Senior Jenna Forster recalled the number of texts she had received from her father on Friday, Jan. 10.
It ended up being just one.
“He only texted me once when he had connection to let me know that he was safe, but I was not worried because I knew what he was doing, and Compton went to the [Los Angeles County] fires late.”
The 12th-grader was referring to the Compton Fire Department, where her father, Shon Halvorson, has been working as a firefighter for seven years and a firefighter-paramedic for the past 20 years.
Forster is among the few students or faculty or staff whom The Accolade found either have immediate family members as first responders to January’s Los Angeles County fires or had relatives impacted by the devastation the Santa Ana wind-swept flames caused to Eaton and Palisades.
Another student, junior Madeline Matheny, told The Accolade in a video about her firefighter dad who assisted in the Palisades blaze, but she did not have contact information for him.
Halvorson said as a firefighter-paramedic, he’s trained not only to extinguish flames, but also to provide emergency medical care to any wounded victims at the scene of a fire.
“We were assigned [to Palisades.] I’m on what they call a type one engine company,” Forster’s father said. “It’s the engine that you guys typically see in the city. And we were assigned to structure protection. … And my particular unit was assigned to the Topanga Canyon and Monte Nido area,” approximately with Topanga Canyon being three miles away from Pacific Palisades and Monte Nido being 38.3 miles away.
The firefighter-paramedic said his crew worked from Thursday, Jan. 9-Wednesday, Jan. 15. The Palisades fire was reported to have started at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 7.
Four Compton firefighters with one fire engine joined 11 other engines from the LA County Fire Department to assist with fire prevention.
They worked 24 hour on and 24 hour off shifts, where they work for 24 hours and then rest for 24 hours the following day.
“There were some houses that had already burnt down, but some were still standing,” Halvorson said. “We were mainly keeping [flames] away from the homes so we were fighting fire up in the hills.”
So how did a fire crew from Compton, which is 28 miles away and a nearly two-hour drive from Pacific Palisades, end up near the scene of where the blaze first broke out?
Like many fire agencies throughout the state, Compton Fire belongs to automatic and mutual aid programs to assist in case of emergencies like the Los Angeles fires, Halvorson said.
“If any agency is overwhelmed with a large amount of fire, they have support,” he said. “Us [the Compton Fire Department] being a little further away, they [the agency] put in a request for mutual aid, and then we go and assist them.”
CLOSE CALL
Social science teacher Hera Kwon said her sister faced the Palisades fire from across the street where she lives.
“She could see everything — pretty dramatic photos of the dark red clouds and all the smoke,” Kwon said.
Evacuation was immediately on Kwon’s sister’s mind.
“There have been a couple of really close calls with fires, so as soon as [my sister’s family] saw how close it was, they started preparing their emergency bag and started packing up their car,” said Kwon, who teaches four periods of American Government and one of Sociology.
During the evacuation, the teacher said her sister sent her text messages letting her know that she and her family were safe. The fires were not close enough to damage Kwon’s sister’s house.
“This was definitely the worst in terms of the damage, but I think because it was on the other side of the freeway, you could see it,” she said. “You could definitely smell it, and they cut the power so they were affected by that, too.”
FULLERTON FIRE ALSO PLAYED A ROLE IN HELPING
The Fullerton Fire Department also assisted with containing the Palisades and Eaton fires for 11 days from Tuesday, Jan. 7-Saturday, Jan. 18.
“[It] is pretty devastating what the fires did to the communities surrounding the Eaton [and] Palisades fires, and I think it serves as a reminder to be firewise,” said Jonathan Fugitt, deputy chief of the Fullerton Fire Department.
Assigned to assist in the Palisades fire, Fugitt said he served as a strike team leader in charge of five fire engines and helped extinguish flames and offered support to the local community.
He said he and his team faced a few challenges from the extensive fires, strong winds of approximately 70-80 miles per hour and 48-hour long sessions without rest for the first two days. After that, they switched to 24 hours on and 24 hours off shifts for the remainder of the days.
Crews worked for 2-3 days in a row.
“The winds were strong enough where you had to lean into the wind in order to stand up,” Fugitt said. “They would also knock you to the ground, so they were pretty strong.”
Looking back to the past few months since January, the deputy fire chief is optimistic about the future of the Palisades and Eaton communities.
“At the end of the day, I think there will be good that comes out of this, and there will be measures that will prevent this from happening ever again,” Fugitt said.
