Column: As Eaton fire advanced, here’s how employees rescued 45 elderly and disabled patients
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Juana Rodriguez, administrator of Two Palms Care Center in Altadena, had just arrived at her home in Riverside. She washed up, prepared to eat dinner with her family, and then got an urgent call from her on-duty nurse.
Fire was approaching the facility, home to 45 elderly and disabled patients ranging in age from mid-60s to 103, many of them bedridden, some with dementia.
“I just grabbed my things, and I told my family I was leaving to go back to work because we might need to evacuate,” Rodriguez said.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
That same evening, Tony Moya, administrator of Golden Legacy Care Center, a sister agency in Sylmar, had just returned to his Sunland home when a colleague texted to ask how many beds were available for evacuees.
Moya, who served in the Marine Corps and was part of Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War of 1991, stepped outside to return to work. But the wind was fierce, so instead of driving back to Sylmar, he raced east on the 210 to help with the evacuation. Flames were rolling across foothills as he approached, and he phoned a colleague who was also headed to Two Palms.
‘“You know, we’re in for a big fight tonight,’” Moya told him.
The Eaton and Palisades fires are among the most horrific disasters in Southern California history, with thousands of structures destroyed, billions in damages and more than two dozen lives lost. The many glitches and failures in the preparation and response will be dissected for months if not years.
But as fires raged, first responders, private citizens and others went all out to protect property and lives, sometimes at great risk. This story, based on interviews with 14 employees and two evacuees, recounts the tumult and determination that characterized the night of Jan. 7 at Two Palms, and what followed, unexpectedly, the next morning.
Rodriguez’s husband drove her back to Altadena, and on the way she checked in with her managers at Golden State Health Centers, owner of 10 care facilities in the area. She also called Two Palms, where two nurses, seven nurse assistants and a cook were on duty. Gather up blankets, she told them, and get the patients into wheelchairs.
But when she and her husband got close, they found that streets leading to Two Palms were blocked.
“There were embers coming down. There were trees already on fire,” Rodriguez said. “So we tried to … find another way.”
The smoke was thick, and her husband said he couldn’t see anything, but Rodriguez told him to keep going.
“I’ll guide you,” she said. “I need to make it to my patients.”
It was a common refrain throughout the evening.
After Martha Perez, the social services director at Two Palms, got a call at home from Rodriguez, she told her worried son and husband it was her duty to go back. While she was driving, another co-worker called and warned her she wouldn’t be able to get through.
“I just kept on insisting,” Perez said.
As Moya approached, “embers were flying everywhere. The wind was blowing, I would say maybe 50, 60 miles an hour. You couldn’t see anything.”
He used a phone app to navigate the last couple of blocks. Nearby structures were ablaze when he arrived.
“Smoke was already inside the building and I saw … like 10 patients already lined up in their wheelchairs,” Moya said. “And so I told everyone, ‘We’re going to evacuate.’”
In the meantime, more employees from sister facilities and corporate headquarters — including floor supervisor Oscar Cornejo, driver Joseph Panduro, maintenance supervisor Nestor Alfonso, activities coordinator Oscar Mejia, patient transition coordinator Mendel Goldstein and clinical director Danielle Jarrett — joined the rescue efforts.
“We just were lifting people and getting them into cars, into ambulances” that had arrived to transport patients, Jarrett said.
Alfonso entered the smoky building and was asked by staffers and police officers who had just arrived to go to the end of a hall to evacuate patients. The power was out, so he used his cellphone flashlight and wheeled out patients on their medical beds. One of them told him, repeatedly, “I am so scared.”
Some of the residents begged to stay. They “were screaming and some were like, ‘I don’t want to go, I want to stay,’” said Mejia, who told them that wasn’t an option.
As they carried patients and pushed hospital beds, employees found it hard to breathe. “There was fire all around us,” Cornejo said. “My fear was we were going to be in the middle of a ring of fire” and not be able to escape.
“The smoke and the embers were just hitting your face, and I was thinking … the last thing I want is for one to blow in my eye,” Cornejo continued, but someone — either an ambulance attendant or a police officer — handed him a pair of goggles.
Outside, some were so frightened they held on to wheelchairs while staff tried to lift them into vehicles, begging not to be left alone.
“In the line of patients that was outside, I saw some praying, some just closing their eyes, some just trying to cover themselves,” Panduro said. “I was telling them that they were OK and that they were leaving soon.” He put on some music and turned on some Christmas lights that had been strung up in the van.
Goldstein recalled that some of the patients were screaming while he assisted with evacuations. Meanwhile, his skin was singed by embers, and ashes covered his hair as the fire continued to advance.
“It was very emotional,” said Goldstein, who was thinking, “I have a family … and maybe I could perish.”
Two Palms was destroyed, but all 45 patients were safely transported to nearby facilities. Moya had four in his Subaru, and one woman insisted they go back to Two Palms and get Charlie. He feared they’d left someone behind, but another patient explained that Charlie had been the name of the woman’s dog, decades ago.
A few hours later, responders learned that the residents of Two Palms weren’t done with their journey.
At dawn the next morning, Jan. 8, another alarm sounded as the Eaton fire spread. The Golden Rose Care Center in Pasadena, formerly called Rose Garden, was forced to evacuate, and some of the roughly 70 patients there had arrived just a few hours earlier from Two Palms.
Moya, who hadn’t slept yet, called some of the same employees who had evacuated Two Palms, as well as additional colleagues. He needed “all hands on deck,” said Ken Keeler, an administrative assistant at Golden Legacy.
“So I jumped into my Honda Civic, probably the least practical car to take to an evacuation,” said Keeler, who made several trips between Pasadena and Sylmar with two or three patients each time, choosing those who were ambulatory enough to get in and out of his Honda.
Joey Silva, a counselor, said employees scrambled to make sure patients had all their needed medication, medical records and patient identification.
Jane Gamm, an art therapist and yoga instructor at Golden Legacy, said that when she got the call to help out, she brushed her teeth, grabbed her keys and drove to Pasadena, where “the sky was black. It didn’t look like morning.” She said some of the patients she transported were terrified, so she played “really relaxing music.”
The rest of Wednesday, Gamm said, was spent “getting everybody safely into the building, getting them settled, and then figuring out how to get in touch with families and let people know their loved ones were safe.”
Two patients, Valerie Fine and Brenda Robinson, were among the Two Palms residents who were evacuated twice in several hours. They ended up at Golden Legacy, where both of them praised the efforts of all the people who helped usher them to safety.
Fine, immobilized by multiple sclerosis, didn’t know the names of the responders, but said she wanted to “shout out” to all of them.
“I wish I had pictures of the whole thing,” Robinson said. Employees “worked so hard to get us evacuated, and get us safe. Beautiful.”
Peter Lee, a psychologist at Golden Legacy and a Marine reservist, worked with Moya to accommodate the evacuees. He said it could take months for patients and staff to process what they’ve been through, but he was already seeing some benefits.
“I think there’s certainly an esprit de corps, a unity, a camaraderie that comes from going through an experience like this,” Lee said.
“Gratitude to my team,” said Rodriguez, and to those who sped to Altadena to assist her Two Palms staff.
Mejia said he lives with his mother, and when he got home after the Two Palms evacuation, he hugged her and told her what had happened.
“She was proud of me,” Mejia said, telling him: “You did something good for a lot of people and for yourself. And thank you for coming back.”
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