CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 16, 1997 | CLAIRE VITUCCI, TIMES STAFF WRITER
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
June 7, 2005 | Daniel Hernandez, Times Staff Writer
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.
SPORTS
October 23, 2009 | Bill Shaikin
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."
NATIONAL
April 24, 2009 | Richard Fausset
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.
WORLD
September 7, 2009 | Robyn Dixon
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.
MAGAZINE
July 10, 2005 | Nancy Rommelmann, Nancy Rommelmann last wrote for the magazine on home funerals and green burials.
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 31, 2009 | By Paul Pringle
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.
WORLD
February 9, 2009 | Jennifer Bennett and Julie Cart
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 5, 2009 | Carol J. Williams and Richard Winton
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.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 28, 2003 | Jack Leonard, Christine Hanley, Stuart Pfeifer and Megan Garvey, This story was reported by Times staff writers Jack Leonard, Christine Hanley, Stuart Pfeifer and Megan Garvey. It was written by Garvey.
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.