Neighborhood Thanks 2 Who Saved Homes : Inferno: Block party honors Steve Sandler and friend Jack Staggs, who stayed behind in Laguna Beach and beat back the flames during an 8-hour ordeal.

The others fled. Steve Sandler stayed.

Homes exploded around him and dry shrubbery erupted in flames during the Laguna Beach fires Oct. 27. But Sandler, 44, stubbornly anchored himself on the rooftop of his split-level house on Coast View Drive and shot a geyser of water into a sky of black smoke.

For eight hours, from about 4 p.m. to midnight, Sandler and a friend stood their ground and never left, protecting a neighborhood that honored them Sunday with a block party of hamburgers and hot dogs for their part in keeping the fire from spreading.

“My home wouldn’t be here without them,” said Mildred Padelford, Sandler’s next-door neighbor, who is in her 80s.

Neighbors stopped by to pump Sandler’s hand, relate their own experience of that frightening day of the Laguna fire and to quiz him about everything that happened. Residents of Canyon View, Buena Vista, Temple Hills and Coast View were invited.

The afternoon of the fire, Sandler’s wife couldn’t believe her husband would actually stay with the house while everyone else was nervously packing up and leaving their possessions to fate.

Susan Sandler was already out the door with the kids, the Scottish fold cat, the snakes, the monitor lizards and a few personal items. From where she was--far below the hillside--her home, and husband, looked like they were lost in the blaze.

The fire was racing along the ridge of Mystic Hills, ran up Temple Hills and came two houses away. With a towel wrapped around his mouth to keep the smoke out, Sandler drew water from his 10,000-gallon back yard pool and soaked his surroundings, including the homes on either side of him.

With Sandler on the roof, his friend Jack Staggs stood below, using a garden hose to fight the fire. Staggs, an auto mechanic from South Laguna, grabbed buckets of water and threw them across the thicket of flames next door.

“We knew that if we lost the area we were hosing down, then we might lose a whole lot more,” Staggs said. “The firemen came by and saw us working on the roof. They never asked us to leave.”

Sandler said he got the word from his wife at about 2 p.m. that the fire was near. Speeding from his import-export automobile parts business in Santa Ana, Sandler couldn’t stand the delay: He drove in lanes of oncoming traffic to make it back home in two hours.

He had sent his 19-year-old son to get a big industrial pump but they ended up not using it because they didn’t want to drain the pool.

But from their own pool pump and with a garden hose tapped into the city’s water, they sprayed everywhere their hoses would reach. In those nearby areas out of reach, they used buckets of water.

The fires got so close and grew so hot that Sandler and Staggs continually hosed each other off. Their eyes were sunburned and they could barely breathe.

“The whole time I was fighting the fire, I was so in shock that I don’t really remember the whole thing,” Sandler said. “It was like I was in the middle of something that didn’t really happen.”

Susan Sandler made a few return trips to check on her husband, but the smoke was heavy and she gasped for air. At 7:30 p.m., with the fire raging, she made it a block away from the house and had to squeeze between houses and back yards to reach Coast View Drive.

“I could see him standing on the roof and I yelled up, ‘Steven, the fire is all around you!’ but the pump was running and it was hard for him to hear,” she said. “He said something like, ‘I’ll get out of here if I have to.’ ”

By 8 p.m., she had heard on the television news that Sandler and Staggs were still with the house and that everyone was safe.

An hour later, she was back and the area was filled with police cars and firetrucks. A few friends had made their way to the Sandler home on bikes, wondering how they could help.

“Steve looked at me and said, ‘I’m starving,’ and I made everyone peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” Susan Sandler said.

That night, as embers faded, Sandler said he was so keyed up from the day’s events that he drank three beers to help him fall asleep.

“And I don’t even drink,” he said.

For 10 days after the fire, Sandler was ill with strep throat and couldn’t get out of bed.

“I was physically exhausted,” he said. “The fire took a lot out of me.”

The Sandlers, who have been married 20 years, moved to the house four years ago. Steve Sandler said he never thought twice about whether or not to try to save it.

“The police came by at some point and said I had to leave,” he said. “I told them, ‘I’m not leaving. I’ve got water and I’m going to stay.’ This was a house I worked hard for and I wasn’t going to let it burn.”