In Fires' Ruins, Lessons in Prevention

But when Hogg returned, she found her back yard still green. Everything beyond it was black.

The same was true across the road in the development named Cielo. The Witch fire left behind an archipelago of green islands in a sea of scorched earth, a sprawling mansion on each one.

When Henry Nadler and his wife bought their house in 2005, fire safety "wouldn't even have occurred to me," he said. But under pressure from their homeowners association, they replaced native brush with fire-resistant plants that were still there when he returned Friday.

"When you went into this house now, you would not believe there was a fire there," he said. "My flowers are all intact. In fact, they might have gotten watered, with the water drops" from above.

A quarter-mile to the west, the contrast was stark.

Rancho Del Rio, built in the 1970s, was wild and natural, with pine trees and eucalyptus, vulnerable to wildfires because their bark is oily and their leaves or needles dry, surrounding ranch houses.

Some roads are lined with palm trees, which act "like bombs in a fire, when those embers get up in them," said Kurtis Anton, a builder.

Anton built one house that survived in Rancho Del Rio, and the garage of another that came through unharmed. "See that stucco overhang?" he said, pointing at the garage. "Embers can't get in the attic." He noted that the intact house also had a wide area of open space around it.

"After the last fire, in 2004, the fire department came and went to every house and told us what they thought we needed to get rid of or do. They gave us an approved list of plants, and we did it," said Scott Jacobs, who lives at the edge of a cul-de-sac where all four of the houses burned. "Our next-door neighbors -- they're my best friends -- they were told to take out those two big pine trees, and they didn't."

Now the blackened pines overlook heaps of ash and twisted metal. Sharon Jacobs and her daughters picked through the rubble, searching for a neighbor's engagement ring. The hubcaps of a car in the driveway had melted into streams of silver-colored lava.

The cost of clearing vegetation is higher around houses nestled in forests -- such as the San Bernardino National Forest, where hundreds of homes burned last week.

A new study by the Natural Resources Defense Council calculated an average cost of $2,510 per home in one settlement in the central Sierra Nevada range. The study pointedly noted that federal funding to encourage mitigation has been cut in half since 2001 and now amounts to only 3 percent of the $2.5 billion federal fire budget. The largest outlay is for suppression.

"A lot of the problem here is that we've become part of the fuel," said Patzert. "Nobody wants to talk about it, but in the last 50 years the population of Southern California has increased by a factor of six, especially in the areas they're having fires. It's the convergence of Mother Nature and human nature."

Geis reported from San Diego County.