One Woman’s Stand for Her House and Street : Vigil: Betty Gallagher had raised two sons in her Manzanita Drive home, and she wasn’t about to abandon it to the flames. Besides, somebody had to watch out for Mrs. Gluckson’s house.

She knew what was coming, but she wasn’t about to leave.

If the firefighters, sapped and weary from battling the firestorm, were determined to make a stand on Manzanita Drive--her street--then, by God, Betty Gallagher, age 69, would stay too.

“I’ve been here long enough to see when there were no homes on Laguna Canyon,” she said, pointing to the canyon, now dotted with one burning home after another.

All day Wednesday, Gallagher had listened to her police scanner to plot the fire’s relentless assault on the community she had lived in and loved for 69 years. But she never once thought the moment would come when she would have to decide whether to risk losing her home or her life.

Gallagher certainly didn’t think about it at 11 a.m. Wednesday, when her scanner first crackled to life with the report of a small brush fire in the canyon, just south of Interstate 5. She didn’t think about it in the early afternoon either, when the encroaching blaze pounced on Emerald Bay, scorching scores of homes there. Or even when it began its southward advance, devouring the northern finger of Laguna Canyon.

“Never did I think it would get this far. I don’t think anybody did,” Gallagher said.

But then the insatiable fire did the unthinkable: It leaped the northern fork of Laguna Canyon and began burning farther south, charring huge chunks of Mystic Hills and its half-million-dollar homes.

When police and lifeguards in Jeeps used loudspeakers to urge residents to leave, Gallagher decided to wait it out. At least for a while.

The widow had raised two sons in that home. Her husband’s Bronze Star was in there.

Besides, she thought, somebody had to watch out for Mrs. Gluckson’s home across the street. Mrs. Gluckson, like most of the residents in and around Manzanita Drive, had packed up what little belongings she could and evacuated late Wednesday afternoon.

“Oh, Mrs. Gluckson would just be devastated if something happened to her home,” said Gallagher, an admittedly ornery woman who had the uncommon ability to spin yarns about her “wonderful” neighbors, even as houses were burning around her.

Down the street from Gallagher’s house, Anneliese’s Preschool looked as if it had been abandoned mid-assignment. Crayons were strewn on table tops. Book bags lay on the floor. A pot-bellied pig and a goat huddled out back.

But Gallagher was going nowhere.

“As long as Mrs. Gluckson’s home doesn’t go,” she said, “I’ll be OK.”

By dusk, Manzanita Drive and nearby Skyline Drive had become a flash point of the fire. Firefighters brought in from Kings and Tulare counties had draped line after line of high-pressure hose down the middle of streets.

“We’re going to try to make a stand here,” said Kings County Fire Capt. Mike Virden. “You see that house there?” he asked, pointing to a home 100 yards away with a wooden shake roof. “It’s going to cook.”

Virden pointed to other houses on Manzanita with ceramic tile roofs. “These over here,” he said, “we might be able to save them.”

And Gallagher’s house?

“If she wants to stay, it’s really up to her,” Virden said. “It’s her home.”

Timber crackled. Sirens wailed. Transformers blew. Water heaters, too.

Gas hissed. Water gurgled its way down gutters. And shouts of “More water!” and “Bring the hose!” could be heard blocks away.

The air was steeped with wool-thick smoke and the raw, pungent odor of burnt wood and drywall and plastic.

“This,” a firefighter said, referring to Manzanita and Skyline, “is the eye of the dragon right now.”

Dousing her home and bushes with a garden hose, Gallagher surveyed the hillside.

“Oh, golly,” she said, pointing to a fully engulfed home about 200 yards away. “Those people up there--they just bought that house three months ago.”

Suddenly, flames began dancing on her next-door neighbor’s roof, a wooden one. “I was afraid of that,” Gallagher said. “If his house went, I knew I’d be in trouble.”

As firefighters pried off shingles and used water from a nearby pool to shower the flames, Gallagher backed her jam-packed Ford Probe into the driveway. If she needed to make a quick getaway--and there were signs that she would--she wanted to be ready. She had already loaded the most valuable of her possessions, a gun collection that included a genuine German Luger, and her jewelry. All she would have to do would be to shoo Crystal and Mighty, her dogs and only companions since her husband’s death four years ago, into the car.

But for the moment, she was safe: Firefighters stamped out the roof fire on her neighbor’s home.

As night swallowed this shell-shocked neighborhood, most of which was without power, word spread that Gallagher had stayed, and she apparently had the only working phone.

One by one, the few other residents who had flouted the evacuation orders came to Gallagher’s to make calls.

There were Dave Koorajian, 36, and Hans Ahlston, 32, who, after shuttling Koorajian’s wife and toddler to safety, literally beat back the flames licking Koorajian’s La Vista Drive home with wet towels and hundreds of buckets of water from a neighbor’s pool.

Koorajian, a computer salesman, recently lost his job; he wasn’t about to lose his home, too. “There was no way I was leaving,” he said. “I built that home 20 years ago.”

Then, there were Mel and Jan Chapman, who left their La Vista Drive home initially, but then returned to keep an all-night vigil to save it.

And Susan Elliott, mother of a 4-year-old and a 9-month-old, left her $360,000 home on Manzanita and then came back.

Said Gallagher, as she listened to them update friends and relatives: “Actually, it’s kind of nice . . . to not be alone.”

By early morning, firefighters had moved on, but Gallagher kept an anxious eye on the fires that burned brightly all about her.

For the first time, she padded into the house to take her daily ration of pills, which she had forgotten to do in the heat of the battle. “Oh, one’s for high blood pressure. One’s for potassium. And the others--I’m not sure what they are.”

All told, three of her immediate neighbor’s homes were destroyed. Just around the bend--on Skyline--barely a home stood.

“I’m calm now, but tomorrow,” Gallagher said, “I’ll fall apart.”

It wasn’t until 4:30 a.m. or so Thursday that she felt safe enough to sleep. But first, she had a call to make.

“Mrs. Gluckson--I’ve got to tell her house is OK.”

Somewhere in the city, another siren sounded.