Home destroyed by fire

Widespread outage in 911 emergency phone system may have led to slow response to blaze on Temple Hills Drive.A computer glitch that downed the Laguna Beach 911 emergency telephone system Tuesday may have delayed response time to an early morning fire that destroyed a $2.5-million home on Temple Hills Drive, officials said.

“There was a delay in notification of us -- the telephone problems contributed to that,” said Laguna Fire Division Chief Jeff LaTendresse.

The massive outage, which affected areas of Orange and Los Angeles counties, stemmed from a computer malfunction in the Long Beach central office of Verizon communications, officials said.

The 911 system and police nonemergency numbers for the city of Laguna Beach worked only intermittently Tuesday, said Rita Fraser, support services manager for the city.

Neighbors reportedly tried to call 911 to report the fire but could not get through. Laguna Beach Fire officials said they received the first call at 4:15 a.m. Tuesday; one resident said she and her husband began calling 911 at 3:45 a.m.

Fran Chilcote, whose home shares a fence with the burned structure, said it was approximately 30 minutes from the time the fire was spotted until fire crews responded.

Chilcote awoke early Tuesday to see smoke and flames coming from the house next door.

She and her husband called 911, and when that didn’t work, Chilcote said she activated her home’s alarm system in hopes that the alarm company would respond.

Several neighbors tried to report the fire, Chilcote said. Her husband’s 911 call was finally answered by a dispatcher in Santa Ana, Chilcote said.

“I could have driven down to the fire station in three minutes if I’d known 911 was not responding,” Chilcote said.

When firefighters arrived, the home was fully involved with heavy fire. Neighbors told firefighters the home was up for sale and was not occupied at the time, officials said.

Fire crews from the Orange County Fire Authority worked with Laguna Beach Fire to contain the blaze within an hour, fire officials said in a prepared statement.

Fire investigators had not determined the cause of the fire as of late Wednesday, LaTendresse said.