Looters follow flames

LA SHERIFF: POLICE ARE ARRESTING STRANGERS FOUND IN EVACUATION ZONE

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National Guard soldiers head to area as back-up force.

Nicholas Norman managed to save his home using little more than buckets of water when towering flames ripped through his neighborhood in a suburb of Los Angeles. But now he's facing a new danger: looters.

After surviving the terror of a chaotic wind-driven fire, Norman was at his Altadena house when he saw two suspicious men in the hours before dawn on Thursday. "They were testing doors and looking in windows" of homes that had been evacuated, he said.

Norman, a teacher, said a police officer friend told him that looters had been arrested a few blocks away just hours earlier.