The Verdugo/San Rafael Fires of 1964 – Part 3

We continue the dramatic story of the dual fires on the Verdugo Mountains and the San Rafael Hills in March 1964. This massively destructive fire was driven by winds with gusts of up to 100 miles per hour. It burned thousands of acres and destroyed scores of homes in just one terrifying day.

The fires had started at dawn on Monday and by mid-morning they had already covered thousands of acres. Nervous Montrose merchants watched the fire flash across the Verdugos, covering hundreds of yards in just minutes.

On the Chevy Chase Canyon side, the fire was spreading north and south, running away from the firemen arriving on scene. Glendale College lay in its path. Students arriving for morning classes immediately realized their danger. Instead of fleeing, they went on the attack. Somehow they organized themselves and 250 students charged up the hill behind the campus (before the 2 Freeway was there). Some students pieced together aging firehoses from the school’s firefighting equipment and began hosing down the brush around the school. Others found tools and began to build a 20-foot wide firebreak between the fire and the school.

The winds were shifting and a group of students were trapped by flames, but escaped with only minor burns. Down below at the school, service clubs organized water, coffee and sandwiches for the amateur firefighters. The firebreak proved effective, and the student firefighters next turned their attention to a couple of threatened apartment buildings, which were also saved.

The school’s president told the newspaper: “We arrived at the campus in the morning and kids were already on the job. You would have thought they were trained firefighters. And they did it on their own. There was no recruitment or prompting by the faculty. They simply recognized the emergency and went into action on their own volition.”

Several football players from CV High School had the same idea and joined firefighters at Whiting Woods to help pull hoses. A ’64 CVHS grad remembers: “The football players were astonished at how difficult and exhausting it was, and appeared to come away from the experience with a high respect for firemen. It took a lot to impress those football players!”

On the southern side of Chevy Chase Canyon the wind pushed the fire south over the hill into Glenoaks Canyon, burning several homes there. Wind gusts pushed the flames up over the next set of hills and down into Eagle Rock (before the 134 Freeway) where it began consuming houses there. Heading east now, the fire was licking at the edges of Pasadena.

By the afternoon of Monday, less than 12 hours after the fire started, the flames were burning homes in the Crescenta Valley, Chevy Chase and Glenoaks canyons, Eagle Rock, Glendale and Burbank. Thousands of residents had been evacuated from Burbank to Pasadena. And firefighters from all over Greater Los Angeles were blanketing the area.

The fires burned all night and all through Tuesday. By 5 p.m. Tuesday the fire department declared the fire “contained, but not controlled.” It had been a frustrating fire for the firemen. They had never been able to make a stand because of the fluidity of the wind-driven flames. They were constantly chasing the fire as it jumped canyons. The winds had never stopped the entire time. They finally contained the fire on Tuesday night just in time for another major fire in Newhall. Fifty-one brave firefighters had been injured, four seriously. In the end, it was 38 homes destroyed, and scores more damaged. Over 9,000 acres had burned.

The Crescenta Valley section of the Verdugo Mountains has not burned since then. Beneath those beautiful green hills is 54 years’ worth of fuel, just waiting for a spark. It’s important to note that in 1964 there was only a small fraction of the hillside development that there is today. Although we have better air resources for firefighting today, the helicopters and fixed wing aircraft would not have been able fly safely against 100 mph gusts. We can only imagine how many homes would be lost today in a similar fire.

  mike lawler