries of Los Angeles classed by experts as the fastest burning ground cover in the western hemisphere. And nestled in that cover, one of the greatest concentrations of high value homes in America. A serious problem in fire protection under even the best of conditions. On the morning of November 6, 1961, fire department dispatchers find conditions far from the best. Santa Ana winds are strong, gusty. Humidity and moisture content of the brush rock bottom. Fire danger extreme. At 8.03 a.m., a condition of high hazard is declared throughout the department. Standby companies are moved up to stations near brush areas to strengthen the circle of protection. But even as they move, trouble strikes. At 8.15 an alert of fire is relayed to the officer in command of mountain firefighting units. It's concerned they reported brush fire in the mountain area. 3600 blocks, Stone Canyon. The division chief responds immediately. Clouds of brush smoke are already visible on the ridge. The chief calls for additional companies. The fire starting from its point of origin north of Mulholland on Stone Canyon spreads out along canyon walls in three directions. First arriving units succeed in stopping it on the north, east and west flanks before it reaches threatened homes. But there is no stopping it on the south. Winds are driving the flames fast and hard toward Mulholland. The chief declares a condition of major emergency. The master plan of defense against the serious brush fire begins. Support from air tankers is requested. 15 additional engine companies roll out. All key personnel are alerted in special mountain firefighting equipment dispatch. Deputy and division chiefs move up to take command of field units. As radio messages crackle in. The fire is over the top. It's heading straight down Stone Canyon. Engine 31, 45, 46 and 67 move directly into the fire. Fire has jumped Mulholland at the crest of the Santa Monica. It's headed toward Bel Air. To these men, brush fires are routine. But this one is pushing them hard. The flames take a run along the canyon slopes heading uphill toward the ridges. Firemen with high pressure hose streams knock the fire down as it tries to make the jump as it did over Mulholland. But in the canyon between, along the wide sweep of firefront traveling unchecked with the wind, there lies the problem. Rough terrain impedes fire crews and meeting the flames head on. Fire fans off to sweep up canyon walls threatening residential areas ahead. Chief engineer William Miller arrives at command post headquarters to take charge of fire operations. A quick size up of conditions prompts him to order everything available into the fire. Fire is spreading, growing by the minute. Air tankers sweep in. Fire danger is compounded by ground winds. The Santa Ana driving through at 50 miles an hour to hurl burning brands ahead of the main front. 100, 200, 300 feet ahead, other blazes are starting. Spot fires that appear from nowhere. All off-duty firemen are recalled to hold back what may come if the wind plays tricks. And the wind does. Embers blow ahead of the fire to fall on the opposite side of Roscoe Man. Fire is now west of Strudella, out of Stone Canyon. Their officers alert the command post for the new outbreak. Defense forces are split once again to handle the two additional fronts. As equipment and manpower thin out, fire grows with the wind. And flames begin spreading at the rate of 13 acres per minute. It takes change from offense to defense. Fire crews are directed to positions between structures and the approaching fire to begin the necessary technique of hit and run firefighting. Get ahead of the fire. Take a stand. Knock it down. Move ahead again. Always stay ahead of the fire. Fight to keep flames confined to single homes. Fire is below them. Sweeping soft, coming up on both sides of the ridges they stand on. Going overhead with the wind, dropping ahead of the men. The firemen are no longer ahead of the fire. Field commanders request more and more help as the flames spread. Unless we have companies that can lay into these individual houses, we are going to begin losing more houses on Roscoe Man. There is not enough. Badly needed help has come from county firefighting units. Twenty-two of their engine companies and patrol rigs are at the fire. Ten more have worked directly ahead of the flames to stop their advance. Twenty-three surrounding municipalities roll out to fill vacated Los Angeles stations. To cover for city companies that have moved into the fire. Fire officials decide where residents may remain, where they may not. Decisions are based on the prime consideration in any fire. Safety to human life. Ahead of the fire, police officers are hard pressed to control the evacuation of residents. While they work, radios blare out messages of trouble. Again, get our canyon. We need police assistance here to evacuate these people. Or if we don't get them out of here. There's a lady here having... Twenty-five Roscoe Bear Road. The children are out. The driver and the bus are... Everyone must use the same narrow streets. No crossroads connect the steep canyons, where fire easily jumps the ridges firefighters must drive miles to go around. Side-seers add to the problems. Police are forced to arrest many who move in to get a ringside view of disaster. And disaster it is. In the canyons, along the hillsides, on the ridges, houses are burning. Smoke blacks out the sun. Firemen work in close as firebrands blow against the sides of houses, drive into crevices of wooden roofs, through windows, into ventilators, and bunch under the eaves of houses in glowing masses, held there by hot glass of fire wind. Wind that bends high pressure hose streams into worthless spray. Wind that quips roof fires into billows of stubborn flame. Where the men have water to fight with, they're holding their own. And then without warning, some don't have water. First the pressure, then the water itself recedes from ridges. Fire companies are backed off by waves of flame. Along Stradella first, then Roscoe Bear, then Lender Flora. The situation becomes one of scattered running battles as fire crews pick individual targets. Water is drafted from swimming pools wherever possible. Where water is limited to that in apparatus tanks, homes that are furiously burning must be passed by. And the hundreds of others threatened or just starting to burn, a difficult choice must be made. Which to fight, which to forfeit. Houses with combustible roofs and those too close to brush are poor risks. Once extinguished, they catch fire again and again. Nevertheless, the firemen try. Air tankers come in low and often, despite collision hazards and the smoke. Only a limited number may operate. Even their biggest loads will not affect the huge central fires. They do their best work in conjunction with ground crews on the flanks to prevent fire spread. More equipment is moved in as fire sweeps south on a solid front at incredible speed. Every burning thing that can be torn loose by the wind is hurled ahead in this horizontal, leap-frogging, wind-driven advance. Burning brands rain down in clouds and fire leaps from wood roof to wood roof. Spot fires appear everywhere. Spread, fused together to feed the parent blaze. A blaze which is no longer just a major brush fire, just a group of burning buildings, it is now a full-scale conflagration. On the move, headed for the thickly populated areas of every residential section north and south of Sunset Boulevard. There is one chance. Every piece of firefighting equipment not actively involved in saving structures is being ordered to the area north of Sunset to head off the flames. Homes for the score disintegrate into quite hot embers carried high into the atmosphere by thermal columns of heat. Firestorms boil upward along residential stretches of Mendeflora, Chalon Road, Stradella, Samara, Chantilly. There is no clearly defined fire front. It's as if an enemy force had suddenly launched a paratroop attack behind the lines of defense. Sector chiefs attempt to maintain order where sectors no longer exist. Flames loom up in scores of homes on scores of streets. Firemen fight in smoke-imposed darkness throughout the fire areas. Some have no water, others have. In their concentration on the jobs at hand, none can know that four new crises are taking form. Six miles northwest in a remote area of Santa Inés Canyon, a second major brush fire is broken loose, destroyed nine homes, and is racing toward the main fire to eventually blacken 10,000 acres. Companies are pulled from Upper Stone Canyon to help county units fight the new blaze. In Benedict Canyon, one half mile east, another brush fire is deliberately set. As ground crews respond, an air tanker is directed in ahead of their arrival to delay the fire's progress. And in Brentwood, a third crisis, a mile and a half west of furiously burning ballet are a completely unexpected phenomenon takes place. Thousands of firebrands are literally dumped from the skies on this heretofore untouched section. In residential areas and hills above, the embers spread. From 60 to 70 fires suddenly blaze up, as if an aerial incendiary attack had been launched. Vitally needed equipment must be pulled from critical areas and diverted to this new front. At the same time, a fourth emergency hits. Clouds of sparks soar high over the new 600-foot San Diego Freeway complex to envelop ridges of West Sepulveda Canyon. As fire in the space of a few minutes leaps the largest man-made firebreak in the city. Controlling this host of new fires seems hopeless. Everything possible is being thrown into the path of a conflagration that will not stop. The county, civil defense and neighboring municipalities are taxing their own fire defense to the utmost in this fight against time and a 20-mile perimeter of sweeping flames. Men do not know whether fire stops or where it begins or how far it will go or how much longer. Or Raga, Kentor Canyon, Bundy, Taggartale. Too many streets, too many homes, too many fires for only 3,000 men to fight. And to these men, the whole thing seems unreal. This is the heat that will not cool. Water that will not quench, wind that will not stop. This is a fire that simply will not be whipped. And then in late afternoon, they get their first break. The Santa Ana diminishes. The racing fire slows to a run and those still left in the burn area get a look at the path that has traveled. But there is no time for contemplation. Fire is still burning heavily on the south and west flanks, still moving. In the early evening, the wind changes, grows stronger, swings the fire west, then northwest. In its path lies the long, deep richness of Mandeville Canyon, one of the most heavily populated, most exclusive, most hazardous canyons in the Santa Monica Range. As darkness moves in, apparatus is safely withdrawn from the burn, manned by tired crews and shuttled into the mouth of Mandeville. Firemen stand by their lines as they watch a sky full of smoke turn red from embers and reflected flames. Fire once again is on the rampage. Like devils running before the wind, flames begin their climb to the top to crest over the ridge, shoot skyward and start down into Mandeville on a direct run for the homes below. And the fight begins. It's a struggle to keep their positions between homes and the first waves of fire as flames boil overhead to sweep the West Canyon wall. Within minutes, the canyon is smothered in the maelstrom of smoke, cinders and fire. And below, as more equipment moves in, firefighters again take beatings in their stand between homes and fire. Daint blisters, hose lines char, firecoats are scorched and endurance tested, but the lines hold and the men hold. And the homes still stand after flames of black and the canyon walls. As the fire swings northward in a dying night wind, a great concentration of ground forces moves against its line of advance. And the city's most disastrous fire is finally beaten down to slow, smoldering containment. November 7th, the morning sun reveals the ruins of what yesterday were homes and trees and irreplaceable possessions. Now, fireplaces stand as tombstones to a row upon row of dead homes on dead streets. 484 times, fire proved its deadly efficiency by incinerating in a few roaring minutes what families had taken years to acquire. 6,090 acres of blackened hills, canyons and neighborhoods. Over 3,000 men, 240 fire vehicles and 16 aircraft tried to stop it. But only after a hard driving Santa Anna died down and gave them a chance. They broke the fires back in 12 hours, saved over 2,200 homes, a major college. Not one single life was lost. Not one critical burn case reported. Firemen had set a new record according to national fire experts. But still, people wonder, fire victims as well as those who merely read about the fire ask the same question. How can a brush fire get so far out of control within a well-protected city and do the things it does? Let's analyze this fire and see what did happen. Some phases are difficult to explain. Why is a framework of bare wood left unharmed and a furnace of heat that crumbles masonry around it? Why does a roaring fire suddenly stop in heavy brushes if cut by a knife? Why do flames spare one house and consume identical dwellings on all sides? A general pattern of fire behavior, however, can be explained. When a brush fire is traveling downhill at its most receptive to extinguishment, a wide clearance around a house gives firemen a break to make a stop provided water is available, provided winds do not start spotfires across the canyon, and combustible roofs do not ignite from falling embers. The fire preheats canyons to ignition temperatures. As flames move uphill, the reaction can be almost explosive. A parallel to this reaction is demonstrated with a branch from a specimen of hillside brush. Held upright with fire moving downward, the fire travels slowly, but reverse the situation. Place the fuel above the fire. On a hill fire, burning brands carry over the top to start spotfires on the opposite side. Where those spotfires merge with the original blaze, you will see fire that leaves only chimneys and brickwork, and no amount of wetting down can stop it. Now let's take another look at fire in action. Brush fires create their own wind. Turbulence and heat bring winds of tornado velocity. Erratic, twisting, treacherous, and unpredictable. Even seasoned news cameraman can be trapped. Where these fire drafts are further compounded by the Santa Ana results can be disastrous. On the morning of November 6th, Santa Ana winds were moving in a southwesternly direction from desert to coast. At the same time, numerous ridges of the Santa Monica's were channeling ground winds almost due south. So it was that winds were traveling in two directions at the time of the fire. When the fire reached Belair and consumed homes in such numbers that firestorms resulted, thermal heat lifted burning shingles and brands two to three thousand feet in the air. Caught in the upper-level wind currents, these burning brands were carried well over a mile across Sepulveda to rain down onto the Brentwood area. Scores of spot fires began spreading to present a new crisis. This action is demonstrated in these pictures taken by UCLA's Meteorological Department. Now the same picture increased to many times its original speed. Deep within the smoke, burning shingles carry a mile and a half to start new fires as shown by black smoke columns, which grow to join the main fire approaching from the east. This leapfrog phenomenon, coupled with powerful ground winds, created a unique fire problem. As one of the nation's foremost conflagration experts puts it... No one has ever faced this problem before. No definite line of defense could be found, and when a chain reaction of this type occurs, a fire department can do nothing more than pick out individual houses and try to save them. But even in such attempts to save individual homes, firemen are further thwarted by the loss of water. How can a modern water system properly designed to meet emergency fire conditions fail to function? Let's look at this simplified diagram of houses on a hill being supplied by a water tank above. When thousands of outlets are open below the hill, water pressure is lost in the overtaxed main. Regardless of the amount of water above the houses. Where the water supply comes from a distant location and supply pipes dead end on the hill, unnecessary use of too many outlets below the fire area simply drains the water out of the upper system. We have considered water, wind, and weather. Now there's the very real problem of how a house is constructed and where. Suppose we live in a house above the congestion of the neighborhood below or run a stilt house built over the brush or in the typical home with a combustible roof, wide low eaves to catch sparks and fire, and a big picture window to let the fire inside. Under any such conditions, there's not much of a chance. In 1959, experts from the National Fire Protection Association surveyed portions of Los Angeles. They found a mountain range within the city. Combustible roofed houses closely spaced in brush-covered canyons and ridges serviced by narrow roads. They called it a design for disaster. They predicted the ballet of fire plus others which are sure to come unless citizens and city officials work together on a definite plan of fire defense. The prediction was nothing new to firemen. They have their own ideas about people who don't like water pumping stations or fire stations in their neighborhood because they feel that they're unsightly. Or homeowners who refuse to cut brush away from homes because it mars the natural beauty of the hills. And those groups who maintain to the last glowing ember that combustible roofs are not hazardous in fire areas despite the fact that over 600 cities have outlawed them. Firefighters are thankful that such is not the thinking of the majority of citizens. But it does not take a majority to start a fire or to feed a conflagration that burns out the careful along with the careless. You are only as safe as your neighbor. When you live in a hazardous area, you're gambling that fire won't start from hot ashes. A cigarette. Children with matches. A faulty chimney. Auto accidents. A fire bug. Fallen wires. Or lightning. These are the odds. If you win, you get to keep what you already have. If you lose, fire, the winner takes all.