Hardships ahead for Calif. wildfire victims

Air quality concerns
Pollution control authorities across Southern California warned that smoke and ash are making the air dangerous. People with heart or respiratory disease, the elderly and children in those areas were urged to remain indoors.

Some people, like Robert Sanders of Rancho Bernardo, had no homes to return to. The 56-year-old photographer came back to find his house reduced to a smoldering pile of rubble. The fire-resistant box he kept his transparencies in was intact, but its contents were melted.

"I've lost my history," Sanders said. "All the work I've done for the past 30 years, it's all destroyed."

Nearby, Allen Jost and his wife, Edie, were among the lucky ones. Although 26 of 53 homes in their Lancashire Way neighborhood were destroyed, they lost only the spa on their back porch.

Wearing gloves and a respirator mask as he swept soot from his driveway, Jost predicted that hard-hit Rancho Bernardo would eventually bounce back.

"It's going to be a construction zone," said Jost, whose home was still without power and gas. "But the neighbors are already getting together and talking about getting a single source for demolition and design and all that. I think when people rebuild, they'll rebuild in a way that this'll never happen again. We're going to have nice new houses — in a year or two."

By noon, the neighborhood was bustling with people digging through the debris with rakes and shovels, trying to find something that had survived the inferno. Khosrow Motamedi dug up a Persian rug and part of his coin collection.

"So far as I know, no one wants to leave," said Motamedi, 41. "It's a beautiful place, under normal circumstances."

At a news conference, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged it would take time to recover.

"It won't be overnight, and it won't be easy, but we won't let up until Southern California gets back to normal," he said as he announced several relief measures.

Long road to normalcy
Until things return to normal, Renee Miller, seven months pregnant, was making do with one of dozens of portable toilets set up around Ramona. Her children, ages 8, 5 and 3, had not had showers in four days, she said, but she was swabbing them with antiseptic hand gel found at hand-washing stations.

"They are filthy little kids today," she said.

Meanwhile, more than 100 miles away in Malibu, former major league baseball player Pete LaCock cleaned up debris at his home. Everything in the house had been damaged by smoke.

"Sheets, clothes, paintings, everything," he said. "It'll take two to three months to get back to normal."

Still, LaCock considered himself lucky. Although the Presbyterian church down the street was destroyed, firefighters managed to stop the flames at his garage and guest house. "The firemen were so great," he said.

One thing working in firefighters' favor was the weather. The sinister desert winds that gusted as high as 100 mph earlier in the week were gone and not expected to return any time soon.

Firefighters continued to battle dangerous blazes in many areas, including one that crested San Diego County's 5,500-foot Palomar Mountain, site of the world-famous Palomar Observatory. Crews cleared brush and set backfires Friday to halt the flames' advance.

The observatory, operated by the California Institute of Technology and home to the world's largest telescope when it was dedicated in 1948, did not appear to be in immediate danger, said observatory spokesman Scott Kardel.

To the southeast, a fire that had already destroyed more than 1,000 homes churned its way toward Julian. The town of 3,000, in the rolling hills of an apple-growing region, was ordered evacuated.

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