Luck Played Major Role as Fire Roamed Like Random Killer : Blazes: One home would burn while its neighbor didn’t. Some people take their loss with touch of humor.

There are roofs that burn, roofs that smoke, roofs that save homes. Two years ago, Doug Schultz paid $20,000 to fireproof his wood shingles with a cocoon of lightweight steel.

So when the flames came late Wednesday to Fay Drive in Glendale, “I thought, this isn’t going to be a problem at all,” he recalled the morning after. Nearby, friends were salvaging a few rare coins from the rubble where Schultz’s home had stood.

The precise reason why the $540,000 house went up like a torch was not known. But the roof--”that metal stuff,” Schultz said reaching for a scrap, “this garbage right here”--was no savior. About the only thing left intact was a charred “For Sale” sign.

Caprice, both natural and human, always plays a role when the air is hot and dry and fires hopscotch destructively across Southern California. The shifting winds, the rain of embers, the good Samaritans who happened by--all help decide what burns and what doesn’t.

From Santa Barbara to San Diego, victims learned that they should expect the unexpected--that high-priced fireproof roofs have severe limitations, that freeways do not always make effective fire breaks, that handsome, affluent neighborhoods can instantly become infernos, that dialing 911 sometimes brings no help.

“I guess everybody thinks if you have a fire, the fire department is going to come,” said Vivian Nelson, whose family managed to save their home in the Rancho San Antonio section of Santa Barbara as fire raged close by. “We were on our own totally. We had no aid. No phones. And, no water when the pipes melted.”

Nelson spent the entire night with her brother and neighbors putting out hot spots on the lawn with buckets of water carried from the children’s swimming pool behind the house. The home survived because they kept it wet.

No fire engines came until three in the morning, Nelson said. “They didn’t come in to fight fires. They came in to do a mop-up.”

Chuck Wagner, Santa Barbara County’s chief administrative officer, said such criticism was unwarranted. “Oh, I have plenty of comment to the criticism,” he said. “I grew up on a farm and I used to have a lot of it on my boots.”

In Glendale, hillside dwellers were accustomed to brush fires near Verdugo Road, where Wednesday’s fire began. But those were extinguished before damage was done.

“We’ve had a fire every year--every year that brush on Verdugo burns,” said Darlene Gill, who watched from high on Avonoak Terrace as the flames crept up the hillside.

“I thought, this will never get to my house. But just in case, I turned on the sprinklers and got the hose and started watering. Within fifteen minutes the heat was so intense, I had to get out.”

Gill seemed surprised by her own resilience. Her home was ashes, but she managed to smile as friends recovered a sooty fur, a single diamond earring, a makeup kit. “That’s what I need,” Gill said with a laugh, “my beauty cream!”

Neighbor Edna Harris, too, was able to joke. “This was my kitchen,” she said of one blackened space. “I had a beautiful view. But I have an even better view now--it’s so open.”

Glendale fire Engineer Bryan Williams said much of the damage was predictable. Wooden shake roofs proved as combustible as ever, he said, and so did the overgrown brush that property owners failed to clear, and trees that had not been trimmed.

“When you got a pine tree standing next to a house and the pine tree blows up, the house usually goes with it,” Williams said.

Glendale fire officials said their manpower was overwhelmed by the speed and ferocity of the blaze, which jumped the Glendale Freeway on winds gusting up to 50 m.p.h.

“If a fire’s going to move through an area, there’s nothing that can stop it. Nature has its own laws,” said fire Capt. Corey Creasey.

Some homeowners, Williams said, took the recommended fire-prevention precautions. By the time the Glendale fire whipped itself to a frenzy, he said, “it took whatever got in the way.”

“Basically, when you’re in the middle of a blast furnace, no roof is going to save you,” said Fire Capt. Ken Richardson. “I don’t think there is any neighborhood that could have prepared for this type of threat.”

But several homeowners on the windy, narrow Glendale streets complained that fire engines took up to an hour to respond to 911 calls. They manned garden hoses and bailed water from swimming pools until it was too late. Police officers ordered people to evacuate before firefighters were in sight.

Schultz’s neighbor on nearby Glenmore Drive, Ruby Haynal, said it seemed to take forever for fire engines to arrive. She had a fire-resistant composition roof and “we kept our yard trimmed back.” The house above her, however, crumbled down in an avalanche of flame. Haynal’s home was gutted; the rose bushes in her front yard, though wilted, survived.

Nearby, Shirlene and Edwin Rogers were celebrating the success of their concrete tile roof, installed only two years ago, and their decision to refuse evacuation orders. Four houses nearby were totalled. Their home was unscathed.

“It’s a miracle,” Shirlene said. “They kept asking us to leave, but we wouldn’t. We kept hosing.” A massive fir tree in their front yard caught on fire three times, she said, and each time they put it out.

On Avonoak Terrace, Shirley Martin was crediting her prayers, her new roof and a stranger who manned a fire department hose and kept the flames at bay. Three homes immediately to the south and one to the north were wiped out, but Martin’s was spared.

Fire was surrounding the house when she closed the windows and doors and raced away. That, she figured, was part of the difference. Then, from a distance, she looked through binoculars and saw “homes on either side with flames shooting up and I thought, my God, it’s inevitable.”

Then she saw the stranger with the hose. His name, she learned later, was Gary Millikan, a La Canada Flintridge man who aspires to be a firefighter.

The charred lots flanking Martin’s homes once held houses with a variety of roofings. One was shake shingle, but others were supposed to be fireproof. Martin’s roof was the same sort of stone-coated, light-weight steel tile that Doug Schultz had put on his home. Martin said she’d do a TV commercial for the roofing company.

Schultz said he’d be talking with his lawyers. “Twenty thousand bucks,” he muttered.