A siege of fire : homeowners bracing for danger season : preparedness: throughout the hillside communities of northern los angeles county, jittery residents are checking hoses for leaks and making sure that dry brush is cleared.

Last year Mary Lee of Chatsworth had a choice: She could remodel her kitchen or she could replace her wood shake roof with a fire-retardant one. “I played Russian roulette and went with the

kitchen,” Lee said. But this year, after watching television images of hundreds of houses gutted by brush fires, she ordered a new roof. It should be installed within a week by Mike

Quiroga’s Van Nuys roofing company, which got 10 calls Thursday and Friday from jittery homeowners wanting to replace their shake roofs, about 50 times the normal number. “I hope we don’t

have any dry winds or arsonists between now and next Monday,” Lee said. Throughout the hillside communities of northern Los Angeles County--from tony Encino to rural Green Valley--homeowners

on Friday were bracing themselves for a hot and dangerous summer. It was a time to check hoses for leaks, gather important documents and tattle on neighbors who haven’t cleared away

drought-brittle brush. Many residents said they had been putting off such preparations for years. Not anymore. Lee, president of Los Angeles Valley College, said she wanted to order her new

roof not just for her sake, but for her neighbors’. Her house, she said, was a “torch for the whole neighborhood.” Even while fires continued to burn in Santa Barbara, and more ignited

Friday in Acton and Elizabeth Lake, calls poured in to fire prevention officers, roofing companies and even sprinkler firms from skittish residents who escaped this time, but don’t want to

risk being a victim during the next firestorm. “One lady called me first thing, and said she’d been nervous for years about having a shake roof,” said Ray Foltz, a sales representative for

Allied Roofing in Valencia. The fires prompted her to pick up the phone early Thursday morning, and by the time Foltz arrived to give her an estimate on replacing the roof, “she was

literally wringing her hands,” he said. Business consultant Patty Kolin, the woman who called Foltz, said living up against the dry hills of Saugus is “really scary,” and becomes more so

every time a fire starts nearby. Kolin, who has two small children, has an escape plan and a list of things to save once the children and pets are safe: Photograph albums, tax files, jewelry

and, if there is time, some of the art she has collected over the years. Capt. Albert Kepler of the Glendale Fire Department chuckled when he was asked how many people had called the

department’s non-emergency fire prevention phone line in recent days. “Oh, boy,” he said. “What does 10 calls an hour work out to?” Most callers asked about dry brush near their residences

that might be fodder for the next blaze, Kepler said. “People just all of a sudden open their eyes and see this tall brush right next to their house. Yesterday, it was just tall grass.

Today, they see it as a fire hazard, which is what we’ve been talking about for years,” Kepler said. When people report a neighbor’s overgrown property, Kepler said, an engine company checks

the address and issues a citation if one is merited. The property owner is billed if the city has to clear the brush, he said. He even got telephone requests for information from Australia,

where the outback is susceptible to the same devastating wildfires as Southern California, he said. Some people whose houses have come within flame’s reach of a brush fire make plans that

can be put into motion immediately. In her house in Green Valley, Sharon Coleman keeps a police and fire radio on 24 hours a day because of the brush fires that charred 2,500 acres of

hillsides in the nearby Angeles National Forest last August. “You listen very closely to the scanner,” she said. Coleman also makes sure that someone is always home to evacuate children or

pets in an emergency. “It’s a way of life and you learn to live with it,” she said. In Granada Hills, homeowner Mary Ellen Crosby squints at the two feet of shake-shingle roof remaining atop

her house on Van Gogh Street. She had the rest of the roof replaced years ago, after one of the many fires that have come close in the 22 years she has lived across from Bee Canyon Park.

Back in the early 1970s, the first time she smelled the smoke and felt the heat blast threatening her house, she was unprepared, Crosby said. “All I did was stand there and cry,” she said.

“You call your husband and wonder where your kids are.” Through the years, a plan developed. A steel box in the basement became the locker for documents and irreplaceable mementos. When

fires threatened, it became a daughter’s job to collect the photographs, a son’s to gather bedding to use at the evacuation center. Crosby would put the dog in the car with food and water

early on, to allow for a quick escape. Then, often with passing teen-agers stopping to help, she watered down her trees and grass, and, placed a sprinkler on the roof feeding water pumped

from her swimming pool. She’s seen it “snowing golf balls of fire” on her lawn. She’s lost her Italian cypress tree, and her orange trees and palm trees have been singed. But Crosby hasn’t

lost her house. “We’re ready,” she said. MORE TO READ