Fires

High-technology arrived just in the nick of time to save a 65-year-old disabled woman trapped by flames that enveloped the bedroom of her Panorama City home this month. Earlier that day, firefighters in the Los Angeles Fire Department's 39th Squad, an elite unit based in Van Nuys, received one of the department's two new thermal-imaging cameras. The other went to a similar unit in Chinatown.

Delia Garcia stepped out of her single-room Westlake apartment to take her daughters to nearby MacArthur Park for paleta popsicles Sunday afternoon. She had $10 in her pocket. A short while later, she looked back to see smoke and flames spewing from the top of her building at 720 S. Westlake Ave. She raced to the building but was unable to get inside. "Shoes, backpacks, everything. My daughter lost her glasses. Without glasses she can't do anything; $350 they cost me," Garcia, 45, said Monday.

Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has fired his estranged wife Jamie from her position as the team's chief executive, triggering what her attorney said would be an imminent legal response. "Jamie is disappointed and saddened by her termination," attorney Dennis Wasser said this afternoon. "As co-owner of the Dodgers, she will address this and all other issues in the courtroom." Wasser would not say whether Jamie McCourt would continue to occupy her office at Dodger Stadium. He said that would depend on the outcome of legal proceedings he expected to initiate "in the next couple weeks."

An out-of-control wildfire continued to tear through the forests and subdivisions of coastal South Carolina on Thursday, destroying dozens of homes, forcing the evacuation of 2,500 residents and threatening nearby Myrtle Beach, one of the state's largest and best-known tourist draws. The fire started Wednesday afternoon in an area northwest of the 60-mile stretch of popular beach towns known as the Grand Strand.

Mike Campbell sat and watched the flames. The 76-year-old Zimbabwean farmer desperately wanted to help. But you can't fight a fire with a walking stick. So the fierce, proud man who had spent so many years fighting for his land was forced to stand by as his family used green branches to fight the blaze burning toward his daughter's home. "It's a terrible feeling when you stand there, helpless. I can't really move very fast," said Campbell, who never really recovered after being beaten by thugs loyal to President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe's election violence in June 2008.

Jay Southard waits just south of mile marker 1313 on the Alaska Highway. It's early June, and the temperature at 8 p.m. is in the 40s, with a raw wind running off the Alaska Range, which rises, iron-colored and veined with snow, in the near distance. Southard is not looking at the mountains, but at the highway running through the center of the town of Tok, keeping an eye out for a red Ford van carrying eight Mexican mushroom pickers.

As walls of flame from the massive Station blaze closed in on their remote compound, the mission of the crews at Fire Camp 16 suddenly changed from protecting their corner of the Angeles National Forest to saving their own lives. Two Los Angeles County firefighters approached the front line of the blaze in a heroic attempt to stop its march toward the camp high in the San Gabriel Mountains and were killed as the flames engulfed the landscape, officials say. Now, four months after Capt.

At least 130 people have died in howling wildfires in Australia, so fierce that they incinerated people trying to flee in their cars, sent towering walls of flames sweeping through small towns and sparked a new debate over whether homeowners should be allowed to stay to try to protect their property.

As authorities investigate suspected arson as the cause of the largest wildfire in Los Angeles County history, prosecutors will be focused on one issue in their attempt to bring murder charges: intent. If the Station fire was set on purpose, the arsonist could face the death penalty for the deaths of firefighters Ted Hall and Arnie Quinones. The two died Sunday in a vehicle accident while aiding a group of inmates battling the fire, which has destroyed more than 154,000 acres and 76 homes.

At dawn, Kelly Zombro prayed. He was out of men, out of equipment, out of hope. "Please, God, this fire needs to go out," Zombro pleaded as embers flew and homes burned. The battalion chief had never seen a fire grow so big so fast, racing overnight from a forest canyon to neighborhoods where people slept. "My fear was that we wouldn't get to the homes on time and they'd wake up and there'd be flames at the window," Zombro said. As the sun rose on the Cedar fire, his dread turned to grief.

There may be a debate about who said what to whom, but to USC Coach Kevin O'Neill, it's simple: "No one should ever speak to the officials but me," he said. With that said, Stan Holt, a graduate student manager who drew a technical foul late in a tight game at Oregon on Saturday, was fired by O'Neill after the team arrived back in Los Angeles that night. While the impact of the call was certain, there is uncertainty about what caused it. O'Neill said official Bobby McRoy did not recite what Holt said, only that "he was screaming obscenities at him."

For Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, blasting the federal government for California's problems has become an oft-used routine since his first days in office. But in a new twist, federal officials are firing back. The bicoastal fusillade, which continued Monday, began last week when Schwarzenegger attributed part of the state's $20-billion deficit to what he called an unfair federal funding formula, criticized the national healthcare plan and included an implicit message of extortion for federal lawmakers in his budget: Come up with an extra $6.9 billion for California or share the blame for eliminating state programs for children, the elderly, the disabled and the poor.

An early morning fire at a mobile home park in Palm Springs on New Year's Day killed three adults and two children, according to the Riverside County Fire Department. Coroner's officials have not identified the victims and do not know if they were from one family. The fire was reported about 5:15 a.m. in the Western Village Mobile Home Park at 150 Oregon Trail. Twenty-five firefighters fought the blaze and had it contained by 6:30 a.m. While dousing the flames, firefighters found the bodies of the three adults.

As walls of flame from the massive Station blaze closed in on their remote compound, the mission of the crews at Fire Camp 16 suddenly changed from protecting their corner of the Angeles National Forest to saving their own lives. Two Los Angeles County firefighters approached the front line of the blaze in a heroic attempt to stop its march toward the camp high in the San Gabriel Mountains and were killed as the flames engulfed the landscape, officials say. Now, four months after Capt.

Newly released records contradict a finding by the U.S. Forest Service that steep terrain prevented the agency from using aircraft to attack -- and potentially contain -- the Station fire just before it began raging out of control. Experts on Forest Service tactics also dispute the agency's conclusion that helicopters and tanker planes would have been ineffective because the canyon in the Angeles National Forest was too treacherous for ground crews to take advantage of aerial water dumps.

Like so many others in the path of the Station fire, the owners of Singing Springs lost everything when flames chewed through a quarter of the Angeles National Forest late last summer. Or so they thought. As the fire swept across the family retreat-turned-movie-ranch Aug. 30, it wiped out all 11 buildings on the 16 1/2 -acre site along Angeles Forest Highway, destroying props, tools, keepsakes and furnishings. It leveled a barn that doubled as the gatekeeper's home, burned down the cabins, scorched the meadow, killed scores of trees and clogged with ash the streams and a swimming hole where trout had hidden.

Five L.A. County sheriff's deputies and a sergeant helped rescue a woman and her disabled son from a house fire early Sunday morning. The rescuers were on patrol about 3 a.m., when they saw a house fully engulfed in flames in an unincorporated area near Compton. The identities of the five men and one woman were withheld for safety reasons related to their assignments, said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for the Sheriff's Department. A man in front of the house, in the 14900 block of South Gibson Avenue, said his wife was inside, but the flames and heat were so intense he could not reenter to rescue her. Other than a side door, all the doors and windows on the house had safety bars.

Santa Barbara County officials charged two men Thursday with misdemeanors for allegedly sparking the destructive Jesusita fire in May by clearing a trail with gas-powered weed cutters. Craig Ilenstine, 50, and Dana Neil Larsen, 45, failed to obtain a so-called hot-work permit as required by county code before undertaking clearance on the Jesusita trail near Cathedral Peak, said Jerry Lulejian, a Santa Barbara County deputy district attorney. The fire erupted May 5 after the men used gas-fueled trimmers to clear brush and limbs from the trail, Lulejian said.

Nearly three months after the Station fire blazed through the foothills and canyons above Los Angeles, killing two firefighters and scorching 160,577 acres, investigators say they don't have the necessary evidence to arrest anyone for setting the fatal fire. Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide detectives have questioned a man who already has been charged with setting a smaller blaze in the Angeles National Forest days before the Station fire broke out. But authorities say they have been unable to connect Babatunsin Olukunle, 25, to the fire.

A faulty catalytic converter on a pickup truck was blamed Tuesday for sparking a series of brush fires that broke out along the 60 Freeway in Diamond Bar, threatening expensive hillside homes and forcing students to seek shelter in a gymnasium when their campus was clouded in smoke. At least eight fires were reported about 11:45 a.m. as the vehicle spewed out sparks and flames in the grass and brush-covered terrain next to the freeway, authorities said. Witnesses told The Times that the blazes were spread fairly evenly along the freeway, a busy east-west artery that links Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley and San Bernardino County.