First Came the Repairs : Blueprints Help Victim Look Forward to Replicating Home in Safer Material

A year after losing his house to the Green Meadow fire, Harman Rasnow finally has a few tangible representations of what the rebuilt version will be like.

He has a thick roll of blueprints showing his family’s future home from every angle. He has his zoning clearance and septic system permit. Out on the patio of his daughter Tina’s house is a big chunk of the highly fire retardant material he is thinking of building with.

And he and his wife Eleanor have peered down into a dollhouse-like model of the home, recognizing rooms and windows and doors they last saw on the afternoon of Oct. 26, 1993.

It might not seem like much, but to Rasnow, 73, it is sweet progress.

“Things are moving about as well as can be expected,” he said, standing on the leveled-off lot where his house used to be. “It’ll happen. There is no point in pushing.”

Until last year, Harman Rasnow and his family were the envy of their Newbury Park neighbors. For 23 years, they had the kind of house few people in carefully zoned Ventura County have, perched at the top of a long, high ridge on 200 acres hanging over the Conejo Valley.

From their home--elevation 1,600 feet--they had ocean views, mountain views, valley views, city views, even freeway views if they cared to check on the pace of civilization below. They called the place U4EA.

Then came the Green Meadow fire. It began in a corner of the Los Robles Golf Course and ate its way through the thick chaparral up the hill toward Rasnow’s house.

He watched, he called the fire department, he watched some more, he called the fire department again. But within a matter of hours, as firefighters concentrated on keeping the blaze away from clusters of Newbury Park homes, the blaze advanced and turned.

It quickly enveloped the house, making the Rasnow family the first victims of the wildfires that raged through Southern California last fall. The Green Meadow fire continued on, far past Rasnow’s house, burning 38,152 acres in its path through the Santa Monica Mountains to the ocean.

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Rasnow has a whole videotape full of television footage shot from helicopters of his house burning. But he has only watched it once, preferring instead to focus on the future.

“There is no need to dwell on it,” he said, looking down the still-singed slope below the home site. “It’s no fun, and it doesn’t do me any good.”

The last year has been hard in many ways. But the hardest thing, Rasnow said, was putting his wife’s 102-year-old mother--whom they had rushed down the hill right before the fire hit the house--into a nursing home.

He and his wife had moved into a condominium they own in Ventura. Coping with the fire’s aftermath involved many trips back and forth between Newbury Park and Ventura, and the couple could not give her the constant care she needs.

“That was agonizing,” Rasnow said, “because she had lived with us for more than 40 years. She kept asking about the house. ‘I want to see where the house was,’ she’d say. Finally we drove her out here. She looked at if for quite awhile without saying anything. Then she said, ‘Now you can take me home.’ ”

About a month ago, the family was reunited. Their daughter Tina’s new house--under construction at the time of the fire, it escaped burning when winds shifted and pushed the fire over the ridge toward Hidden Valley--was finished. Now his wife’s mother--Helene Herz--lives there. The Rasnows divide their time between Tina’s house and Ventura.

“We’re all together again,” Rasnow said.

The family lost many treasured heirlooms in last year’s fire, including 200-year-old Austrian china, a black walnut bedroom set, Eleanor Rasnow’s collection of music boxes, and portraits of Herz’s Austrian mother and other relatives.

“People say, you can always get all new things,” she said. “But the new doesn’t always come up to par. A lot of the things that you want to replace are not made anymore.”

Included in that list is the unique Rasnow home itself. Designed by Harman Rasnow, it was built in sections at an Oxnard mobile home factory in the 1960s. The completed sections were then dragged up the steep hill on Ventu Park Road and linked together, forming a ring around the pool.

The factory is gone, so he is turning to conventional builders, but not to conventional materials. He wants this house to be more fireproof, and he thinks he may have found the answer.

“Here it is,” he said, hefting a block of something--it looked like concrete--off Tina’s patio and into the air. “See how light it is?”

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It is a product from an Arizona-based company called Ener-Grid, formerly known as Rastra. A combination of recycled styrofoam, cement and some mystery ingredients fitted around steel supports, it is one of the most fire-resistant building materials available, according to Ener-Grid President Stanley John.

In a telephone interview, he described a test of Ener-Grid where 1,920-degree flames were aimed at a wall built of the stuff for two hours. After the test, the temperature on the other side of the wall had increased by only one degree, he said.

Rasnow said he is not completely convinced about Ener-Grid yet. It is not easy to obtain and has not been approved for use by Ventura County building officials.

“It may be the greatest material in the world,” said William Windroth, director of the county’s Building and Safety Department. “But I personally haven’t seen anything to prove that.”

If using Ener-Grid proves too complicated, Rasnow said he will use something else. By the second anniversary of the fire, he wants to be well settled in. “Long before that,” he said.