Crews survey fire damage

Examining the charred landscape around Bonita Canyon after Monday’s brush fires, John Fransen and his daughter Leigh realized that firefighters had arrived at the blaze not a minute too soon to save their Newport Beach home.

Aside from some singed wood shingles and a flame-broiled top of a palm tree in their back yard, the family did not find any serious damage to their wood house, and they give a lot of credit for that to an alert neighbor, Chuck Reilly.

Reilly saw smoke billowing toward the house in the canyon as he was driving back from getting a burger and called the fire department. He redirected an engine that was headed for the wrong side of the canyon, he said, then grabbed a garden hose and got to work.

As the flames, propelled by strong winds, crept closer and closer to the house and a palm tree in the yard caught fire, it became too dangerous for Reilly, who was doing his best to soak the wood-shingled walls of the house to prevent them from catching on fire.

“It started getting out of control, and the firemen called me off,” Reilly said, so he grabbed the family dog and left.

The Fransens, meanwhile, were speeding home from a vacation in Las Vegas that they cut short when they heard news of the fire.

Their house was not significantly damaged, but neighbor Natolie Ochi’s house on a cliff overlooking the canyon bore the brunt of the flames.

Authorities still don’t know what caused the blaze that consumed about 35 acres in the canyon before it was put out Monday night, but investigators aren’t ruling out arson.

Fire investigators have identified persons of interest in the fire and are following up on a couple of investigative leads, Newport Beach Fire Chief Steve Lewis told the City Council Tuesday evening.

Investigation crews plan to continue searching through the charred dirt and interviewing neighbors for the next couple days.

“This one’s going to take a while to think through,” said Fire Capt. Rob Beuch, who was looking around the blackened canyon with a team of men Tuesday afternoon.

He said there were no immediate clues that indicated beyond a doubt whether the fire was natural or man-made. Concerns like that were secondary in Ochi’s mind, though, as she cleaned up the torched rubble that filled her back yard.

Her metal fence was eaten by flames, all of her yard furniture melted, and the line of bushes separating her house from the Fransens was black and leafless.

One thing is certain, though: if fire fighters hadn’t responded when they had, the fire likely would have jumped from house to house and could have burned down the whole neighborhood, Beuch said.

The fire started low in the canyon and worked its way up as embers were blown by the wind, officials said.

Along with 300 other neighbors, Ochi evacuated her house when she and her housekeeper saw smoke coming up the hillside, but she didn’t go far.

“I couldn’t leave my house. I wanted to see if it burned or not,” Ochi said. “I just spent the last five years of my life working on this house.”

No other damages to houses were reported, but large swaths of vegetation in the canyon were wiped out.

The fire made it all the way up to the nearby San Joaquin Reservoir, which helicopters used to fill up tanks of water to drop on the flames.

In the zones hit by the fire, all that remains are charred tree trunks and cacti and succulents that look like melted wax sculptures.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].