Residents on fire boundary watch, worry

The fast-moving brush fire above Lake View Terrace had residents wondering if their neighborhood would be the next to face the flames.

As they stood on Gavina Avenue on the boundary of the Marek fire, cousins William Alvarez, 17, and Carlos Alvarez, 18, both seniors at Sylmar High School, looked out across the scorched hills where they grew up hiking and playing in the treehouse they built years ago. About a quarter of those still around the periphery of the fire were wearing face masks to protect them from the soot and smoke billowing from the blackened hills.

The younger cousin had awakened at 5:30 a.m. to see orange flames sweeping over terrain above his house on Hubbard Street in northeast Sylmar and ran to Carlos’ house on Tibbetts Street to alert the family that “the hills are on fire.”

Around 7 a.m., police cars raced by with sirens blaring, warning everyone in the area to evacuate. By 8 a.m., about 10 family members had crowded into the Hubbard Street residence, where the cousins expected to be able to ride out the fire and avoid a second evacuation unless the blaze spread.

“I woke up and there were orange flames everywhere,” William Alvarez recalled as he and Carlos stood on Gavina Avenue, looking out toward Kagel Canyon and Lopez Canyon Road. They had recently gone off-trail riding in the area in William’s Ford Explorer.

“You could see the flames all through the mountains,” said Carlos Alvarez, who described the scene as “like waking up to hell.”

“It’s crazy, because yesterday it was completely out,” he added.

Also viewing the scene from Gavina Avenue was Efren Urbina, 32, a juvenile probations officer for Los Angeles County whose home is just outside the evacuation zone.

“The whole night we heard helicopters but we didn’t think much of it,” Urbina said. He was alerted to the severity of the blaze when his wife, a teacher at Hubbard Elementary, got a call around 7 a.m. to say the school was closed because of the fire threat.

“I didn’t think it was that serious” until then, he said. “This is devastating. This is a tragedy.”

He said he has family members in San Diego who have gone through such fires. “It’s different when you’re living through it and you can smell it,” he said.

 ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com