Rain Falls, Heroes Rise

The sky had broken for just a bit as Mother Nature took another deep breath before letting loose. Milad Yekrangi of Rancho Santa Margarita grabbed a couple of his buddies and headed to Fire Station 45. There, with sand, shovel and loud-yellow bags they waged their small war with Big Mama.

"We're just trying to stack up as much as we can," Yekrangi said, "and take it to the people who need it."

They weren't expecting anything in return.

"Dude, you should be wearing a cape," Yekrangi is told. "You guys are heroes."

"I don't think we look at it that way," he answered back.

"No, we don't," added Kevin O'Brien, 21, of Laguna Hills, tying off the top of a bag but looking up to answer.

Yekrangi, 18, saw the news on television and the damage the storm had done in Dove Canyon. He felt compelled to help, "same as when the fires happened in '09."

It's not much. It's only sandbags. But for the house in Trabuco Canyon that got the bounty in the back of Justin Reisiger's weighted-down SUV, it mattered—even if  it was only a gesture from three nice guys with tattooed arms.

"I live in Trabuco Canyon, and my house is messed up," said Reisiger, 19, who got home at 1 a.m. on Wednesday morning only to be told by his dad, Hal, that they were getting ready to pull an all-nighter to try to minimize any damage to their home on Rancho Cielo. Every 20 minutes they checked outside, looking for any trouble that could be developing.

They threw sandbags and pumped the pool, cleared gutters and drains, diverted runoff and rerouted pumps. In the end, there didn't appear to be any structural damage, and the toll was limited to the landscaping.

"We were the only ones doing it," Reisiger said of the all-night flurry. "I sure didn't see anybody else doing it."

Then with very little sleep, he joined his friends Yekrangi and O'Brien and decided to do what they could do for someone else. They didn't know whom—just someone who needed it.