Sylmar Ca

The exhilaration was palpable as Adam and Candy Kessler arrived Wednesday at their freshly built residence in Sylmar's Oakridge Mobile Home Park -- he driving a U-Haul van filled with the couple's furniture and personal belongings, she following in a car. With them they also brought a resolve to help resettle a tight-knit community that was largely destroyed in last autumn's wildfires. "We're very excited," said Candy Kessler as she prepared to enter the yellow manufactured home they ordered to replace the one lost in November's Sayre fire.

More than 115,000 residences and businesses in widely scattered parts of Los Angeles lost power Saturday when the Sylmar fire damaged the main transmission network bringing electricity into the city, water and power officials said. Entire neighborhoods were plunged into darkness for about half an hour Saturday morning, including parts of Mid-City, Crenshaw, Harbor Gateway and Sherman Oaks, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said.

Although flames had chewed through the power lines that serve the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, staff members thought that they would be fine. The hospital prided itself on its "state-of-the-art" backup systems. But wind-whipped flames and choking smoke brought Olive View to a dark standstill early Saturday as the hospital lost power and its emergency generators failed. "It was total darkness," said hospital spokeswoman Carla Nino. "We had our flashlights. We went into our disaster mode."

Lisa Bialac-Jehle was just a few minutes from sleep Friday night when her phone rang. It was the American Red Cross, and they were calling about a fire. The caller told Bialac-Jehle, 52, a member of the organization's disaster action team, that she was needed immediately at Sylmar High School to help victims who had fled there. So she threw on some clothes, hopped in the car and sped up the 405.

Marion Thornton, 89, and her husband, Austin, 91, are one of the original 15 families who moved into Oakridge Mobile Home Park 29 years ago. Their mobile home is one of the roughly 140 that remained standing after the Sayre fire swept into the Sylmar park and wiped out most of its 600 mobile homes. The couple waited nearly seven hours Monday, along with hundreds of others at Sylmar High School, for a shuttle into the park about two miles away so they could look at their home.

When Michele Fauquier's apartment manager banged on her door early Saturday to warn her about the approaching Sylmar fire, all the hospice nurse could think about were her patients across the way in the Oakridge Mobile Home Park. Without stopping to save her own belongings, Fauquier jumped into her car and drove to the home of a 57-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis.

Residents of Yorba Linda, where fire destroyed 118 homes, had complained for years of poor water pressure, a problem that may have made it more difficult for firefighters to beat back the weekend blaze that tore through the upscale community. In Sylmar, where about 500 mobile homes burned to the ground, fire officials said they were investigating reports of lack of water pressure there.

The firestorm that destroyed most of Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Sylmar has prompted investigations into whether tougher standards are needed to protect residents of manufactured housing in fire-prone areas. Because many elderly people live in mobile home parks, state regulators and elected officials plan to explore the adequacy of evacuation plans and emergency procedures, which have been lacking at parks throughout the state.

At noon Saturday, Dana Xedos found the one thing she'd been looking for in the month and a half since her home burned down in the Marek fire -- a gold ring that her late husband gave to her son. As soon as Xedos saw the ring, she broke into tears. A couple of hours earlier, Xedos' former neighbor Sally Garrett, 76, found the one thing she hoped for since losing everything to the fire -- a home.

In one bedroom, there is still a stack of hand-written flashcards on the windowsill, where one of the twins left them: Anomalous. Antipathy. Assuage. On the floor, there is a little box of nail polish -- lime green, another called "berry framboise." On the wall, a calendar maps out a teenager's month: vocab quiz. mock trial. driver test.