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On July 1, 1985, flames raged out of control in the hills above Palo Alto, destroying 13 homes and leaving more than 40 people homeless in what fire officials called one of the most destructive blazes in Santa Clara County history at the time.
“It was like a tornado of fire zig-zagging through a town,” Palo Alto police officer Dennis Neverve, who was the first patrolman on the scene, told the Peninsula Times Tribune in an article on July 2, 1985.
Fire investigators were certain the blaze was deliberately set and arrested a suspect just hours after the fire was reported but released him later that day because of insufficient evidence.
In the following weeks, several Peninsula communities formed a regional secret witness program and offered a $1,000 reward in an attempt to obtain information about who set the fire.
With no witnesses, no fingerprints, no footprints and charred evidence, the case went cold and remains unsolved 40 years later.
A fire is set off Arastradero Road
The weather was hot and windy along the Peninsula that Monday afternoon when an alarm came into the Palo Alto Fire Department at 3:14 p.m. – a fire had broken out just over a 1-mile stretch on both sides of Arastradero Road, near the Page Mill Road intersection west of Interstate 280 in Los Altos Hills.
Driven by 100-degree temperatures and 15-25 mph winds, the fire traveled across 1,000 acres, jumping from grass to eucalyptus trees, and moved uphill toward a cluster of homes in the neighborhood near Liddicoat Drive, where it wreaked most of its damage.
More than 200 firefighters and 60 emergency units from 21 separate agencies from as far as South San Francisco and Morgan Hill responded to the blaze. The fire was fought from the air, too. Two airtankers from the California Department of Forestry dropped fire retardant around homes, while two rented helicopters doused the area with 300-gallon buckets of water from Felt Lake and nearby swimming pools for hours until the sun had set.
Local residents and onlookers who had seen the smoke from miles away formed a fire brigade, shoveling dirt over spreading embers and moving horses and other animals from the street.
“I saw it from down in Los Altos and took my moped up to see what was going on,” resident Mark Slocum told the Peninsula Times Tribune on July 2, 1985. “When I asked if I could give a hand, they said, ‘grab a shovel and start working.'”
Despite the large response, progress was slow. The hills, trees and winding roads made it difficult for firefighters to access the fire.
The blaze, now known as the Liddicoat Fire, raged out of control near Page Mill and Arastradero roads for several hours, spreading embers across dry hillside grass faster than firefighters could keep up. One news account described eucalyptus trees erupting into “100-foot-tall fountains of fire”.
Armed with shovels and garden hoses
Many residents in the neighborhood wouldn’t leave; instead, they grabbed garden hoses, buckets and shovels in a frantic effort to keep the blaze from igniting their rooftops.
“It was pandemonium out there for awhile,” Palo Alto police Lt. Ron Louie told the Peninsula Times Tribune.
Local newspapers reported teens running house to house with brooms and buckets and tied shirts and rags over their faces to protect themselves against the smoke.
Firefighters rescued two boys holed up in their homes under their beds and rescued another resident whose pants were literally on fire.
Dayna Lynd-Pugh, owner of the 10-acre Flying Tail Farms stables on Arastradero Road, told local news reporters that she rushed through burning grassland to reach her 15-month-old daughter and set free 59 horses from her stables, allowing them to escape as best they could.
Another resident said he tried to get into his car to escape when he saw the fast-moving flames coming over the hill, but the doors were too hot to touch. Many residents, according to local news accounts, escaped with just the clothes on their backs.
By the time the Liddicoat Fire was declared under control nearly five hours later at 7:56 p.m., it had charred 150 acres, destroyed four homes in Palo Alto, nine homes in Los Altos Hills, and caused an estimated $15 million in damages (the equivalent of $44.7 million today), according to various media accounts.
There were no human fatalities but numerous injuries were suffered by firefighters, and four horses died.
The hunt for an arsonist
Fire investigators determined that the blaze had been deliberately set in a number of different spots by an arsonist.
Investigators told the Peninsula Times Tribune that the area along Arastradero Road, where the blaze was first reported, was an unlikely site for accidental fires.
“There are no electricity lines, no stoves, no manmade ways for it to start there,” Palo Alto fire inspector Dan Heiser said during the investigation.
One person reported seeing someone throwing flaming objects from a car on Arastradero Road before the fire swept through the hills, but investigators were unable to verify the account.
Palo Alto police arrested an arson suspect within hours after the fire broke out. Due to a recent string of arson fires in Woodside, La Honda and Los Altos, investigators had been on the lookout for suspects, so when a man drove up to the fire scene in a gray pickup truck that fit the description of a vehicle driven by an arson suspect in three recent La Honda fires, police arrested him.
The 36-year-old man was a volunteer firefighter with the La Honda fire brigade. He told investigators he had stopped on Alpine Road to buy a soda when he saw the smoke and drove down to the scene to help. Police were unable to find any physical evidence in the man’s truck to link him to the fire. They released him, and he promised to go to the police station the next day to take a lie detector test, according to an article published in the San Jose Mercury News on Aug. 2, 1985. He ended up hiring a lawyer instead. He was never charged in connection with the fire, nor was anyone else.
Stricter fire regulations
At the time of the fire, Los Altos Hills was one of the few hillside communities in the county that didn’t require fire-retardant roofing. A year earlier, voters had rescinded a law that the Los Altos Hills Town Council passed in 1981 requiring residents to use flame-retardant materials when building or replacing a roof.
When they initially passed the ordinance, the Council was concerned that embers could spread from one burning house to another one’s roof and start a series of fires, particularly in the summer. The extra cost of fire-retardant roofing would be an “insurance” against fire hazards, town leaders said at the time.
The Los Altos Hills Committee for Reasonable Roofing, which led the referendum, had other thoughts. The citizen group said flame-retardant roofing materials would cost 30% more than conventional materials and didn’t last as long. They criticized the law as an intrusion by the local government.
“One of the major justifications for rescinding the ordinance was that there never had been a roof fire in the hills, until now,” Mayor Louise Dronkert told the Mercury News days after the fire.
The devastating blaze ultimately led to stricter fire safety regulations in Los Altos Hills.
Within a year, the town began spraying a weed-killing chemical along the entire road and pathway system for the first time, and adopted a series of recommendations from a citizen’s task force formed shortly after the fire to identify ways the city could prevent fires.
The guidelines encouraged residents to choose fire-retardant roofs when rebuilding and to establish green belts around their homes (both of these practices have since become requirements). Those with swimming pools were encouraged to install gas-powered pool pumps that could be used to hose down roofs that weren’t fire-retardant, if needed.
The town approved a more aggressive weed abatement program requiring residents to clear their property of brush every year by July 1 or risk footing the bill for cleanup work ordered by the fire marshal to make a property compliant.
The town also established a series of neighborhood emergency networks and initiated the formation of the Interagency Forest Hazard Mitigation Group with representatives from Palo Alto, Cupertino, Midpeninsula Open Space District and Santa Clara County to coordinate firefighting and prevention efforts between various jurisdictions.
