COLUMN ONE : Knowing When It’s Time to Go : Firefighters say some residents who stayed to protect their homes hurt more than they helped. The size and ferocity of recent blazes made individual stands harder for crews to handle.

They stood on rooftops, garden hoses in hand, doing battle with the flames that raced toward their homes.

Their images flashed across television screens day after day: the everyman heroes battling to save their own little plots of ground, even after they had been ordered to leave.

Turn to the firefighters, though, and a different picture emerges of the people who made their stands with garden hoses. Instead of brave, they are painted as foolhardy. Instead of a help, they are called a hindrance, the reason more homes could not be saved.

In local mythology and in fact, some old canyon hands know the rules of the game and have been able to perform rooftop miracles while staying out of firefighters’ way. This time out, in part because of the ferocity of the firestorms, staying behind was more difficult.

“It’s not a heroic act, it’s a foolish act,” Kern County Deputy Chief Charles Dowdy said as he stood ready with his fire company along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. “It places a greater value on their homes than it does on the lives of my men. It’s kind of like the guy who runs after a purse snatcher. He’s a hero as long as he isn’t stabbed or beaten up.”

As the fires of Southern California were finally contained by week’s end, firefighters took issue with the idea of stubborn homeowners as heroes. Some said they understood the desire to defend one’s home. But many told stories of nearly being run over by frantic residents, of coming close to losing rigs because of them, or of having their work hampered by streets clogged with cars as people waited until the last minute to escape.

They also told of being cursed by impatient homeowners, losing water pressure when they needed it most and having to rescue stranded citizens when they should have focused their efforts on battling the flames.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Emerald Bay, a ritzy Laguna Beach neighborhood that was ravaged by fire last week.

Orange County Battalion Chief Steve Whitaker, who was chief of operations at the Laguna fire, said his men were handicapped by those who refused to leave.

“Half of the 100 firefighters we engaged in Emerald Bay were sent in to rescue people who refused to leave,” Whitaker said. “That means close to 50 firefighters were not able to fight the fire. I know it hampered our ability to do the job we needed to do.”

Whitaker said that because so many people refused to leave, a helicopter could not drop fire retardant on the flames, contributing to the loss of at least half a dozen homes.

“They were in the way,” he said. “It’s frustrating. I believe I could have done more with the resources I had to save homes.”

As natural calamities go, brush fires at least seem possible to defeat. Unlike an earthquake or a flash flood, fires can be seen coming miles away. Bags can be packed. And, at times, homeowners can stand on their roofs and try to fight off the embers.

They did it this time because they have done it successfully in the past, when other brush fires have swept down out of the canyons.

Tom Pecsok of Malibu spent hours on his shake-shingle roof dousing flames last Tuesday. He had worn a pair of his wife’s cooking mitts to protect against the heat.

“I have always heard you should stay with your house. I thought it was the best thing to do,” he said. “I don’t think I was foolhardy at all. I thought I was totally prepared.”

But firefighters said the flames that raked Southern California in the last 12 days, fanned by Santa Ana winds, were in a league of their own. The brush was thicker than it had been in decades. And the dryness of summer had turned it into an inferno waiting to happen.

Firefighters said that in most cases no amount of water could have protected homes from the kind of heat generated by the flames, that the water hosed onto roofs by owners evaporated long before the fire even got near.

“It’s like trying to fight a house fire with a squirt gun,” said Capt. Fernando Caldera of the Chino Valley Fire Department, who helped battle both the Banning and Calabasas/Malibu blazes.

The condemnation of homeowners was not universal. Some firefighters said they understood why people would stay--that there is so much emotion wrapped up in a home, so much at stake, that homeowners are willing to take such risks.

“I put myself in their place,” Orange County Battalion Chief Dan Runnestrand said. “Professionally, I say stay off the roof. But if it’s a matter of just keeping the sparks off, you’d have a hard time convincing me to get off the roof.”

In fact, Los Angeles Assistant Chief Tony Ennis said that help from residents has actually been encouraged in previous fires, and that he had always had a positive experience with people who had stayed behind.

This week, resting firefighters recounted some of the events they had seen on the front lines. Although homeowners and fire crews often worked together, there were exceptions:

Orange County firefighter Jim Shook told of the two homeowners from hell. His crew was fighting the Calabasas/Malibu fire at Big Rock when the couple first appeared in their Jeep, racing to their home so fast they nearly ran into the firefighters.

As the flames moved closer, the couple decided it was no longer safe and asked the firefighters for a ride down the hill, but only after they packed a few things. The minutes ticked by, and still neither emerged from the house. Fire crews were screaming for them to get on the truck. And when they finally did, the firefighters had to abandon a burning home to bring the couple down to Pacific Coast Highway.

Ten minutes later, Shook said he heard a broadcast over the emergency radio that the man had returned to the house and firefighters from another department were trying desperately to make sure he was safe.

“The moral of the story is to let firefighters do their job,” said Shook. “We could have done our jobs a lot quicker if we didn’t have these people to worry about.

“Maybe some of them do get lucky and save their homes,” he said “But people fail to remember that this was a huge fire and generally they are not prepared for it.”

At the staging area near Pepperdine University, Los Angeles County firefighter Brad Joyce recalled people who insisted on waiting until the last minute to leave. They stayed until the flames were dangerously close, only to demand that firefighters move their truck so they could get their car out of the driveway. But Joyce said the fire hoses had been laid out to protect three nearby houses and the truck could not back out.

“They really cussed at us. They called us a lot of things,” Joyce said. “Of course, when we saved their house, they thought we were the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

Although it is technically against the law to remain behind after an evacuation order, firefighters said this week they feel stymied by their lack of enforcement power.

“People are going to be stupid,” Orange County Fire Department Capt. Gary Stenberg said. “I’ve yelled at people to leave. I’ve told people, ‘I want you out of here and I want you out now.’ But there is only so much I can do.”

Jerry Shacklett, a captain with the Orange County Fire Department, said he tried to reason with a 75-year-old man who was adamant about staying in his home at Big Rock in Malibu. Nothing could make the old man change his mind.

“He was bound and determined to stay with the house,” Shacklett said. “I told him I couldn’t worry about him and fight fires, too. I was really concerned we would have to drop what we were doing to protect him. He was a constant distraction. It wasn’t until he saw the fire and perceived that there was a threat that he decided to leave.”

And finally, Los Angeles Fire Capt. Paul Schuster said he and his men were fighting the fire in the hills to the east of Malibu when flames came shooting over the rise. And then the worst happened.

“In the middle of all that, the hydrant completely died,” said Schuster. “My engineer later told me, ‘Cap, I thought I was going to die.’ ”

They avoided being burned, but Schuster said they might not have lost pressure had so many residents not been using garden hoses.

Rooftop heroics are seen as the flashiest--and least effective--parts of a homeowner’s firefighting repertoire. Firefighters said many of the homes that were lost could have been saved with a minimum of common-sense precautions before the flames came: clearing brush, using fire-retardant plants and eliminating shake-shingle roofs. But firefighters said they saw many homes that went up in smoke because nothing had been done in advance.

“You’ve got some of the dumbest people in the world living in Southern California,” said Dowdy of the Kern County Fire Department, referring to the lack of precautions for the expensive canyon homes that burned.

Or as California Department of Forestry firefighter Michael Maendle more tactfully put it: “If they had a defensible space around the house, it would already be safe. Then they wouldn’t have to wait to the last minute and use water.”