They Fought a Brave Battle--but Still Lost

They fought as best they could amid the heat and flames--with garden hoses, buckets of water, shovels of dirt. In the end, many were forced to surrender the effort, and they watched helplessly as their homes were destroyed.

The scene was repeated over and over again Thursday through a long, hot afternoon and into the night. In ravines above Santa Barbara. The steep canyons of the Chino Hills. Through a rolling residential neighborhood in east Glendale, where flames hopped capriciously along Solway Street, Lorinda Drive, Foxkirk Road, Ridge Drive and dozens of others--pleasant streets of a kind that could be found almost anywhere in Southern California.

If there was a message in the fiery outbursts of Thursday, it was the same brutal but almost banal message seemingly delivered every summer: This could happen to you.

At 3:30 p.m. the flames were converging from three directions on Solway Street. Neighbors evacuated with their belongings and rallied to each other’s aid.

Chuck Dery, 32, rushed to help neighbors with the ensuing fight. They watched over their shoulders for helicopters with water and fire-retardant chemicals, for firefighters, for help.

“I think we held the line somewhat until the copters made their drop,” Dery said. “The fire was that far away, he said, holding his hands about two feet apart.

At 716 Solway St., Todd Schulze, 26, was napping when a friend woke him with a warning that fire was coming over the ridge. The young man climbed on top of the garage with a garden hose and wet down the roof and trees. He would recall how the fire popped and cracked like gunshots and firecrackers, how the downed power lines arced.

“Power lines were jumping all over the road,” Schulze said.

Schulze’s father, Wayne, arrived and joined the fight, but it was too late: The house seemingly exploded in flames. It was a time for taking stock.

“This is the guy I’m glad to see,” Wayne Schulze said, putting his arm around his son’s shoulder.

There were victories. Tony Anobile stuck it out on Solway and fought the fire for hours with a single garden hose. Once he looked down and saw his sandals were afire. He directed the water stream on them and kept fighting. He saved his house.

Up the incline looking north, the silhouettes of chimneys of burned houses on Ridge Drive could be seen clearly from Solway.

“See that smoke?” said Avo Soulahian, 54, who lived on Ridge Drive with his brother, Raffy, and his family. “That’s our house. We escaped the war in Lebanon, and we came here. Nothing bad happened to us in Lebanon.”

The family had lived in the home for about a year.

The fight was over by the time Dr. Andre Henry reached the neighborhood, attempting to save his home at 695 Ridge Drive. Police had erected barricades and wouldn’t let him pass. Henry’s cousin, Luc Alexander, told Henry that he had been at home and had done what he could as a home next door caught fire and spilled burning embers.

“I had the water hose and was trying to do my best when the police came and said, ‘You have to leave now.’ And, I did.”

After hours of uncertainty, Henry would learn that his home had been spared. Fire had jumped his house, he said, and destroyed the homes of three neighbors.

Theodor Bauer, who had lived on Ridge Drive for 21 years, covered his shingle roof with a new fireproof steel roof two years ago, but when the flames came Thursday the shingles caught fire anyway and the house burned.

“I could have saved it,” Bauer said. “But four policemen dragged me away. Everything’s gone.”

Neighbors helping neighbors was a common theme in Glendale.

The fire made it to Barbara Fogarish’s block on Lorinda Drive shortly before 5 p.m.

The first houses to burn on the cul-de-sac were those with shake roofs. But composition roofs caught fire, too, and flames leaped from roof to roof.

A force of volunteer firefighters--neighbors and total strangers alike--joined in the battle, dipping buckets into swimming pools, shoveling dirt, and linking garden hoses to reach the advancing fire.

“They just came out of nowhere,” Fogarish said.

Her husband, Andrew, sprayed water from the roof of the garage. When a Pasadena Fire Department truck showed up the fire was mostly under control.

One of the volunteers was an 18-year-old named Steve Skendzic. He said he had seen the towering smoke column from where he lives in Atwater.

“I used to live in Glendale, and I didn’t want to see my ‘hood burning up,” he said. “I hate this stuff. This is awful.” Ron Cimino, 26, a computer operator for Glendale Federal Bank, was watching television newscasts at home in La Crescenta when he realized that his parents’ home on Foxkirk Road was in danger. His parents were on vacation.

When he arrived, the flames were perilously close to the house. He grabbed a garden hose to attempt to push back the fire creeping through brush. It had little effect.

Cimino, who suffered minor burns on his arms and back, held a T-shirt over his mouth as he fought the fire.

“The flames were creeping up the hill,” Cimino said. “There was a wind gust, and I was in the middle. I jumped in the pool, and that helped.”

At 4:30 p.m., Cimino said, police forced him to evacuate, and when he returned an hour later, the house had burned to the ground.

“There was no fire department there when we got kicked out,” he complained. “They were other places, but not there. I don’t think it’s fair that they make you leave when there’s no firemen. We were at least doing better than nothing.”

He had not yet told his parents that their house was gone.