Deputies raced to evacuate Altadena residents, wondering if their station would burn, too
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From the living room of her Riverside County home, Raquel Sandoval watched as her 8-year-old daughter flipped through the TV channels before bed, pausing on the news.
It was wall-to-wall coverage of the Palisades fire that had broken out earlier in the day. At the bottom of the screen, Sandoval spotted a line of text about a fire in Eaton Canyon, two miles east of the historic sheriff’s station in the middle of downtown Altadena.
In the 26 years she’d spent working for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Sandoval — a morning shift sergeant — had seen plenty of disasters threaten the communities she policed: earthquakes, floods and, of course, wildfires. She knew the routine, and knew this would be a long week.
But when she finally set her alarm for 3 a.m. and went to bed, Sandoval still had no idea how bad the blaze was — or how bad it would become.
By the time she woke up, half of Altadena was gone.
Overnight, the fire had grown to 1,000 acres — though it would later spread to more than 14,000 and kill at least 17 people, becoming the second most destructive wildfire in state history. The nature center, the golf course and the assisted living facility nestled at the foot of the canyon had already been destroyed, along with schools, parks and entire neighborhoods.
Deputies had worked through the night, on streets lit only by the menacing glow of encroaching flames. And now, those flames were threatening the sheriff’s station — and all the people, guns, evidence and case files inside of it.
To deputies, sheriff’s stations — especially a cozy one like Altadena, where there are only about 40 deputies — can feel like a safe haven. A place where they can take off their gun belts. A place where they can let down their guard. A place where disaster doesn’t strike. Sandoval had never heard of one needing to evacuate.
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department launched a Looter Suppression Team for the Altadena area scorched by the Eaton fire.
And yet, this one did. And before dawn on the morning of Jan. 8, Sandoval called headquarters and said it was time to flee.
“I never thought in my career that I would have to say that,” she told The Times in a recent interview. “Our mindset was we’re not going to see this place again.”
***
For the deputies at Altadena station, Jan. 7 started off as a fairly normal day, serving warrants, responding to calls for service and patrolling the streets. But it was hard not to notice that it was fire weather when dry, dusty winds began battering the Rite-Aid sign across the street. It teetered so ominously on its pole that some deputies joked about betting on when it would finally fall down.
A few of the station’s patrol cars had already been sent to help battle the blazes in Malibu, leaving just a skeleton crew in Altadena. Like the rest of the department, Altadena has struggled with a staffing shortage. Roughly 23% of jobs are vacant or filled by workers on some type of leave, according to the latest sheriff’s data.
That was why Jeff Lohmann, a detective, was helping out on patrol duty.
As night grew near, minor backyard fires started popping up around town, forcing Lohmann and other deputies to pitch in on firefighting duties, with stray garden hoses swiped from nearby houses.
Just after 6 p.m., flames started flickering beneath a transmission line on the east side of town, in Eaton Canyon Park. The winds, gusting over 50 mph, whipped scarlet embers across the brush.
Within minutes, a call came across Lohmann’s patrol car radio. There was a fire on the hill, and the two other deputies already headed there needed help.
***
By that time, Capt. Jabari Williams — the top cop at Altadena station — had just gotten home to Gardena after a chaotic day at work. He sat down in front of the TV with a freshly made plate of nachos.
At 6:33 p.m., his phone buzzed. It was his night shift sergeant, warning of a fire in Eaton Canyon, one that was big enough they’d have to start evacuating people.
Williams put down his food and ran out the door.
In Altadena, Lohmann sped toward the burning hill, racing to help evacuate people from imperiled homes. At 7:15 p.m., he rounded a bend and gasped. The night sky was white with smoke. The mountains glowed orange.
He took out his phone and started recording.
“This is frickin’ nuts,” he said. “This blew up in minutes.”
A siren screamed overhead.
“I’m en route to evacuate some autistic kids stuck in a house, somewhere up in Kinneloa Mesa,” he explained. “It’s a high-risk area for this fire. It’s about 200 homes and high risk. And, well, that’s where we’re going.”
He passed a firetruck, the red lights playing hopscotch on the pavement.
“This is gettin’ real,” he said, watching cars flee in the opposite direction.
He tore down Altadena Drive but before he could hang a left on New York Drive and make it up the narrow zigzag of Kinneloa Mesa Road, he hit a cloud of ashy smoke. It grew thick and black, and soon he couldn’t see past the end of his car.
Waves of embers rippled his direction. He wondered if the only way out was behind him.
***
As the fire spread, Williams fought through rush-hour gridlock, which seemed heavier than usual, with a flood of evacuees.
He’d been keeping tabs on the weather all week, and he knew the dry Santa Ana winds meant his deputies would have to be prepared for anything.
While Williams was en route, officials on the ground set up a command center a few blocks north of the sheriff’s station at Farnsworth Park, a 91-year-old green space that usually hosts weddings and day camps — not deputies and fire officials. It would eventually burn, too.
Three miles away, Lohmann inched along in his patrol car, no longer sure what direction he was going.
“I won’t be too embarrassed to say I was absolutely terrified,” he said. “There was about two minutes there when I thought I screwed up.”
After narrowly making it through wildfire, Altadena station closes due to contamination.
When he broke through the smoke, he realized he wasn’t where he needed to be — and probably couldn’t get there. He wouldn’t be able to back up his buddies or help the kids who needed to evacuate from Kinneloa Mesa.
Other deputies did, though. Shaken, Lohmann turned back to the work at hand and drove off to another call.
The next few hours were a blur. Lohmann and his fellow deputies wound through the smoky streets, “driving by Braille” as he put it. Branches and downed electrical wires littered the pavement. Some deputies carried fire extinguishers on their laps, in case they ran into spot fires.
In staticky announcements over the patrol car public address systems, they urged people to leave. Lohmann said sometimes residents flagged him down, blinking their flashlights to summon his help evacuating elderly relatives. Sometimes he carried them to safety himself.
Before 10 p.m., the scope of the disaster had outgrown the emergency command post at Farnsworth Park, and Williams and other officials shifted their operations west across the 210 Freeway to the Rose Bowl.
At that point, the flames had stayed on the east side of town, not threatening the park, the sheriff’s station or the other buildings on Lake Avenue. But at 10:51 p.m., an alert came in about a burning home on East Calaveras Street, a couple miles southwest of any previously reported conflagration.
“I don’t know what happened, but the fire shifted,” Williams said. “It started heading towards the residential areas of Altadena, closer to the station.”
The risk was growing, but by that point some deputies — including Lohmann — who had started working early in the morning were hitting 19 hours on the job, the maximum allowed under department policy. With more reinforcements coming, Lohmann headed home at about midnight for a few hours of sleep.
***
After Sandoval’s alarm went off at 3 a.m., she dressed for work quietly, without checking the news. It wasn’t until she came up the 210 Freeway that she saw the towering flames and began to understand the enormity of what had happened.
She continued up Lake Avenue, then suddenly plunged into blackness. The power was out, and smoke shrouded the roads. Around the station, buildings were on fire.
She parked and ran into the women’s locker room to dress, using her phone as a flashlight. Afterward, she hurried into the main station and ran into another sergeant.
“I think we should consider evacuating,” she told him.
Williams wanted to hold off evacuating as long as he could, he said. But embers and ash were blowing into the front lobby. Then the park across the street caught fire, and Williams knew he had no choice.
He gave the order, and Sandoval made the call to headquarters.
“We’re going to have to evacuate the station,” she said.
The voice on the other end seemed dumbfounded.
***
At 6 a.m., Lohmann reported back for duty — in a town he could barely recognize.
“When I left, we’d had a center line — Lake Street — as the evacuation line, and the fire was east of that,” he said. “But when I came back in the morning, the entire city was in ruins.”
The station appeared to be engulfed in flames. The shrubs abutting the building had caught fire. The California state flag overhead was singed. There was no water and no power. Fire alarms chirped into the ashy air.
The initial evacuation had salvaged some of the basics, but — since the building itself still wasn’t on fire — Lohmann and another deputy darted inside armed with flashlights and trash bags, hoping to retrieve any remaining necessities from the detective bureau.
Inside, there were already more than a half dozen deputies hurrying around the station in the dark. They grabbed their gun belts and ballistic vests. Battery packs and body cameras. They took computers and clothes, throwing things into duffel bags and garbage bags as embers swirled.
Some deputies ran through the hallways, grabbing photos off the walls. Some ferried vehicles to the safety of the nearby Crescenta Valley station. At one point, Sandoval remembered watching a deputy open the trunk of an SUV filled with AR-15s rescued from the armory.
“People thought we had lost our station,” Lohmann recalled.
Even as the place emptied out, Williams stayed behind, determined to keep the building secured.
“I think the captain is going down with the ship,” Sandoval remembered telling other deputies. “He’s still there.”
After a report from The Times, officials have called for an external review into delayed evacuation alerts in western Altadena, during the Eaton fire.
Since many of the deputies were busy helping with evacuations in the community, it took Sandoval and those who remained a few hours to get everything moved from the Altadena station to Crescenta Valley.
But then came another scare. In late morning, deputies got word that the Chevron nearest the station had just gotten a new shipment of fuel. Its underground tankers were full, and the church next door was on fire, creating the risk of an explosion. Lohmann remembered hearing fire officials say that, to be safe, they might need to clear out a half-mile radius around the building.
He watched as fire crews cut holes in the doors of the automotive garage and poured in water, hoping to avoid a conflagration. Suddenly, he said, black smoke billowed from the building, and the fire captain on scene turned around and yelled: Run!
At first, some deputies gathered in the parking lot of the Grocery Outlet, waiting to see whether the tanks would explode. They didn’t — but soon the Aldi market next to the Grocery Outlet caught fire. At 1:51 p.m., Lohmann pulled out his phone to record the blaze.
“That’s our grocery store,” he said, focusing on the pillars of black smoke before panning to the rubble of the post office across the street. “Look at all this.”
Soon, he headed back out in the chaos.
***
A week later, Lohmann and another deputy, Det. David Gaisford, took a Times reporter to survey the damage, still shell-shocked by it themselves.
The Church of Christ was burned. The blackened shell of a school bus sat on an empty street. Blocks and blocks of homes had disappeared, replaced by the rubble of charred lives: A scorched elliptical machine stood alone on one lot. In another, the blackened bricks of the fireplace poked up from the debris like prairie dogs. In front of flattened houses, some homeowners posted handwritten signs: Armed. Will Shoot Looters.
“The fire department said that there will be root balls that burn a foot or two underground for weeks,” Lohmann said.
Gaisford nodded in agreement.
Though fire crews had arrived in time to save the sheriff’s station, a week later the air inside was still heavy with the acrid aftermath. The deputies had come back, but the lack of running water forced them to set up portable toilets in the parking lot.
By the following day, Jan. 16, the conditions sparked a complaint to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, and Williams shut down the station for the weekend. The department reopened it after officials brought in air purifiers and restored running water.
But to the deputies who work there, the change is still difficult to comprehend. Familiar landmarks they passed every shift have vanished. Homes they helped evacuate have turned to ash. Altadena, many fear, will never be the same.
“This was a school,” Gaisford said wistfully, peering out from his patrol car at a field of rubble. “It’s all gone now.”
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