On January 7, they were one of the first teams to the scene as 100 mph winds tore through Altadena. Here, Engine 732 reflects on the first night fighting California’s second most destructive fire in history
Words by LESLEY M. M. BLUME
Like most experienced firefighters, Captain Paramedic Paul Porraz can read fire smoke like musicians read sheet music. “Whether it’s white, dark brown, black: that shows what’s burning,” he says. The San Gabriel Valley native estimates he has fought hundreds of fires in his 20-year career: brush fires, wildfires, and vehicle fires; fires in houses, apartment complexes, and commercial buildings. But battling the Eaton Fire — which incinerated 14,000 acres in Altadena, the equivalent of around 11,000 football fields, and claimed at least 17 lives — was a once-in-a-career event. At least, that’s what he hopes.
Firefighters across the region had been warned that the night of January 7 would likely be a long one. Urgent red flag warnings forecasting unusually high winds — possibly reaching up to 100 miles per hour — plus extremely dry conditions and low humidity had been issued for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It was prime fire weather. After eight months without rain, the dry brush on the hillsides across the region was kindling, practically beckoning embers to set it alight. A fire in the Palisades, which ignited at 10:30 a.m., was already raging and had claimed more than 1,200 acres by the time Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency at 5:30 p.m. “This is a highly dangerous windstorm creating extreme fire risk,” he announced, urging residents to heed evacuation orders. “And we’re not out of the woods yet.” This would turn out to be the epitome of understatement.
Just after 6 p.m., Captain Porraz and a team of three other Pasadena-based colleagues — Firefighter Paramedic Kari Jenkins, Firefighter Masateru Chae, and Fire Engineer Sean Katt — had been standing in line to order dinner at the Stonefire Grill restaurant in Altadena. The team, then staffing Pasadena Engine 732, had already put out a small brush fire on Rim Road at 3:30 that afternoon, but it had quickly been subdued.
At 6:14 p.m., as they waited their turn to order, a call came in announcing a brush fire in Eaton Canyon. By 6:23 p.m., helicopters equipped with water tanks were also being dispatched to the location.
“We didn’t even make it to the counter,” recalls Engineer Katt, 36, who lives in the Simi Valley with his wife and their two young children. “We just ran to the fire engine.”
The twilight sky above remained clear, he says, but the winds were picking up fast. As the firefighters neared their destination on Canyon Close Drive, the team could see a fire flaring around an Eaton Canyon hilltop electrical transmission tower, owned by Southern California Edison; the site is currently under investigation as the possible origin of the catastrophic fire that would soon consume much of the area. The Engine 732 team was among the first to arrive at the site, along with Engine 36 nearby.
“We saw literally the beginning of this entire incident firsthand,” says Firefighter Jenkins, 43, a native Angeleno, mother of two young children, and a firefighter with 19 years of experience. At first, she adds, “it didn’t look that big.” Yet by the time the team positioned themselves in a nearby cul-de-sac at the end of Canyon View Lane, the fire was already searing down the slopes and had nearly reached the homes.
“It was shocking for me,” says Katt, who, as engineer, is responsible for driving the engine. “I grew up in Ventura County seeing fire behavior like that, but not in Pasadena. It was eerie to see it happen that fast there. The foothills in Pasadena are very protected from our typical Santa Ana winds; we don’t usually get them.” There had been precedents, such as a devastating 2011 windstorm that had ravaged the area, but such wind events are relatively rare.
Firefighters Jenkins and Chae each grabbed hoses and ran to separate backyards to try to stave off the flames. Their confidence was still reasonably high: “I had [hydrant] water for days,” recalls Firefighter Jenkins. But soon, she noticed that Eaton Wash, a stream in the reserve, appeared to be smoldering. The winds would seem to calm, but then surge in powerful gusts toward them, like a dragon breathing fire down the hill. Overhead, the winds were already making life hell for aerial firefighting crews: downgusts were violently pushing the choppers down, reportedly bringing one of them within 400 feet of the ground. By 7:30 p.m., all aircraft had been grounded. (“This by far is the worst event I’ve been in, in my career — without a doubt,” Los Angeles County Fire Department pilot Ken Williams, who has 42 years and 11,000 hours of flying experience, told the New York Times.)
Miraculously, Captain Porraz’s team was able to save the cul-de-sac houses. They were then dispatched to a new location on Pinecrest Drive and Alta Loma Drive, where they became part of a larger task force. “Embers were flying everywhere,” recalls Firefighter Jenkins. “[They] were hitting us, the water streams were hitting us, debris was hitting us.” The fire was spreading incredibly fast, and it was jumping: “I mean it literally jumped city blocks,” says Captain Porraz. “It just kept going above us.”
“Wind-driven fires like this one, we call them campaign fires,” says Engineer Katt. “They’re going to grow very large … and it’s going to continue to spot. That’s one of the biggest problems.” Burning branches, torn from their trees by the winds, can be blown through the air for three-quarters of a mile, he says; embers can be carried up to three miles on those winds and set distant locations aflame. “When it’s a fire that strong,” he adds, “nothing we have is that powerful.”
“The wind would just blow the entire stream back at you.”
firefighter jenkins
The gear list for firefighters is intense: goggles, N95 masks, heat-resistant face shrouds, and face shields. Helmets. Gloves. Flame-resistant Nomex brush coats. And yet none of it, in the face of a monster fire event of this magnitude, was sufficient when the winds really went into overdrive at around 2 or 3 a.m. and the team found itself inside peak hell. The earlier part of the night, it turned out, had only been preliminary hell.
“Even with the goggles we had, the winds were so strong that [they] would find any gap and get inside your eyes,” recalls Firefighter Chae, 48. Born in Tokyo and raised partly in L.A., he has been a firefighter for nearly 10 years. By the middle of the night, he recalled, he could barely keep his eyes open: “I was doing my job keeping one eye open to give relief to the other eye.”
Not even their 40,000-pound engine felt a safe haven for the team as they were dispatched from location to location along Altadena Drive and smaller streets in the area, navigating snarls of downed power lines, burning branches, and felled trees. There is not yet a full record of the full list of addresses and locations to which the team was dispatched over the course of the fire; it will take months for the Incident Management Team to compile and finalize, says Pasadena Fire Department Deputy Fire Chief Anthony James.
“It was the first time I’ve ever seen a fire engine shake,” says Engineer Katt. “And your visibility is 5 to 10 feet in front of you.” Even getting in and out of the rig grew dangerous, with the winds threatening to slam its doors violently. The smoke assaulting them, he adds, was composed of not just scorched vegetation and brush, but also the incinerated remains of “everything from your household cleaners to your cars, to the houses themselves.”
Walls of wind were now occasionally knocking the firefighters down, throwing them. Their water hoses were increasingly useless. “We were spraying as much as we could,” recalls Firefighter Jenkins, “but most of the time my partner and I both ended up getting drenched because the wind would gust so hard it would just blow the entire stream back at you.” Other nearby teams using powerful deck guns — different models can spray between 500 and 2,000 gallons a minute — affixed to their engines couldn’t even make a dent. “It was just blowing,” says Captain Porraz. “You couldn’t reach the fire. The winds were just taking it apart.”
As the night went on and the fire continued to rage without mercy, the team kept getting dispatched on new assignments, spending less and less time at each location. “We would be trying to make a stance and they would just be calling [on the radio] for more of us: more houses were starting to catch,” says Firefighter Jenkins.
Often the firefighters would think they’d saved a house, only to see it engulfed in flames a few hours or even minutes later. It felt defeating, says Captain Porraz. He went into overdrive to keep the team’s morale up. The camaraderie helped, the firefighters say, but they knew the cruel truth: The fire had them outgunned.
“You’re doing everything you can,” says Firefighter Chae, “and yet you’re fighting this wind, nature, God — whatever it is that you believe in. There’s something higher going on here that’s determining what’s going to happen.”
No one can remember who first saw the oranges hanging on a nearby tree. Ravenous and fatigued, at around 3 a.m., the firefighters started grabbing them and passing them around. “We just needed something,” recalls Firefighter Chae. “I remember thinking, ‘I could just take a bite out of this orange or even a lemon. I don’t care: I’ll take a bite out of a lemon with the skin still on.’ ” Instead, he sat on the ground and peeled an orange with his dirty hands: “I couldn’t eat it fast enough.”
Sometime between 4 and 4:30 a.m., there was another call — someone was trapped in a house on W. Mariposa Street. As Engineer Katt steered the engine through the streets toward the address, the true extent of the devastation started becoming clear to the team. The familiar streets they drove down every day were unrecognizable. Until then, says Captain Porraz, “I had no idea that everything, literally everything, was on fire.” Firefighter Chae adds, “All of us were in shock. It was like a war zone. I couldn’t believe how much was already gone.”
“All of us were in shock. It was like a war zone.”
firefighter chae
The team kept picking up people who waved them down in the streets, evacuees trembling with shock, often lost and disoriented. One woman flagged the team down and asked them to rescue her cats from a house completely engulfed in flames. The firefighters believe that they ultimately picked up four or five people even before they reached the rescue address at 454 W. Mariposa Street, where they encountered an elderly woman and her daughter. They implored the firefighters to let them take their suitcases and several garbage bags filled with their possessions. Most of the bags were left behind, but the women were successfully steered into the crammed ambulance now flanking Engine 732. “When I came back, around two days later,” recalls Engineer Katt, “their house had burned to the ground.”
When the sun finally rose over L.A., the world watched in horror as the first images and videos emerged of the miles of charred city blocks smoldering across the region. For Captain Porraz’s team, it was nearly time for a shift change, and the crew members from Engine 732 made their way back to their respective Pasadena stations, which remained unscathed. At Station 39, Firefighter Chae’s base station, a half-cooked dinner from the night before languished on the stove of the kitchen. As he greeted other firefighters onsite, Firefighter Chae felt like they were viewing him with alarm.
“I hadn’t seen myself yet,” he says. “I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.” His eyes were bloodshot and puffy: “They were just torn up.”
Captain Porraz prepared to get on a different engine with a new team of firefighters. According to a Cal Fire Situation Update filed at 7:20 a.m., firefighters were still facing rapid and dangerous fire growth under extreme conditions and spot fires in Altadena, Pasadena, and Sierra Madre. The new crew was psyched to get into the fight, he recalls: “They’re all fresh, excited, ‘Let’s go to work.’ ” He also remembers thinking, as he looked at them, “You have no idea what you’re in for.”
One member of his fresh crew: Firefighter Brendan Adams, who drove into Pasadena from Whitehead, about 40 minutes away. On his way in, he had seen three overturned trucks on the highway, flung over by the winds. “The sun was up, but it was still pitch black,” he recalls. “There was just debris everywhere and smoke; the city’s on fire. It was a surreal sight to roll up to.”
It would take 24 days for the Eaton and Palisades fires to be contained, or for control lines to be completely established around the fires’ perimeters. (At the time of writing, units involved in the Palisades Fire and other regional fires were still too busy to be interviewed, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Fire Department said.) As the winds began to subside on January 8, aerial support could resume and help turn the tide against the flames.
The Eaton Fire is currently assessed as the second most destructive fire in California’s history, with 9,418 structures burned; the Palisades Fire has grimly distinguished itself as the third-most destructive, with 6,837 structures and nearly 23,500 acres burned.
The firefighters who worked Engine 732 in those early hours say that they are still decompressing and processing what they experienced and saw; their bodies are still recovering. In the hours and days after that hellish night, “the stuff coming out of your noses and your pores after the fire is disgusting,” says Captain Porraz. “It’s just black. Your ears are completely black … the smell stays with you for quite some time.”
“It definitely beat us up quite a bit,” adds Firefighter Jenkins, who says for weeks afterward she could see the exhaustion on her colleagues’ faces. But, she says, “The bumps, bruises, the hacking, the coughing has somewhat subsided.”
The long-term psychological impact on their community remains to be seen. As they emerged from their own Sisyphean battle the morning of January 8, the Engine 732 team soon learned that some of their colleagues had seen their own houses go up in flames — and then had gone straight back to work, battling to save other homes.
The streets of Altadena have now been cleared, so you can drive rather smoothly through the blocks of ruins. What remains: a landscape of jagged chimneys standing amid charred debris, all that is left of walls and roofs. Somewhat cruelly, the fire spared small reminders of the lives once lived in these homes: a little book-borrowing box still stands on the green lawn of a decimated house; intact, glistening Christmas ornaments dangle from a blackened front yard tree; an iron garden bench sits serenely in front of the blackened remains of a front porch.
“We’re just in the realization of, ‘We live in this now every day,’ ” says Engineer Katt. “This is going to be a new reality for probably the next two years before they rebuild. And just not knowing what the community is going to be: that’s probably part of what hits most of us the hardest.”
Captain Porraz says he is still trying to boost morale. He feels terrible that they weren’t able to save more with the resources they had. They rescued people from the streets and burning homes, he reminds his team. It feels good to remember that, he says. The houses on Canyon View and Canyon Close were saved, too.
“So I took a picture [of the houses] and sent it to the crew,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Hey, we did a good thing that night, guys.’ We saved lives. At least we can say we can hold on to that.”
Feature image: The winds would seem to calm, but then surge in powerful gusts toward them, like a dragon breathing fire down the hill. PHOTO: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of C Magazine.
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