The Eaton Fire burst out of the San Gabriel mountains above Altadena Tuesday night. It has since devoured more than 7,000 homes and structures in this tight-knit, diverse community making it one of the most savage firestorms in Los Angeles County’s history. The death toll is rising. Wildfires are a fact of life here – but nothing prepared people for destruction on this scale.
Rows of chimneys now stand like tombstones, towering palm trees like burned matchsticks. We found fire crews still working to contain the inferno and a dazed Calvin family sifting through the ruins of their homes and their lives.
Zaire Calvin: This is unreal. Oh my god. (crying) My house.
Zaire Calvin and his family have called Altadena home for three generations.
Zaire Calvin: Just wonder if anything’s left. (sniff) The– the t– rockin’ chair for the baby. (crying) I literally just built all of this.
Calvin, a high school football coach, has lived on this block his whole life. He’s seen a number of wildfires flare up in the foothills, but never in his 47 years had he seen anything like the firestorm that swept off the mountain this past Tuesday.
Zaire Calvin: And outta nowhere you see the fire appear across Lake Street. And you could see it going up the mountain on our side within an hour. For it to move that quickly and that rapidly and for it to shift paths that fast was insane.
His son Jamire told us the winds kicked up and power went down across the neighborhood.
Jamire Calvin: It was like a hurricane, just fire, no water like 80 miles an hour plus. It felt surreal.
Bill Whitaker: Was the fire, like, racing down the hill at that point?
Jamire Calvin: Yeah.
Zaire Calvin: That’s what’s scary about this. It just was shooting… like …
Bill Whitaker: Like a blowtorch?
Zaire Calvin: Like a blowtorch. It was literally just shooting off of the mountain. It felt like you’re being attacked by a storm.
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As the fire bore down on them, Zaire put his wife, baby and mother into the car. Jamire grabbed what he could.
Jamire Calvin: I’m lucky to even have the little bag of clothes that I have left. But as far as trophies, memories, diplomas, everything else just went up in flames.
Zaire Calvin: My mom just said it to me she’s like, ‘everything’s gone? You mean the books that we have, like, nothing?’ I’m just like ‘Mom – it’s all gone. All of it. Every memory all those things are gone. We have whatever’s left in our heads to rebuild with. All of it’s gone.’
This fire in Altadena was just one of eight destructive wildfires that lay siege to Los Angeles this past week. With almost no rain for eight months, hillsides and backyards were bone dry, primed to burn. Investigators are still trying to determine how the fires started, but whipped by ferocious Santa Ana windsthose blazes roared down city streets and spread like a deadly virus, no place seemed immune. Neighborhoods not engulfed in flames were blanketed by smoke and ash. Wealth and status offered no protection. Affluent Pacific Palisades was first to fall. Thousands of structures were destroyed. Thousands of people were forced to flee.
Chief Anthony Marrone: The conditions, that night, were unbearable. It was a devil wind that came out, you know, that extreme Santa Ana wind condition.
Anthony Marrone is chief of the L.A. County Fire Department, one of the officials overseeing the firefight. He told us the devil winds hurled embers far ahead of the fire – like snowfall from hell.
Chief Anthony Marrone: Embers like this are transported in the smoke column and– and pushed–
Bill Whitaker: Some of them as big as this–
Chief Anthony Marrone: –downwind– or bigger.
Bill Whitaker: So this is being blown by the winds way beyond
Chief Anthony Marrone: Thousands and thousands of burning embers, this size and bigger, being transported by that wind and that smoke column.
Chief Marrone says fires normally run uphill.
Chief Anthony Marrone: But with these winds it was pushed downhill into these neighborhoods.
Bill Whitaker: And sending these embers (right) …blocks, if not miles ahead —
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Chief Anthony Marrone: Right. And the embers were being generated not only by the brush on the hillsides but by the homes that are burning.
When the life-threatening winds started building, Marrone told us he called up extra crews and engines. But the fires grew too big, too fast. Demand for water overburdened the system. Water pressure dropped and fire hoses ran dry, while the fires raged.
Bill Whitaker: We hear that people were complaining that there wasn’t enough water or wasn’t enough water pressure. Was that a– factor?
Chief Anthony Marrone: Ye– well, so the water system was stretched. Metropolitan water systems are not designed to sustain a fire fight like this. Your viewers can’t expect a municipal water system to supply enough firefighting water to extinguish every one of these houses. That’s unrealistic.
Bill Whitaker: Did you have enough resources? Did you have enough firefighters? Did you have enough fire engines?
Chief Anthony Marrone: No. And there’s– and there’s not enough fire engines for this.
Bill Whitaker: Ordinarily for one house like this, you might have three, or four, or five–
Chief Anthony Marrone: Three or four fire engines. We think we’ve lost 8,000 structures, so times three fire engines each, that– that requires 26,000 fire engines. I don’t think the state of California has 26,000 fire engines that could be at one place, right now.
Bill Whitaker: Your firefighters, your resources … everything, overwhelmed?
Chief Anthony Marrone: Absolutely overwhelmed.
Chief Brian Fennessy: Mother Nature owned us, owned us those two days.
Neighboring Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy has been fighting wildfires for almost five decades. He dispatched hundreds of firefighters to help Chief Marrone and beleaguered crews across L.A. One of the most powerful tools in their arsenal: this fleet of hi-tech choppers that can fight fires 24/7, dropping up to 3,000 gallons of water each pass. But with Santa Ana winds gusting near 100 miles per hour, the choppers were grounded during crucial early hours.
Chief Brian Fennessy: The fires that they experienced this week were unstoppable.
Bill Whitaker: Unstoppable.
Chief Brian Fennessy: Unstoppable.
Bill Whitaker: What’s it like for you, firefighter, to have to say words like that.
Chief Brian Fennessy: It makes me feel bad. Right? I mean, that’s not in our nature. I mean, we’re– we’re fixers. That is the mindset: We’re gonna put our lives on the line. We’re gonna, give a lot to save a lot. So when you have a fire like, to say that’s unstoppable? Man, that is– it’s– it’s uncomfortable. It’s very uncomfortable.
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After an uncomfortable 27 hour delay, the choppers were able to get back into the fight when the winds died down. Thursday, Chief Fennessy let us join a reconnaissance flight, so we could see the destruction from above.
We flew over the fire zones, and saw an ashen checkerboard of devastation stretched below us for miles at Pacific Palisades. When we flew over Altadena where Chief Fennessy grew up – he found it hard to get his bearings:
Chief Fennessey: Oh, my goodness. It really wiped it out, man.
Bill Whitaker: Oh, wow.
Chief Fennessey: Holy crud. The Rose Bowl is just down.
Bill Whitaker: Yea.
Chief Fennessey: Kind of orient you, you can see the Rose Bowl from here. I had no idea it extended this far. You can see charred buildings, warehouses.
Bill Whitaker: Everything gone.
Chief Fennessey: Gone, yeah.
In the early morning hours after the Altadena fire erupted, Chief Fennessy couldn’t reach his brother. Although it was out of his jurisdiction, he drove up from Orange County.
When he learned his brother was safe, he went to check on his long-time friend Tony Goss and this is what he found.
Chief Brian Fennessy: This place was glowing, it was completely hot, there was a gas main over here that was venting, and so it was like a jet engine, it was pretty loud. Tony’s still in his pajamas, he looks like a firefighter, his face is, you know, black from all the soot, and– he’s walking around, you know, I don’t know if you remember this. You were walkin’ around, kinda talkin’ to yourself.
Goss had tried to save his home armed with just a garden hose, but the fire was too fierce. When we met him, he was still in disbelief that he’d been forced to walk away from his family home of more than 60 years. But this was gone.
Tony Goss: I knew it was time to leave, so I pulled out and all my neighbors were right there. I said, no, it’s time. It’s time. I don’t need to die today.
Chief Fennessy then went down the road to his brother’s house. The block was in flames – he discovered the gas meter at the house next door was surrounded by fire and about to ignite… and he said there was no water …
Chief Brian Fennessy: So I needed to cool this down.
So Fennessy got creative.
Chief Brian Fennessy: I ended up forcing entry into– through the front door and went through the house, you know into the kitchen looking for bottled water, anything that– that I could use. And so I ended up finding– a carton of milk and, I think a couple beers or sodas, whatever the heck they were. And came out here and really literally had to kinda go in there under the heat, wet it, and then get out. Because it was just, this house was just burning and, and I had to do that a few times till it was done.
Bill Whitaker: Bet you’ve never saved a house with milk before.
Chief Brian Fennessy: No. To do nothing means the home’s gonna be lost. And in this case, yeah, you know, little bit of milk and a couple beers really saved the day.
The houses he fought to save are the only two left standing on the block. The devil winds are forecast to intensify again tomorrow through Wednesday. Evacuation orders have been expanded. The city remains on edge.
Chief Brian Fennessy: These fires are gonna be an impact, you know, to the community, families, people, for many, many years to come. This is one of those fires, if not the fire, that they’re gonna be telling their grandchildren about.
In the chaos of evacuating his baby and elderly mother to safety, Zaire Calvin got separated from his sister Evelyn. She lived next door.
Zaire Calvin: Everybody’s yelling, “Get out.” I’m thinking that she’s getting out. And the next day after the storm– I come back, and her car’s still there. So at that point, in my brain, my soul is shaking.
He and his cousin found Evelyn’s remains in the rubble.
Zaire’s grief is shared. Five Calvin family members lived on this block – four lost their houses. But they’re trying to hold onto the hope that they can rebuild their beloved community.
Zaire Calvin: Everyone’s in the same boat. Like, everybody you would depend on, everybody you would go to, they’re all homeless also. They just lost everything. They’ve lost all their memories, all the joy. Everything that we’ve built together in this neighborhood we all lost together. and I hate it, I hate it. ‘Cause I love Altadena. (voice breaks, shakes head)
Produced by Nichole Marks, Marc Lieberman, Heather Abbott. Associate producers: John Gallen, Katie Kerbstat, Cassidy McDonald, LaCrai Scott. Broadcast associates: Grace Conley, Mariah Johnson, Mimi Lamarre. Edited by Peter M. Berman, Warren Lustig.
Bill Whitaker
Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.
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