A strike team of about 20 firefighters from Modesto and throughout Stanislaus County were summoned to battle the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles County which has inflicted historic devastation to residences and businesses in Altadena.
The region has seen the worst devastation in Pacific Palisades where multi-million dollar homes have been reduced to ash and rubble. So far at least 24 persons have been killed and an estimated 150,000 left homeless and more than 10,000 structures destroyed.
Jeff Serpa, the former Ceres Fire Battalion Chief who is now with Modesto Fire Department, and others have been assigned to the Eaton Fire on the eastern flank of the San Fernando Valley. The strike team was dispatched shortly after the massive firestorms erupted like a blow torch on Tuesday, Jan. 7. The crew left Stanislaus County at 11 p.m., drove the five-plus hours and arrived at the Eaton Fire in and around Pasadena.
“I have not experienced anything like this in my career,” Serpa told the Courier on Monday morning.
Fire engines from Modesto, Stanislaus Consolidated, Burbank-Paradise, Denair, Turlock Rural and West Stanislaus fire departments are part of the strike team.
“We were immediately assigned to Division Zulu which was in the area of Altadena and immediately went to work protecting structures, evacuating residents and trying to limit the destruction,” said Serpa. “We did our best with what we had. It’s always a struggle with amassing enough resources to battle a fire like this.”
Without question, the biggest enemy were the fierce winds that defied the logical path of storms when fires swept down hills in addition to up hills.
“It’s extremely difficult to fight a fire when you have 60 to 80 mph sustained winds and 90 mph gusts but our primary job was life safety, getting the residents out of their homes and then once we had them evacuated within our area we immediately went to work protecting structures.
One building saved by Serpa’s team helped to save the Super King grocery store near Lincoln and Woodbury in Altadena.
“We had roughly softball sized burning embers landing on the roof of a grocery store that we pulled up to first thing,” said Serpa. “We had numerous houses burning, we had others threatened, we had people that needed to be evacuated. It was literally all hands on deck.”
While firefighters relied on neighbors to advise when elderly residents needed assistance getting out, it was difficult trying to keep people from returning back to their homes to retrieve valuables, personal belongings and heirlooms.
“They evacuated a couple of different elderly care facilities using city buses, basically put them on a bus, got them out and took them to either to a similar facility in another city or took them to the evacuation center which was in Pasadena.”
As of Monday morning, Serpa said that the fires were largely contained but crews are concerned about a wind event coming in Monday with 60-70 mph winds.
“That really puts everybody on a heightened state of alert. Everyone’s on pins and needles wondering what this thing is going to do. Is there going to be another start? Is this fire going to kick back up? So everybody is just very cautious.”
Serpa explained that in an urban firestorm, embers are picked up and scattered across a wide area of residences and businesses, simultaneously setting off multiple structure fires at once.
“You’ll get dozens and dozens of fires that start and crews start going into these fires and by the time they can get into the area, now we have 20 or 30 structures burning and in 10 minutes we have 40 or 50 structures burning. It multiplies exponentially. In an hour we have 100, 250 structures burning.”
A typical fully involved structure fire will get the attention of five engines. In the Eaton Fire, a structure fire might get one firefighter trying to douse the flames “because that’s all we have,” he added.
Serpa did see some houses remain unburned in a block of devastation.
“In the neighborhood we were in, we would have two or three or four houses burning and we would go to the next one that wasn’t burning and that would be our stand. Our men and women did phenomenal work holding their ground, really taking that stand against people’s property and saying, we’re not going to have any more burn.”
“We were engaged in like a five-block area. We lost roughly two dozen homes but we saved probably twice that many, conservatively, including the grocery store. We do the best we can. Some of them we win, and some of them we don’t.”
Serpa refused to speculate on what started the fires in Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills and Altadena at a critical time but said it could have sparked a thousand different ways, from a car fire to a downed electric line.
Depending on what happens this week, Serpa said strike teams on fires of this magnitude tend to remain on scene for two weeks.
“We can extend with our fire chief’s permission to 21 days but in my experience we’ll be here roughly two weeks as long as things continue to progress like they are. If we get a wind event and get another fire sparked off, we could be here for the full 21 days.”
Relief crews would then come in to send the local team home.
