Homes Lost as Malibu Fires Roar Back

Nov. 25, 2007— -- As the battle against the flames raged on, residents of Malibu shifted through smoldering ruins in a fruitless search for the familiar.

"It's the weirdest thing to not be able to say that you're going home," lamented one fire victim, Katherine Strange.

The inferno this weekend incinerated house after house in this idyllic mountainside California community. But even more homes might have been lost if not for an unprecedented move by fire officials.

"We lost dozens of homes," Tom Barry, chief of the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told ABC News. "But it could have been in the hundreds had we not had pre-positioned resources at the ready."

After being criticized for mobilizing too few resources during last month's devastating rash of wildfires, officials deployed manpower and equipment to Southern California even before the fires broke out. The forecast had called for windy and extremely dry conditions.

"This time, we moved 449 engines and over 102 aircraft from north to south," added Barry. "We've never done anything like that before."

This week's fire originated in the neighborhood of Corral Canyon. Officials said that, within an hour after they received the first emergency call, the blaze was being battled with resources that normally take an entire day to mobilize.

Firefighters saved homes as the flames jumped from one neighbor's house to another.

"I was really scared," said Malibu resident Al Brody. "I saw the fires coming to my neighbor's house."

Officials have called the fire suspicious. They think it may have been started by people, though they are not calling it arson.

But despite the quick response, officials say the lesson of this week's fire is that, even an army of firefighters at the ready are no match for extremely windy and dry conditions, such as the ones Southern California has endured over the past month.

If there's a spark, it's not a matter of whether homes will burn, but rather, how many.