It was a firefighters' nightmare: erratic winds driving flames so fast there was no time to react. Blazes jumping freeways and racing up canyons. Hopscotching embers leaving behind a patchwork quilt of burned homes and blackened cars.
"Everything just came together to make it the worst possible thing," Los Angeles County Fire Chief Mike Freeman said Monday of the Sesnon fire, which roared through hillside neighborhoods in Chatsworth and Porter Ranch.
For people in the fire's unpredictable path, there was little warning.
"This is something I've never seen," said Bill Byers, 59, who lives in the Twin Lakes neighborhood in unincorporated Chatsworth, where at least eight homes burned to the ground. "The fire roared through in less than a minute."
Firefighters like to herd fire. They like to get ahead of it and make a stand. But Monday, they often found themselves chasing the flames instead. "Embers are driving spot fires, maybe four blocks away. It's extremely frustrating," Freeman said late in the afternoon.
In some cases, firetrucks and police cruisers arrived to find residents looking on as flames licked shrubs in their backyards.
Leon Chernosk, 74, said he was watching fire coverage on television. If the flames reached his neighborhood, he figured, it wouldn't be for hours. Then he looked northeast, and the smoke was so thick he couldn't see the mountains. He hopped in his car and rushed down the hill. A minute later, he changed his mind and raced back to his Mayan Drive home to retrieve pictures.
When he pulled up to the Cape Cod-style house where he had lived for two decades, the two houses next to his were burning. He grabbed a hose to put out a fire on his deck.
"I couldn't see; my eyes were burning," Chernosk said. The heat scorched his skin. His neighbor's butane tank exploded. It was time to go. When he came back, after the fires died down, his home had been reduced to ashes.
"Everything I own, 20 years of my stuff, all my pictures and photos, all burned to the ground," Chernosk said. "It's just a pile of dust."
Byers and his neighbors in Twin Lakes were also taken unawares. They had been keeping a wary eye on the news as smoke from nearby Porter Ranch cast a pall over the neighborhood. Then, within just a few minutes, billows of smoke turned the daytime sky black.
By the time Byers noticed and stepped outside, three homes up the hill were burning. So was his deck.
