Men Put Out Roof Blaze in Yorba Linda : Rescue: The pair spot brush fire from about one mile away and rush over, scaling a hill and climbing atop a home to save it.

Two men were credited with saving a house from a brush fire apparently started by illegal fireworks, fire officials said.

Jeff Leinen, 23, of Anaheim and Ron Sherman, 22, of Placentia scaled a hill and then jumped on the roof of a home on Fairlynn Boulevard to extinguish a small blaze, county Fire Department spokeswoman Kathleen Cha said.

Sherman said he and Leinen were working in Leinen’s front yard, about one mile from the fire, when they saw the smoke. Sherman, a truck driver, said they grabbed some gardening tools and headed toward the fire.

“We knew we could probably get there faster than the firemen, so we headed over,” Sherman said. “When we got close, we saw the fire on the hill was too big, so we went up the hill to tell people to put their sprinklers on. Then we heard the helicopter say that a roof was on fire and we went over there. The flames were coming out of the roof so we got a hose and put it out.”

Leinen, a building manager who is studying to be a firefighter at Rancho Santiago College, said they arrived about three minutes before firefighters arrived.

“The fire wasn’t that huge, but if nobody had put it out, it would have burned the house down,” Leinen said.

Damage to the home was limited to $1,000, Cha said. About one acre of grass and shrubbery was also burned in the 12:53 p.m. fire. A second home on Acacia Hill Drive suffered minor damage when an ember landed on its roof, causing a fire that firefighters quickly extinguished, Cha said.

“Of several homes in the area, those were the only two with shake wood roofs,” Cha said. “None of the other homes with other types of roofs caught fire, even though some were closer to the main fire.”

Cha said three boys, ages 15 or 16, were seen running from the scene when the fire broke out.

“They apparently threw something into the grass and it exploded, probably illegal fireworks,” Cha said.