LA Fires - The First 12 Hours

Page 1 of LA Fires - The First 12 Hours Just after 6 p.m on January 7th the fire guided in Eaton Canyon California, in a matter of hours powered by sustained 60 mph winds with gusts as high as 100 mph, the fire spread through Pasadena and into the neighboring area of Altadena. In the days that followed the Eaton Canyon fire grew to become one of the worst fires in California history killing 17 people, burning more than 14,000 acres, destroying more than 9,400 structures, and damaging more than 1,000 others. In the city of Pasadena approximately 150 structures were destroyed, but because of the efforts of the police and fire departments no one in Pasadena lost their lives.

My guests today are Captain Trey Sorenson from the Pasadena Fire Department, and Sergeant Bobby Crease from the Pasadena Police Department. Trey was the evacuation group supervisor, and Bobby was the command post supervisor during the first 14 hours of the fire. Although the Eaton fire burned for almost 2 weeks, for this debrief we will be looking at the first 12 hours of the fire and how the police and fire departments struggled to save lives as an uncontrollable fire tore through their city.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units.

As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Jon Becker: Guys, thank you for being here.

Bobby Crease: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: So Bobby, why don't we start with you. I think it's probably best to just walk through the timeline of the fire, and at the end we can kind of walk through lessons learned, but maybe just well actually before we do that let's just do a little background give me your background give me a little bit about the city of Pasadena Police Department.

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Bobby Crease: Okay. About 30 years on the job now and I think that anniversary is in September, so 25 of those with Pasadena. I've worked just about every section in the department from backgrounds to gangs, detectives, patrol, and probably the most passionate part of it is being on the SWAT team since 2002. So the city of Pasadena is about 24 square miles, about 140,000 nighttime population that probably swells another 100,000 during the day?

Jon Becker: How many cops does the department have?

Bobby Crease: We have 235 sworn I believe. Probably another 60-80 not sworn.

Jon Becker: For those that don't know Pasadena, you hear 140,000/150,000 people, it doesn't seem like a big city but Pasadena is kind of a unique city because at that size in California. It's not a particularly big city, but because of the Rose Bowl and the Rose Parade, Pasadena has kind of an outsized national or even international reputation and brand, and all that.

Bobby Crease: Yes absolutely, and we see people from all over the world that come here just to see the Rose Bowl all the way from January to December whether it's to watch a football game, or simply just to come visit it because they've seen it on TV, so it's all year round. It really is.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So Trey, talk to me a little bit about your career in the fire department.

Trey Sorenson: I've been on for 23 years. I started in the San Marino Fire Department. I lateral to Pasadena 20 years ago as a firefighter paramedic. Been a captain for 15 years, and I've been on the SWAT team for 8 years as a tactical medic with the police department. I've been our arson investigator with the fire department. Unique spot, paid by the fire department. Work out of our robbery homicide unit with the police department. So I very rarely work on an engine anymore, maybe once a year when somebody needs help with coverage, but my primary role is working out of the police department arson guy.

Jon Becker: So guys, I think everybody kind of has a concept of what a wildfire looks like, and I know that I did living in California my whole life. And I think that this fire really kind of radically redefined what I thought a fire looked like. Why don't we start with the timeline, you're both working when this happens. I know you're working, you're a field supervisor sergeant at this point, right?

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Bobby Crease: Yes.

Jon Becker: What are you doing when the evening starts?

Bobby Crease: I was actually in court all day, got done with court and then I was kind of just roving around we had trees into houses. We had a person trapped under a tree, and I was just kind of an adjunct to the fire department. I've got basically a you see call it the plumber truck. So it's got light package sirens. I was just kind of bouncing around trying to get ahead of the engines on incidents.

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Jon Becker: Yeah because if I remember correctly, we know it's a red flag event.

Bobby Crease: Yes.

Jon Becker: We know there's going to be high winds which in California means there's a potential for fire.

Bobby Crease: Yep.

Jon Becker: Man-made or otherwise. So you guys are already kind of on a heightened state of alert when this whole thing starts.

Bobby Crease: Yes. We had already been put on kind of a quasi tactical alert, everybody's in uniform including all of our detectives and everything in preparation for this wind event. What helped was (we say helped kind of cautiously) in 2011 we had a very similar event with no fire obviously and we had thousands upon thousands of trees that went down blocking major intersections. It probably took a month probably to clear, and that was helpful in preparation for this event so we kind of knew what to expect, where to have pieces in place, things of that nature. So we were prepared for a wind event that evening.

Jon Becker: Yeah, but obviously there's no way to prepare for what's about to happen.

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Bobby Crease: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Okay so what is the first moment that you become aware of the fire?

Bobby Crease: So funny, I'm listening to a little bit of the radio traffic on the way in, and I think the first fire call that came out was down on Queensberry. This was before the actual initial call or right after. Some of the timeline does definitely bleed together as you're going through the night but the unit gets to Queensberry and there's no fire there.

I was talking to Trey about it a little ,and we think what happened because this happened throughout the night, is they may have seen the fire on the hillside, and thought that it was closer than it was. I guess that's a very real thing. People see the fire outside the window and they and they were like "Holy crap. Here comes a fire.” So they call 911 thinking that the house is about to catch on fire. The fire wasn't even close to there. It was obviously still up in the canyon at that moment, but a few minutes later I think our first actual call in that area and I was at the station still getting ready to go out comes in, and initially, you're kind of feeling it out a little bit, and see what type of fire it is. Is it real? Is it just a little spot fire bush caught on fire, is this like a legit thing?

Jon Becker: Homeless fire.

Trey Sorenson: Exactly. All that stuff comes into play you start rattling past experiences through your head, and then as the minutes start to move on, and people are getting on the radio saying, they can kind of see flyer and stuff up on the hillside, it's like, “Okay maybe we should step up our response to this thing”.

I get into the car with my partner my corporal Barry Glockson and we get on the freeway, and lo and behold Trey's right with us. He's right behind us and we get off the freeway at Altadena Drive, and actually I think we got off an exit before going up to Orange Grove, and kind of zigzagged up because of traffic. As we made that turn up to Altadena Drive I actually looked at Barry and I said, “This is the real one man. This is going to happen. We need to start getting our minds right basically for how we're going to help mitigate the problem.”

So Trey was right there, he actually got up ahead of us a little bit. We got up to Altadena Drive and New York. You're already starting to get some smoke. The winds are kicking.

We actually have some units that are coming up by us, and without even getting on the radio, we're actually talking to them out the window, basically, “Hey, just let's start evac up north of New York Drive” (which is Altadena) that's the area we were in. We do have portions of Eaton Canyon that belong to the city, and our range is actually just adjacent to the canyon. So we definitely have some responsibility up there but at that point, borders didn't matter. Let's start saving lives and getting people evacuated. You could see that it was coming, and it was coming really really fast.

Page 5 of So we do that for a few minutes. Trey puts out where our command post is at with the fire department. Barry and I head over to the command post just to start coordinating assets, and getting folks there, so we could now start to do a systematic evacuation.

I timed it on the thing. I think we were there for about 20 minutes as we got out of the car, and Trey looked at me, he goes, “Sustained I think at 57”. He had his wind meter out, and it was blowing. We were there for a few minutes, and we had this hellacious gust at least 80 mph come down through the canyon, and that was our first burst of heat, and embers and a plethora of smoke that just came through. I think Trey actually said it on radio at one point but I looked at Barry I said, “Not sure this is the best spot for a command post, but hey the fire guys know what they're doing, we'll trust them”. We were there for a few more minutes, and one of the battalion chiefs said, "All right, guys we're moving." We said, "Thank goodness ‘cause this is not a great spot to be in."

Jon Becker: Just to set the stage, Eaton Canyon is just that, right? It's a canyon with a kind of a river wash that comes out of it. You've got your range on one side of it, but it's kind of like houses on both sides of the canyon down at the bottom, right?

Bobby Crease: Yes. and a very popular canyon there's several hiking trails that go up there's a beautiful waterfall after you get up about two or three miles into the canyon. So lots of people like to go there, and spend time. We're very used to going up there and familiar with the terrain.

Jon Becker: Eaton Canyon then backs up if you picture the mountains in the background it kind of backs up against Righteous Mountain.

Bobby Crease: Right.

Jon Becker: We call them the foothills but Righteous Mountains, and kind of National Forest Land eventually and as you come south down the canyon, you're moving into a really populous neighborhood.

Bobby Crease: Yes Altadena all residential through there thousands and thousands of homes, and then as you go east of the canyon--

Jon Becker: When you say ‘Altadena’, you mean Altadena Drive not the city of Altadena.

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Bobby Crease: Both because that actually turns into the city of Altadena now that we're up north of Washington just south of New York Drive is where that border is. So all of that area is actually the city of Altadena. As we go east now we get into Pasadena City proper with our range, and then a little farther east into Hastings Ranch which is where we lost the bulk of our homes in the city of Pasadena.

Jon Becker: Also to set the stage Altadena is a city but it's not policed or fired by Pasadena, it's police services provided by LA County Sheriff, and LA County Fire provides fire service.

Bobby Crease: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay. That border, if I remember correctly from looking at the map, is not like “Oh hey here's Altadena, here's Pasadena”. It's this kind of laced together border where when you're driving through there you don't know whether you're in the city of Pasadena or the city of Altadena.

Bobby Crease: Yeah, even the canyon because we extend several hundred yards into the canyon itself with the border. Just years of experience and working there you talk to different people and you're like, “Why is the border like that?” One answer is, it's water rights.

Jon Becker: Oh interesting. Trey, you're driving on the freeway you catch Bobby.

Trey Sorenson: Right. I was right behind them. I got off at Altadine. I looked up the hillside, being the arson guy, I want details, and I just start taking pictures with my phone so I can look back at them, and I realized it's up in the canyon which is kind of bizarre. You got 50/60 miles an hour winds. It's an odd spot for it to be but I knew it was in an ugly spot. This is the one we talk about in the fire department, it gets up here, it's ugly, it's going to be ugly. As I'm watching it, as I'm driving up Altadena I could see it pushing south. So the fire is pushing downhill southbound into the canyon which is not how it's supposed to go, it's supposed to run uphill with topography.

Jon Becker: Right. In this case if it runs uphill it's going back into the mountains, not down into the homes.

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Trey Sorenson: Correct, and that's what normally happens on these. We get quite a few fires in there. There's transients down there but this was not in the normal transient wash area. It was up in the hill, and the fact that it started pushing down kind of caught my attention.

I got to New York Drive where the battalion chiefs kind of set up. I was watching it and Bobby and Barry set up. They're getting their whiteboard out, and like he said, I'm like, “This is a bad spot”. He's like “Well, they're here”. I'm like “Doesn't mean they're making the right decisions”.

Jon Becker: They arrived.

Trey Sorenson: I basically told Bobby, "If this thing hits the bottom of this canyon, hits the bottom of the wash it's going to push south, and then it will naturally go up the topography." So it starts pushing south to the bottom of the canyon, and I'm like, "This is not good, it's going to take Altadena Drive." I said "It's going to take the range." I could see the patrol cars up at the range. I just told Bobby, "Get those guys out of there." You're going to do things to protect your own. This is their baby. This is our range. They're going to go above and beyond but they have no chance. This thing is wind driven. I took the weather when I got there we're at like 57 to 60 mph southbound over the bridge, and I just told Barry and Bobby, "If you get smoke in your face get out, don't wait for these guys to get out to another spot."

Jon Becker: The smoke in the face is an indication that the wind is blowing the fire towards you.

Trey Sorenson: Yeah. I could hear the traffic. I'm on the PD frequency. I'm listening to them. I can't even get through the fire tac frequency. And I walked up to the battalion chief, the passing battalion chief LA County battalion chief and Cal Fire all kind of met up on the bridge. I walked up and recognized my buddy is the IC. He's the guy you want.

He's the brush guy. He knows his shit. He's calm under pressure. I just walked up, knocked on the window, and he looked at me and I could see he had his maps out. I said, "Evac group?" It's like "Yes." I said, "Shit now I'm evac group." Never done evac group before, but I know I have comms with PD. I can talk cop, my primary daily role is talk on the cop frequency. I know the cops on the SWAT team. We have a great working relationship to communicate and get things done. Bobby said, “Where's it going?” I said, “It's going to go east, it's going to take the range. It's going to take Kinneloa and it's going to go west and it's going to take Altadena. So the weather pattern was very odd.

We stayed there like you said probably about 20 minutes, and then I pushed to Kinneloa, started getting patrol guys up to evacuate Kinneloa. Kinneloa burned 30 years ago. It was a devastating brush fire. Kinneloa fire that's all I kept thinking is all those homes are going to burn. I made the turn to go up to Kinneloa and there's a church that sits right at the bottom of the driveway by county engine 6 or station 66. And I don't know how they Page 8 of saved that station but everything around it was on fire where the fire blew past it south.

The church when I made the turn, it's got a real unique design in the front of it. It has these two angled walls with vertical wall in the middle, and there there used to be stained glass windows that were blown out. The fired pushed through the back of the church and was pushing out the front where I couldn't get past. I just thought “There's going to be bodies. We're going to lose houses up there, and people are going to be trapped.” I turned around defeated in my head I was just "Hey what's next what's next find work, find work." And I told the cops I said, "If you've got embers over your head, let me know what street you're at." So I'm getting intel back that “We're at Hastings Ranch and we've got embers over our head”. I said, “Hastings Ranch all right that's 3 miles to the east of us”. Okay that makes sense, and then we've got embers over our head at Oxford and Washington. Oxford and Washington which is middle of the city.

Bobby Crease: Way west.

Trey Sorenson: Way west, a mile and a half down from the urban interface. I said, Burrito Express, there's a fire at Burrito Express. This doesn't make sense.” We just coordinated to take four more blocks west, if you have embers over your head, take four more blocks west. As I'm driving over New York Drive, I look south, and about a mile south of New York Drive I can see a palm tree on fire down by Washington, and I said, "Oh this is ugly." So we've got three fronts we've got that we care about. We've got an east front that's going to Hastings Ranch, we have a west front that's running the city, and then we have a south front that is pushing down into Pasadena at Washington Drive.

So tactically it is very difficult to stop this fire.

The cops I could tell their frustration on the radio. They said, “I need an engine to such and such the front yard is on fire. We're going to lose the house”. We're doing mandatory evacuations on the PA, cops are knocking on doors and I'm in my head. I was processing as you do, “What are the pros and cons? What's the downside of this?” I said, “We're doing mandatory evacuation how do I…” Bobby and I are making these decisions, just telling them it's mandatory evacuation. I know there's some legal side that if I evacuate somebody, I don't know. So in my head I just got on the radio, and I told everybody on the radio, “You're not getting a fire engine, structures are going to burn.” Our primary role is life and safety. That's all we're doing is we're saving lives. Get everybody out, that's what we're doing.”

Jon Becker: How far into the fire? How long has the fire been burning when you make that radio call?

Trey Sorenson: Probably 20 or 30 minutes.

Bobby Crease: 20 or 30 minutes, yeah.

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Jon Becker: We have this concept of, oh a fire starts here and it spreads very slowly and and you're telling me in 30 minutes, we're 3 miles to the east, we're a mile and a half to the south, and we're a couple of miles to the west and there's fires popping up all over the place.

Bobby Crease: Yeah it's very surreal and the chaos is almost unmanageable. I think I've been a sergeant since December 2008. I've worked numerous crime scenes, numerous critical incidents, nothing prepares you for that. It's just a different monster, and you do your best to try to listen to the expert. I've countless times, the chief did a press conference about a week ago, and the media was there, and we were able to talk to some people and I said, “You need to talk to Trey because he was in it and he really saved just unbelievably, made some calls out there that we wouldn't have been able to do on our own because we just don't have the understanding of the fire where it's going to go where it's moving to.” Trey was able to give that to us so that we were able to focus our efforts on those areas first. It was hours before we were what I want to say ‘caught up’. I use that term loosely because these guys are evacuating while buildings are on fire. The best case scenario is we're evacuating before it gets there. It's like the fire is there and we're doing evacuations while buildings are on fire. That really comes to a head we're about an hour and a half into it.

Trey has some fantastic stories. He gets into a situation where he's asking for a couple units because they're trying to get this heavier set person into a car because is by himself on the sidewalk basically trying to get out. So he gets a couple more units there.

Then he realizes that a few doors up from there is a convalescent home. I think we're probably at an hour, hour 20 maybe an hour 20 into it. We don't understand the magnitude initially. Even Trey I think his first assessment was “Hey, we probably got like 50 or 60 people here. We need to move and give me some more resources to help pull these folks out”. We started to divert a couple officers in that direction. We can't divert everybody because we got other buildings on fire, and ember's flying in all directions.

As that scene starts to progress some of the conversation is on the radio and some of it's on the phone. So as we're talking, we started to lose radio communication just because of the heat, and the smoke. Our radio tower didn't burn not that night anyway. And as we're trying to communicate on the radio, it just was not connecting. The signal was not connecting. We have a backup plan for that. We'll talk about that at the end, and some things we could have done a lot better preparing for if that were to actually have happened. Trey said, "Okay it looks like we have over 200 people here." The number keeps climbing, and so we said, "Okay we need to get more resources to Trey. Trey's asking for fire resources, we're trying to get him PD resources." He was there. I'm listening to it on the radio, and it's one of those surreal scenes just listening to him describe it, and I'm doing this because we've now moved our command post three times.

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Jon Becker: Because you got overrun by fire.

Bobby Crease: Yes. It was great back to the bridge real quick. It's this final 80 to 100 mile gust comes over, and one of the battalion chiefs said, “Okay guys we're moving”.

Barry and I said, “It's about time”. We ended up over at Farnsworth Park off the lake top of the lake into Altadena which we were only there for 2 hours I think before, and that's a good 2 to 3 miles probably from where we were. 2 hours into that we had to move again down to the Rose Bowl.

Back to the convalescent home: That was the very first major single scene during the fire that really got everybody's attention. None of these people can help themselves. I literally mean a convalescent home with over 200 patients, another 80 or so staff probably, and they're bedridden, almost all of them are bedridden.

Jon Becker: And a lot of them are obese.

Bobby Crease: Yes. So going back later and watching the body cam footage of those rescues, you're seeing fire right outside the window from the cop's body camera while they're literally trying to pull beds out of the front of this place, and then going back in, I think that evacuation took about 50 minutes to get everybody out. I'll let Trey tell some of the more dynamic portions of it. As you're just going back and re-watching that, and listening to it on the radio doesn't give you the actual picture of watching what actually occurred and like just the smoke, the ember seeing the flames. It was definitely surreal listening to it let alone being there,

Jon Becker: Before we get to the convalescent hospital in depth, let's talk about resources. So at 6:00 that night before this fire starts, how many cops are working in the City of Pasadena?

Bobby Crease: So we had graveyards had just started they run 12 cops, two sergeants.

We had seven or eight cops, myself and my corporal, watch commander, and then any bleed over from some sections that may have still been working like our park safety folks non-sworn. Our park safeties were non-sworn, they were phenomenal. Didn't hesitate. Got right in the mix. They have their own cars. They were up there doing evacuations, traffic control, getting people moving. The backup in traffic. I asked for everything basically. I asked for mutual aid about 20 minutes in, got on the radio, and my watch commander who was coordinating at the station, I was like hey we need mutual aid here, and she was working on that call backs trying to get other people to come back to work. We had other resources that were doing that it was funny quick funny story.

Page 11 of A couple days later one of the guys that came back into work, he said, “Do you even remember talking to me?” I said, “Nope, don't even remember.” I said, “What'd you say?”

He said, “I asked you if you wanted me to come in.” I was like “What'd I say?” He said, “Hell yeah”, and so that happened.

Jon Becker: So this thing kicks off. There's maybe 30 police personnel.

Bobby Crease: Yeah, that's a stretch but yeah.

Jon Becker: Best case scenario we got 30 cops, from a fire standpoint what would be typical for Pasadena on a night like that for fire personnel?

Trey Sorenson: Our fire personnel work 48 hour shifts but we have eight engines, two ladder trucks, six ambulances and one battalion chief. The ladder trucks, what they ended up doing is the units initially deployed up off of Eaton Canyon off to the west side and they started setting up structure protection routes. So then the mutual aid request comes in, and it's all predetermined which stations maintain coverage throughout San Gabriel. So we get Glendale Arcadia Sierra Madre San Gabriel. Anywhere in the San Gabriel Valley is responding to this thing. We've got Monterey Park Montebello responding, and we can't get an engine to help us basically you're not getting an engine they're already deployed and they're hunkering down trying to stop this thing.

Jon Becker: So when you're starting what do you think at 6:13? I think 6:13 is. The call the official start time of the fire.

Trey Sorenson: Yes.

Jon Becker: So at 6:12, how many firemen are working in the city of Pasadena you think?

Trey Sorenson: There's 50.

Jon Becker: Right now we got 50 fire, and we got 30 cops at a fire that in an hour is going to go to an area that's four miles wide, four and a half miles wide and a mile and a half deep. All right so that seems a little unfair but I'm not going to do the math. So when Page 12 of you put out mutual aid on the police side. all of the surrounding areas are now going to send you cops?

Trey Sorenson: Yes.

Jon Becker: Right away your problem is evacuation, right?

Trey Sorenson: Correct.

Jon Becker: The fire department's problem is fire, but your problem is getting people out of the way of fire.

Trey Sorenson: Correct.

Jon Becker: So what do you initially do? When you get there the fire's burning okay start evacuating people so now you're sending your officers into the fire zone and on the edge of the fire zone telling them just get people out of their houses.

Trey Sorenson: Yes it's very chaotic initially but trying to bring some calm to the chaos is twofold, and you're kind of in it. One, don't get yourself elevated on the radio. Make sure they know when you're sitting in places it's calm, it's collected. Even though it's not you're trying to make some order out of all the chaos. Basically when we get to our command post, we open up our computers, we have a mapping issue that we discovered that we're working on trying to get fixed. Our CAD mapping system only goes a block outside of the city of Pasadena. So as we are now trying to evacuate portions of Pasadena, we're looking up a up at a map both directions not just west into Altadena, but now north into Kinneloa Canyon because that belongs to the county, but then a mile over not even a mile really, we're back into the city of Pasadena…

Jon Becker: That's the Hastings Ranch area, and all that.

Trey Sorenson: So trying to get a map that we could see we're looking at a laptop computer screen, and we have the same screen in the front end, and the back of our Taho for command post purposes. At that point we're looking at an area I can't see on the map. So Barry and I are literally on our phones now. Thankfully that they've worked pretty well most of the night, but we're literally on Google Maps now. We're trying to grid as best as possible where we need to send these cops. At some point Barry's Page 13 of actually calling out street names because we're seeing names that are of streets that we've never heard of, and we're calling them out because they're dead ends into the canyon, it's a cul-de-sac that ends in the canyon.

Jon Becker: These are catching fire.

Trey Sorenson: These are imminent. These places are imminent. So we're trying to focus on those first. I'm asking not just for mutual aid, but I'm also asking for the sheriff's department. I asked for CHP to come assist as well, because they can help with the flow of traffic, as that helps free our folks up to continue doing door-to-door evacuations. So, it took I think an hour. I think I asked 20 minutes in. I think Glendel was the first unit, first city there for mutual aid, and that was about an hour 20 in, if I'm remembering correctly, an hour 20 hour 30. So about an hour after the initial call for mutual aid is when I start to actually receive it. We already have zones for them to start evacuating. So it's just we're just waiting for them to get there because we actually haven't even really started evacuating parts of Pasadena that needed to go. We're still focused in Altadena, so we actually started our mutual aid areas down actually in the city of Pasadena. We had a few cops that were down there because we were getting spot fires that were popping up. They would go down, they'd see a spot fire, or a structure fire, and they would evacuate that street basically by themselves.

Jon Becker: In this case spot fire, and structure fire are just 10 minutes apart basically.

Trey Sorenson: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: The spot fire is going to become a structure fire as soon as it finds a structure.

Bobby Crease: Yeah. What's surreal, and just watching hours and hours of body cam footage afterwards, and an in-car video camera is watching the people try to put the fire out. Trey's got another story about one of the fire engines, and what he saw them doing that because they fell back on their training, and what they were supposed to be doing, but basically it was for not because this was just going to keep going. People with the water hoses are basically trying to put out bushes.

Jon Becker: I think that that is kind of something that is hard to understand until you watch the body worn camera, and we'll show this. This is not like a house on fire, this is the wrath of God.

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Bobby Crease: Yes.

Jon Becker: Both sides of the street are on fire, the wind's blowing 60 miles to 100 miles an hour, sparks are flying across the street, palm fronds are being shot out on fire.

I had a concept of what this was going to look like, and it was nowhere near as bad as it actually was when I watched the body worn camera. So, you think, “Oh if it's a fire, it's moving relatively slowly”. It's jumping a mile, and lighting a house on fire that's now going to burn a neighborhood down.

Bobby Crease: Yes. That literally happened.

Jon Becker: You got 30 cops initially.

Bobby Crease: Yep.

Jon Becker: The relationship between Pasadena and Glendale obviously, you guys are brother agencies, your SWAT teams train together. You have good mutual aid relationships, but it still takes them a while to get there and fight the traffic to get to the location as these guys are descending on you and you're starting to get these resources.

I'm going to guess your problem goes from a kind of local chaos of things being on fire, I don't have enough resources to now okay there's 50 cops that are arriving. What do you want to do with them?

Bobby Crease: We never had enough. I will literally say, we never had enough. When you start to spread out, and how fast this thing was moving, I'll say and just to jump ahead a little bit about 10 hours in, we're now at the Rose Bowl. We got to the Rose Bowl a little after 9 pm to evacuate Linda Vista which is 10 miles from the start of the fire, because the fire department was afraid it was going to jump the 210 Freeway.

Jon Becker: So in 3 hours, two hours and change.

Bobby Crease: No, this is a little deeper into it.

Jon Becker: You said 9:00 p.m.

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Bobby Crease: Is when we got to the Rose Bowl, but we're now probably about 2 or 3 in the morning we're 10 mi away. 7 to 8 hours in and we're 10 miles away and we're now having to evacuate a portion of Pasadena up into the far western edge of Altadena, which for Altadena made a big difference because it did burn that far, it literally did burn that far. They were afraid it was going to jump the 210 Freeway which would have put it now into the Linda Vista area on the mountain side that would have brought it up over into Glendale. Thankfully that did not happen, but that's how evacuations are supposed to work. You're supposed to be like, "Okay guys the fire's heading this way, we need you to go evacuate that neighborhood because we're afraid the fire is going to jump and get there."

Jon Becker: Yeah because in 3 hours the fire may get to this neighborhood not, "Oh that shit, it skipped that neighborhood it's two neighborhoods over."

Bobby Crease: Yes.

Jon Becker: The chaos of this… how are you allocating units? As mutual aid resources are showing up on the police side what are you doing?

Bobby Crease: We're grouping them together. Kind of simultaneous to that we're starting to get mutual aid resources in about an hour and 20 in, we're also getting some call backs now as well. So by between 7:30 and 9:00, we actually do start to get a good group of cops there from our mutual aid partners and from our call backs. What we were trying to do is keep them grouped together. So our smaller agencies like San Marino, South Pass, San Fernando, they're only sending-- so a mutual aid agreement is 50% of your on duty resources basically is how the agreement works. So as those resources are coming in the smaller agencies I'm partnering with the larger agencies. So I partnered some of them with the Glendale guy. I put the sergeant from Glendale who actually is a friend of mine. I just liked that they told me who was coming. I called him on the phone. He was fantastic, so I gave him a bigger group to work with. So it was a sergeant, four cops from Glendale, and now I'm partnering with other agencies smaller.

Jon Becker: So you're getting one or two from an agency, you're sticking them with a group of six, or eight from another agency.

Bobby Crease: Exactly.

Jon Becker: So you're not having to manage all 10 from different agencies, you put them all under that single umbrella.

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Bobby Crease: So I basically had two mutual aid groups that were working one led by Burbank the other one led by Glendale and now I'm using those to leapfrog west through our city to help evacuate Pasadena. Then we're getting groups from Trey's unit, robbery-homicide we kept those guys together. So it was easier to manage by keeping those guys together to help leapfrog and work together, that way nobody gets stuck by themselves, and we have some recall, “Hey is so and so done here so and so done there?”

Keeping track of that many cops we ran a very minimalistic command post, myself, my partner, and one acting commander Keith Gomez who was fantastic, did his best to get us everything we asked for and never said no. Took over the radio when we needed a break to grab water, or go to the bathroom.

Honestly, I think it would have been more convoluted had we had more people just given the chaos that we were trying to manage. We ran out of space to write on. You'd always get out a notepad but because one of us is always working the radio, the other one's working a map, literally non-stop at least for the first four or five hours, we had to remember literally where we were putting people. Dispatch was fantastic. They kept track of everything. As you read through our CAD history for the first 12 hours is 35 pages. So going through.

The cops asked. They were all, "Hey are we giving you every address we knock at?" Well, I've got six groups. By 8 or 9 o’clock we got six different teams working different areas of the city, and there's no way. That would overwhelm us. It overwhelmed the radio for one, and then it would overwhelm dispatch. The only address we want to hear is the refusals because we had numerous people that refused to leave.

Trey Sorenson: So that was huge later on the followup side.

Bobby Crease: Yes.

Trey Sorenson: That intel backs, fact that the officers would say, “I'm at so and so street, this address we have two elderly people they're refusing.” In my head, I thought whoever's got to clean this up on the backside that's going to be great intel which ended up being me on the backside cleaning it up.

Jon Becker: Ironically. like

Trey Sorenson: So dispatch two days later I said, “I don't know how you're going to pull this off”. I don't know. I don't know what it looks like was kind of my theme for this week's event for seven days. I said, “I don't know what it looks like but I need you to go through your notes and get me every address on refusal to evacuate”.

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Jon Becker: Yes because at this point, the fire is burning so fast. You're not fighting the fire, there is no way to fight the fire. There's no helicopters or airplanes in the air because the wind is blowing so high. There's no point in putting a ladder truck someplace, and, “Oh we're going to put this house out” because it's just moving so fast that really all you guys are trying to do is just save people.

Trey Sorenson: That's a very good point. The fire tactical side is if you can stop it at a certain point, we know it's going to take these 10 houses out on Riviera. Our objective was to stop it at Riviera, so it didn't run all the way into Hastings. They held it. County fire deployed and they held it at this pent house on Riviera which kept it from furthering into... There's washes all behind these houses that I had no idea until you see this house on fire, and you wonder how the hell did this house catch on fire. I walk back there I'm like, “Oh, there's a wash back here”. There's washes that run all down from the mountains for the rain obviously.

Jon Becker: Fire is running through the washes behind the fire line.

Trey Sorenson: It's running behind the houses on both sides. So it's running south, south downhill pushed by wind and then topography is uphill, so the fire runs up the hills to the backyards of these homes. That's happening every half mile throughout the city. So that's how it's bleeding into all these residential areas. It's very bizarre until you're watching it and it doesn't make sense, and then the next day you look at overhead and you say, “That's how that happened”.

Jon Becker: That's how. At the time you don't have situational awareness of any of that it just seems like the fire is just jumping from place to place.

Trey Sorenson: Yes.

Jon Becker: In some cases it is jumping from place to place. A palm frond is picking up in the air, and flying a mile away and lighting something on fire.

Trey Sorenson: I'm at the top of Hastings Ranch evacuating. There's probably 10 houses on fire. I watched palm fronds. It's similar to control, alt delete in my brain. I watched a palm frond just travel, travel and it landed, and I look back about a minute later and the house is on fire. I said, “I know how that one started right like I got one solved”.

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Jon Becker: Jesus.

Trey Sorenson: There was nothing you could do to stop it, zero, zero you could do.

Jon Becker: I like to think if the hillsides are on fire, the fire department's going to show up they're going to put out the fire. You think about historical events like the Chicago fire, or the London fire like how could that ever happen, that would never happen today.

Yeah it would actually.

Trey Sorenson: This is categorized as a brush fire. The day after I was talking to somebody and they say, "This isn't brush fire, this is a conflagration.” It's going from structure to structure and there's no stopping it, it's these fires. It's a historical fire that started out in the brush, but this is not your standard set up a brush fire and you have a division A and division Z, and then you fill it in in between as it burns through Santa Clarita, well this isn't that. There's no division A and Z. There's a structure protection group in Kinneloa, a structure protection group in Altadena, structure protection group North Altadena that's how it was set up on the fire site. Classification as a brush fire is how it started, but it was only in the brush for 15/20 minutes and then it's in--

Jon Becker: Burning its way through a neighborhood. Yeah that's crazy. Bobby, we're maybe an hour, an hour 20 in, and we're seeing now mutual aid resources starting to come, your fires still spreading. You're trying to evacuate, how many homes do you think at this point?

Bobby Crease: Oh god, thousands. We were probably upwards of four three or 4 thousand homes already.

Jon Becker: You're announcing in the neighborhoods, knocking on doors.

Bobby Crease: We left that discretionary to the-- because they asked, “Do we need to knock on every door?” I said, “That's got to be discretionary”. If the houses or brush is at the back of these houses because the officers were seeing it. They were seeing it come up the canyon over the back of some of these homes. If you think they're in there go knock on the door. If it is okay the fire is not quite here yet, I can get away with just rolling up and down the street on a PA, then do that but it was definitely discretionary.

They made the right call.

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Jon Becker: I've seen the body warrant of guys kicking down doors and pulling people out. I mean, these are especially when you get into kind of Altadena and the west side, these are closely packed houses. They're smaller older homes with older people in them.

Bobby Crease: Yeah, and Altadena I definitely would describe as an older neighborhood, older families, generational homes and families that have just been there for a really really long time. That's exactly what you saw evacuating from there. So finding shelters for them, I think we had a couple ideas that were brought up but ultimately the only place that was big enough was the Pasadena Convention Center. I think we had that established about an hour and a half in because our folks in the field were getting asked where do we go, and because that's something else you don't think of in the moment of that chaos happening is these people, not all of them have family, and they don't have someone somewhere else to go to. All their family's at that house literally. Then it becomes, “Okay, if I leave where do I go. I don't have money to go rent a hotel”.

A funny story about just working regular patrol 2 days ago, we ran into a lady who was said, “I had to go past Westcoina to get a hotel room” because that's how fast they were filling up.

Jon Becker: Which is 25 miles away from there.

Bobby Crease: Yeah. There was nothing available, and that was the people that could get a hotel room,

Jon Becker: Yeah a lot of these people are not going to be able to afford a hotel, so you now in addition to trying to constantly evacuate these people, you guys now have this additional burden of moving people. I think part of the reason that I wanted to only talk about the first 12 hours of the fire, is in California we do fire-- it is a thing, it happens every year. Calfire and CalOES, there is a big machine here that's good at this, but that big machine is going to take a while to start turning y and and it's it's it's going to be a while until you have true CalFire, CalOES, true ICS command system in place with supporting resources, and until then it's you.

Bobby Crease: Yeah.

Jon Becker: It's crazy. So Trey told me we're an hour 20, hour 30 into this. Let's do the convalescent now.

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Trey Sorenson: All right. So it's Hastings. I'm confident that the evacuation is pretty solid in Hastings. I've clear there. Kind of another side note story is I've never worked this district. I've always worked Oldtown as ops guy. I've never worked on the east end of town, maybe five shifts my entire career I end up on a road. I've got houses on fire on both sides, and I come up over the top of this hill, it's called Carriage House. I’ve never been on this road in my life, and I go into full white out. I can't see my hood on my truck.

I look at my iPad. I was just using it to map and figure out what we need to evac, and I look at the street, and it curves, “Oh shit, this is how the arson guy died on Paradise Fire.

This is how the fire marshall died on the campfire.” All these incidents that you listen to these single resources that die. How the hell does an arson guy die on a brush fire? What are you doing? Maybe he was the evac group guy. In my head I said, “Oh fuck”.

I literally don't remember on the job ever panicking. I always can help myself, get your mind. I took a deep breath and said, "Ah man, you're good like let's think this out." And I put my truck in reverse. I knew I couldn't go down. I put my truck in reverse and my camera pops up and it's crystal clear and I said, “Bizarre but let's go with it.” I went back all the way down the hill, to a clear area. Well, cops are going to kill themselves. They're going above and beyond listening to the radio traffic. I said, "All right, nobody goes above this street." I had to put thresholds on them. So I said "No one goes above this street." And I base that just off of the smoke conditions, it's pushing down but it's settling. It's settling in these pockets where the wind's over the top. It didn't make sense till later looking at it.

Jon Becker: Yeah but the wind coming down the mountain, and it's pushing the smoke down into the neighborhoods.

Trey Sorenson: So the fire is blown through but the houses are still smoldering but they're creating a ton of smoke, so that heavy dense smoke is pushing south. I just kept moving “okay we're not going above this street not going above this street, copy”. I would just relay that to the command post. I felt good. There were no lights on at the houses which was telling me that the people were out. There was still power in this area.

So there were no cars in the driveway, you're doing these check boxes and, “Okay, I think we're good here.” When we evacuated down to Washington. I looped around.

My geographical senses were so off. I couldn't keep Hastings Ranch and Kinneloa and Altadena, Eaton Canyon. I said, “, "Oh if I go this way. I'll be at Hastings Ranch." I said, "I'm already in Hastings Ranch." One of the guys said, "I can only remember two things at a time." I think that's just the stress and dealing with two radio traffics and stuff like that. I said, "All right let's settle down."

I made this loop around Washington. Then I came northbound on Altadena from Washington and like McDonald's is on fire and Jewish church is on fire, the temple's on fire. I'm like “I got to get back in the mix up into Altadena” As I'm driving I see this lady in a wheelchair with a cat box on her lap, and I said, “That's bizarre” on the sidewalk and Page 21 of there's the fire's 10, 15t behind her, but it's pushing south she's on the sidewalk, and I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I said, "Ow."

Bobby Crease: I literally when he's saying stuff like this and other guys say stuff too but that scene in “Blackhawk Down” and the one Ranger references it, but he sees the donkey crossing the street, and shit that he remembers that's what I kept thinking about.

I was that's one of those moments.

Trey Sorenson: I stopped. She's a bigger gal. I look in my mirror and our training captain, a great friend of mine Captain Organ, I see him pull curb and I u-turn around, I go back he' said, "Sorry got a loader in my truck." I said, "All right." And then I wheel it over and he's got his work truck's a 350 so it's a little bit higher and I said, "All right." So we started, "Okay." And then I just said that I need additional resources because I know I can get cops there. I said, I'm getting no fire resources, but I know I can get a cop there so I give the CP. I don't know where I am this is a county area. I'm blocked north of Washington on Altadena on the east curb. Brad May who's one of our helport lieutenants he's driving by he gets out he said, "You need some?" I said, "Yes." So I go up to the guy. I said, "Ma'am listen we're going to get you close to the door we're gonna stand you up and we're going to sit you in this truck we're get you out of here. She said, "Honey I'm paralyzed." All right.

Jon Becker: Awesome.

Bobby Crease: It got harder.

Trey Sorenson: I said, "All right add it just add to it." So then her assistant comes up to her caretaker and she said, "I can go get the thing from the house, it's a little crane." I'm game planning this in my head, and I'm like, "Stop this is that definition of paralysis by analysis. Overthinking it, and you're not going to win like let's just fucking start trying. I tell Brad I'm like, "We're just going to give her a heave ho. Josh got in the back of the truck and he grabbed her by the shoulders, and we got her like halfway into the ledge, and she's sitting on my leg, and she's like "Honey I'm falling." I'm like "You're not falling.

We're not going to let you fall." I was, "Okay”. Well flip her around to get her in the seat. I spin her and put a seat belt on her, and Josh is like "Now what?" I'm like "Don't know, good luck."

Jon Becker: Take her somewhere other than here.

Trey Sorenson: So then she says "Just take me to…” Sweetest lady ever right. Sweetest thing ever. She says "Just take me to Huntington, they'll know what to do with me”.

Huntington's our local trauma hospital." I didn't hit. Just all these weird things I Page 22 of remember and I just thought that's bizarre, okay, whatever. As Josh takes off to take her to Huntington, I look south, and I see all these cars pulling in the parking lot. The cars are coming north towards the fire then they go east into this parking lot. “What is this?” I look up and says “Assisted living facility” on the sign. This is interesting because where this facility is, it backs up to Eaton Canyon, where it spotted like an hour before down in the canyon from New York Drive. I'm like, "Oh this backs up to the canyon." I looked, and there's fire coming over the top of the three-story convalescent home which didn't make sense, a lot of things aren't making sense. I'm trying to process and make decisions.

As I'm walking down the driveway I look in the first convalescent home, there's three separate structures, the first one they're all down in the lobby. They have power, lights are on. “How many people do you have?” “We have 40. We have a van coming.” Get to the next building, they've got 20 or third buildings. That's the fire I can see. It is extremely close to it. I look inside and there's no power. It's six sprinkler heads are broken, but they're just pissing water out of them, they're not spraying like a normal sprinkler, and they're scared and terrified. People inside they're elderly, they're in wheelchairs. They've got a helper with them. There's people in hospital beds in the lobby. I just go, "Oh shit, what do we do here?" I go, "Nope, just make a decision." I put checkpoints on myself. If I see fire out of this back window, I'm pulling the trigger. If I see fire on this hillside coming over the top, I'm pulling the trigger, and I'm calling for fire resources. I'm letting the command post know, I need everybody we have. I told Bobby on the phone. I thought it was on the radio. I reviewed the radio traffic, it's not there.

Bobby Crease: Yeah, I think that was a phone call.

Trey Sorenson: I told Bobby, “I don't know what this is going to look like but I've got to move 290 people somewhere”. He says, “How about McDonald's?” I said, “McDonald's won't work. I saw McDonald's on fire”. He says, “7-Eleven?” I said, “7-Eleven” which is across the street. So a lot of face to face, and then the cops start showing up. Two guys from the helport show up who I know, and they’re like, "What do you need Cap?" I said, "Get ready." I said, "When I tell you we're going to pull the trigger, we're pulling the trigger and we're going to move all these people to 7-Eleven. Copy that, get that building ready." He says, "Copy that." And then the other guy said, "I got this van over here, and it won't start but there's people in it already." I said, "What?" I said, "Okay." I'm inside the lobby of this place--

Bobby Crease: I think they pushed that van didn't they?

Trey Sorenson: They pushed the van.

Bobby Crease: Literally pushed it.

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Trey Sorenson: Yeah, the van was backed up to the hillside that's on fire, and I turned around and there's an area all these things are happening.

Jon Becker: This is like a bad fever dream.

Trey Sorenson: Is this real?

Bobby Crease: Absolutely insane.

Trey Sorenson: Another department showed up and tried to give him a brief. I said, “Hey said you got 294 people we got to evac. I need a strike team now. Give me one engine. We can keep this in check with one engine.” He says, "We don't have anybody."

He says, "Shelter in place." And my mind went into… I'm standing in the middle of this driveway shelter. I’m like, “We're past that?”

Jon Becker: This is going to burn down. Shelter in place means burn to death.

Trey Sorenson: All I think about is the flood in North Carolina, and 300 people die in a condo home drowned, and all the workers survive. I said, "Yeah that ain't going to be me." I'm not going to live with that very long”. It hit these trigger points, and I have embers over the top. The sad part is, all the legal shit's in my head. I said, "What if I wheel grandma across the street, and she goes plowed by a fire engine. There's no electricity on the lights, and there's engines zip zapping around. What if I plow grandma with an engine like that's going to be on my ass, and then we're going to come back tomorrow and this building's going to be standing." This other chief told me to shelter in place, and he was right.

I'm playing all these games in my head, standing in the middle of this parking lot. I told myself, I walked in and I said, if there's fire in the back window and I walked in and if there's fire in the back window and I said, we're moving. We’re done. I don't have to make any more decisions. I took a picture of that and I took a picture of outside. When I get called into court because grandma gets run over, these are the reasons I pulled the trigger.

Jon Becker: It is so sad that that even has to be a calculus.

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Bobby Crease: You got to think about it.

Jon Becker: Just to digress for a second like that is what we don't understand when we're suing our police and fire departments, is we are putting in his head in a situation like that, “Oh man, I have to make sure that we don't do something that gets us sued”.

Bobby Crease: Yep.

Jon Becker: Which could have very easily led to him saying, "Okay we'll shelter in place." And not to foreshadow too much, but an hour later that convalescent home is an ashtray.

Bobby Crease: Correct.

Trey Sorenson: Yes. So we as we're getting we're moving people out the lady goes "Hey we have someone trapped in the elevator." I'm "Right”. So we had about an hour before that my brother-in-law who's a battalion chief he's working, works for Pasadena. I can't get through on a regular TAC on my radio that they've moved this to another TAC. I'm calling him on the phone, and like I said earlier, I said, “I need an engine at such and such.” He said, “Get me on red nine”. So we went to a direct check TAC which would be like simplex on the fire side. We have our task force which is like an engine truck, ambulance, functioning together with the battalion chiefs, and we're all on this on red nine which is direct TAC. I get on red nine. I'm like “Is there a truck on red nine?” Truck 32 comes. It's like “What do you got, sorry?” “I got an elevator rescue in a con home. I've got a fire impingement, and I need you here.” He says, “Copy that”.

The voice I hear is the guy that can get the job done. Thank God, it's Rob. I said, "Park on Altadena, don't commit to the parking lot”. The parking lot to this thing is a half mile long. These three buildings are all off of a lot. I didn't want the truck in there getting stuck. I turn around and they're running down the driveway with their elevator tools, and they walk in. I said, "Okay, don't need to check that box off right?" It was bizarre. It's like when you're doing something in the office, and you have this list of three things that you have to do that day, and you get two other things that you had to do that weren't on your list, so you just add them to the list, so you can cross them off. That was kind of my mentality at least I can check that off.

We get everybody moved out, and they get the elevator door open, they blow it open with the jaws of life and pull the body out it's like “You're good, what do you need?” I said, “I need a hose line like that'd be great”. He's like “Sorry brother, we're trucking an RA.” So they get on the way. We've moved. I'm out in the middle of Altadena, and there's this herd of people like that's the pictures, like they bring back a lot of “Shit we did it”.

Page 25 of We're putting three people in a hospital bed, it's comfy. You're going to 7-Eleven. I don't know what we're doing next.

Jon Becker: Yeah piling him on a hospital bed, and pushing him down Altadena Drive.

Bobby Crease: Literally.

Jon Becker: Yeah it's skateboard races.

Trey Sorenson: Then Bobby gets on the radio he said, "Well buses work." I said, "Yep.

Like I don't know how you're getting them but that's on them to figure out right which is a whole nother game.”

I come back to the con home and standing in the lobby of it and one of our ambulances shows up. Our EMS chief, who's one of my best friends, walked my kids down the aisle for my wedding. He shows up, “What do you need?” “We need to do a secondary search”.

We had a headcount from the facility which did an amazing job. We had a headcount, they were 100% accounted for. Still, we don't trust that. Fire service we have primaries that are done by the fire department, and then you send another crew to do a secondary search for a new set of eyes. I tell these guys. tell the sticker guy Lucero makes all of our stickers for the fire department, and then a kid I've never seen before on the job for two weeks and Silvam and then Ted I said, “We need secondaries on this building.” “Copy that”. The sticker guy said, "Hey keep an eye on this thing if it gets through the window let us know." I said, "Clear mind right?" I'm not thinking that. My mind is somewhere.

I'm thinking about 50 different things.

I end up in this little lobby area and I have eyes on the fire hitting the building, and about 10 minutes it breaches the second floor window on our side, so I pull them out. We're on Red Nine, we're on a direct tac and I relayed to the command post, “Hey, we got 100% evacuated, we're doing secondaries. They said, "Copy that." That’s good, right? It was intense for that whole operation.

Jon Becker: Yes, and we'll show the video of this, but you guys are evacuating the building is starting to burn. This is not like, oh they evacuated and 45 minutes later the fire got there. This is, the building is on fire as the last people are being pulled out of the building.

Trey Sorenson: Correct. There's broken windows, there's smoke, it's eerie.The fear on them is kind of the motivator, they know it's not okay and it's our job to fix the problem.

Page 26 of Let's fix the problem. How do we fix it? We just move them. I don't know what it looks like but we're just going to move them.

Jon Becker: Just move 295 people somewhere.

Trey Sorenson: Right.

Jon Becker: Most of whom are bedridden and in wheelchairs, and…

Trey Sorenson: Walkers, wheelchairs yeah. Then the fire breaches the second floor window. I pull them out. The fire is in between them and the east side of the building, so they have to exit the east side to where the fire is blowing up the hillside out of the canyon. They said, "We're kind of stuck over here, we're going to let it die down a minute." Okay, so then they come around the corner. They come back "Good." I said, "Good this building's done." My brother-in-law shows up, "What do you need?" “We're good we're moving on.” We kind of just "All right we're good here, what's the next operation?" Then Barry gets me on my earpiece. Our fire guys aren't moderate PD. I'm on PD frequency in Barry's, “Trey you up?” “Yep”.

Room 326. It was kind of like this, I'm not going to ask questions. He's got intel from somewhere right where I don't need anything else. If he's telling me someone's in 326, someone's in 326. I just looked at the 4 of them and said, “Room 326”. I said, "Kick the fucking door, and let's go. Grab the body, and let's go”. They said, "Copy that." They take off up the stairwell.

Now I'm in the parking lot, and it was as if time stopped. I'm watching this fire run the second floor, and I know that I just sent these guys to the third floor; sticker guy, new guy, my best friend, my brother-in-law. All these things are going through my head. Off of intel from Barry who was my partner in homicide, I trust him with my life. I said "Damn." I said, "What if?" You start what ifing it before it's even done.

Jon Becker: Right which in this case is not a constructive thing to do.

Trey Sorenson: No. All I'm picturing is I can picture my mother-in-law's living room, and all I'm thinking about is, I'm going to tell my mother-in-law, father-in-law that I killed their son. I sent their son on a death mission or a wife? I'm going to have to come home and break the news to her that they're dead, and Ted's mom and dad. This new kid I've never met. It was really surreal for a minute. I want updates. I want updates. I just sent them on a death mission. Tell me where you're at, tell me what's happening but Page 27 of then I know me. When I'm on these operations the last thing I want to do is talk on the radio, or someone asking me questions about what I'm doing. Do work. I know they're doing work. It seemed like 10 minutes, it's probably 3 or 4 minutes, and then I'm just giving them updates on where the fire is. It's on the second floor. It's halfway through the second floor running west, getting pushed by the winds. I just hear Ted, he said, “Yep coming down”. It's like west stairwell plus one, and I'm like “Oh fuck, they got him”.

Jon Becker: So despite the facility staff saying we got everybody, and primary clearing being done there's still one person, who fortunately called somebody who called somebody, and saved their life.

Trey Sorenson: So that person had called a family member, the family member called dispatch, dispatch lets the command post know, Barry lets me know. They come down the stairwell with the wheelchair, this lady they wrapped her in a blanket and a towel, so she can get smoke inhalation. “Where are we going?” I said, “7-Eleven”. I knew at that moment like this incident was going to jack me up.

Jon Becker: There's going to be trauma from this.

Trey Sorenson: They said, “Okay now what?” Then I tell them like "Okay now we're at 100%”. We got the person out of 326, and they're getting moved to the command post, and still even through the night like they weren't accounted for yet but they said, "We just got a call from someone that 326 isn't accounted for." I said, "326 is out of the building." Like there was still confusion through the night.

Jon Becker: Oh yeah, I mean the chaos is unbelievable.

Bobby Crease: It took a while.

Jon Becker: Well now you've got close to 300 people at 7-Eleven.

Bobby Crease: The timeline is kind of funky. He brings that up actually pretty early in the conversation, the fact that he's already established 7-Eleven, okay we're moving. It's actually not super close; it's still a half a block south and Caddy Corner. There's other buildings on fire on the way to 7-Eleven. So it's like they're trying to wheel these people through the street, and get them down. They were throwing people in the beds of trucks, whatever they could do to get them down there. I asked them if buses would work, and that just kind of goes back to our critical decision-making. How are we going to fix this Page 28 of problem? Buses that's really the only way to get that many people moved. I actually started calling friends.

I called the former Covena chief and got no answer because he's the Foothill Transit security chief now. I was going to ask him for a bunch of buses. I said, “We just got to find buses”. We had switched normal operations to a different frequency for patrol which we had one sergeant, and probably one cop working the rest of the city. I got the sergeant on the Air Milton White. I say " Milton I need you to hijack me a couple buses and bring him up here." And hijack probably wasn't the right word but--

Jon Becker: I would say it's an appropriate word.

Bobby Crease: He did man. He found two Pasadena City Arts buses parked at Corson and Allen. Got out and said, "Hey we need your help, and we need it right now." He escorted him up to the 7-Eleven. That's what they loaded everybody on with.

Jon Becker: So we go from 249 people certainly dying, or 200 with staff close to 300 people certainly dying to nobody dying.

Trey Sorenson: Yep.

Jon Becker: That's pretty yoman police work right there, and pretty yoman firework.

Trey Sorenson: It just sat with me. I know that I know Kennallo is burned over and I know that there's going to be dead bodies up there. I know Hastings is going to have dead bodies. Then I said, "Okay but we did good here right?" Then I see a Palm Springs fire engine drive by, I said, "Oh they got here fast." I look down, and it's 4:00 a.m. This thing kicked off at 6:00, it's 10 hours later. I said, "Oh it's 4:00 a.m." I go to the fire station. I wash my face. I couldn't see. I take a piss, and it's as if they said, "Hey this thing's at Lake and Altadena, the gas station on fire." Lake and Altadena.

Jon Becker: For those that don't know, that is a long way away and way down the hill.

Trey Sorenson: So then it kicked off the West End. So they said, "We need evac." Guys are just pushing west pushing west so then, hop on the freeway drive around to Windsor.

I get off the freeway and I get to Ventura and Altadena which is the top corner up by JPL, residential area. I get out of my truck, and I take the weather again. I got 70 mph west Page 29 of winds. Where I just came from, I've got 50 mph east winds, and south winds. I'm looking at JPL and then the mountain slope kind of dips down. I said, “Oh shit, if this gets into the Arroyo like it did all these other canyons, it's going to get into the Arroyo , and this is going to go to Dodger Stadium.”

Bobby Crease: Yeah it's going to come through, it's going to come through the Rose Bowl which is now where all the resources are coming to.

Jon Becker: Yeah, which is now the third place that you've a command post.

Bobby Crease: Yeah.

Trey Sorenson: I get out and I take weather and I've got this 70 mile an hour wind wet.

As I’m standing there, I'm trying to game plan how we are going to evac. I'm looking at my map and Bobby was saying, this is not our area. This is not our district. We don't know what street. I know where Altadena is, and it's a threshold for me. Practical wise on the evacuation. But now I've got to pull up to a house and they're doing this mandatory evac and it's one of my partners. I see his bald head. I said, "Oh Juan's here."

"Shit my my guys are here, my robbery-homicide guys are here." It's finally, "Okay. We got this." Then we went from this west wind to, I'll never forget this south just pushing hard south wind. I just thought, “How in the hell did that happen?” I go to my truck and take wind now I got a 75 mph south wind pushing to the 210 frequency.

Jon Becker: It's not only blowing fast it's swirling while it's doing it.

Bobby Crease: Yes.

Trey Sorenson: I see the header so the header of smoke is pushing this. This column is pushing way over to the west, and it just turns, and it blankets the city, blankets Altadena southbound. I get on the radio with CP, and I go, “I need every available unit and deputy up to this area. I was there for 15 minutes. There were not a lot of resources in that area. Commander Goumas gets on the radio, he says, "You're getting nobody. Got our guys." I said, "Copy that." So start evacing. I've got all the slick tops, all the detectives running around doing evacs knocking on doors.

Bobby Crease: We actually recalled almost all of our personnel back to the Rose Bowl for a quick brief, and then we sent them all out to start that side of the city.

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Jon Becker: Yes, so now we're 10 miles.

Bobby Crease: Yeah.

Jon Becker: From the point of origin to the west, and kind of northwest.

Bobby Crease: Yeah. We had been asked by San Marino and Arcadia for help, and we're all “Kind of stretched thin guys”. They were pulling resources from the cities east of Monrovia, Isuza to help them because it's also skirting the northern edge to the east of all those cities.

Jon Becker: Yeah because it's burning through the top of Hastings Ranch, and moving towards Arcadia.

Bobby Crease: Yeah, thankfully a few structures burned over there but not a lot. Trey can explain that better, but that's all because of how the wind was acting. It didn't push south into those cities, it actually stayed up just skirting the edge of the mountain right there.

Trey Sorenson: I just remember going to the command post around 6:00 a.m and my fire chief is there with the deputy chief. It's like, "What do you think?” “Hasting is ugly.

Kinneloa is gone, probably going to have 100 licks at me.” He says, “Give me an update when you can."

So daybreak there's houses that I knew I had to go to, people that wouldn't evac, and I looked gone. Go up gone. Go up here, gone. I drive up Kinneloa where the church was, and there's one burned house two burned houses. I couldn't process how I drive all the way to the very top these very high-end homes in--

Bobby Crease: Gated community.

Trey Sorenson: Gated community. I'm looking around, nothing's burned. How did this happen? The way the wind pushed, it pushed it south basically to the bottom of Kinneloa, and around into Hastings and then it went all the way around, because of the topography of the hillside, it pushed it around to the top of Hastings. So it went all the way around Kinneloa.

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Bobby Crease: They had a couple homes mixed in that burned up there, but there's several hundred. When you drive up there I definitely don't understand it as a cop, and then listening to Trey describe it as a firefighter and you say, “I have no idea how that didn't burn”.

Trey Sorenson: Just in touring the area with you guys, there is just such a cruel randomness to it where it's seven houses on a street are burned, and one is totally fine.

Bobby Crease: Right.

Jon Becker: It's not, oh well the one concrete house survived, and all the wood houses burned. Your range is mostly destroyed, and there's buildings where I said, well that would definitely burn, and it didn't. I guess part of that is the wind, and just the kind of--

Trey Sorenson: It's the wind, and it's the stuff around the house. So there’s this ornamental they call them ornamental vegetation, so you have these small bushes you have these things butted up to the house to make the house look good. If that catches on fire, it's going to run up to your eaves. Your house is gone in your attic. Even if you have a stucco house. The houses that survive don't have that.

Jon Becker: Interesting.

Trey Sorenson: We do these brush clearances, and we do all these things, and the city comes out and escapes the hillside so there's not overgrowth, but take care of your own stuff. If you have your patio furniture up against the back of your house, your house is probably going to burn down in a fire. Throw it in the pool.

Jon Becker: That's crazy.

Trey Sorenson: It's really crazy.

Jon Becker: I think we can use the convalescent hospital as kind of a microcosm of the night, but this is happening, small versions of that are happening all over. You guys are trying to evacuate people they're refusing, or you have a body worn camera kicking indoors and pulling people out of their houses. When does it start to feel you have even Page 32 of support? I don't want to say you're starting to win because it's going to be days till you start winning. At least start to feel maybe you're not getting your ass kicked is bad.

Bobby Crease: So the fact that Trey brought up that Linda Vista, and Western Altadena evacuation that was about 3:00 or 4 in the morning is when we started doing that. I think maybe a couple hours before that because you can't you can't fathom the devastation. Even at night when you're driving through it, it's not the same as when you go back later, and you say, "Oh my”. It's a different perspective. But a couple hours before that. I think we thought okay we've got at that point probably 95 to 120 cops give or take, sending people back for breaks and etc. They did a good job doing that on their own because Trey said, some of the guys said they couldn't see after going and evacuating a block. Guys were going into whatever they could find to to wash themselves off. It's a false sense of security for sure. It's as if I've got a hundred or so cops working at any given moment, but then it's as if assistant fire chief walks over, and says, “Hey guys, we think it might jump the freeway, and now we need to evacuate Linda Vista”, and then that dump happens again, and then it's just ramped back up.

Rose Bowl gets cold at night and we were literally shivering. We finally got our big mobile command post down there, and the commander said, “Why don't we go inside?”

It was getting hard to even push the buttons. The crazy thing was there'd be an 85 mph gust that came through and it was hot, and it was like, “Well where'd that air come from?”

I said, “Oh yeah there's a big ass fire over there that's blowing all that hot air”. So that reinvigorated the situation you all said, yeah that's not going to be good if it jumps a freeway right there, and gets into the Arroyo and that wind sustains going to the south because it literally would have pushed all the way through South Pass and people were-- Altadena is gone like there's no way to even--

Jon Becker: Yeah literally an entire city is basically gone.

Bobby Crease: Yeah it is literally basically gone, and you feel horrible for those people.

It could have been worse, it literally could have kept going like if the winds would not have started to subside that next morning, it literally could have been worse so we start Linda Vista. We have to draw the line somewhere right. It's not infinite so we draw a line in the sand as to where we're going to do evacuations to. And then that way the focus of effort the cops have is just good direction. By that time we had enough cops and supervisors there that I could actually assign however many cops to a supervisor, and then give them a specific area of the city to work on top of that as that's happening we already start to get calls for looters. So we're now having to adjust to send people back over to evacuated areas because we're already getting looting calls, and that was probably 8 hours in.

Jon Becker: So just when you get that warm fuzzy in your tummy that Trey's rescuing people in the hospital, in come the assholes to steal everything they can find.

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Bobby Crease: Literally they don't waste any time.

Jon Becker:Lovely.

Bobby Crease: You can look up the evacuation areas on a map on the computer. So they know as they're driving through they know what's been evacuated and if the cops are all gone that means that area has been evacuated. There's no cops left and we were literally using every other resource we had to help with traffic control. CHP never showed up so we knew that that initial night, they were there the day after but that initial night they didn't show up. So we were using parking enforcement, or contracted employees with the city and putting them at major intersections in Hastings Ranch to try to prevent cars from going up into that area. We're getting calls from these guys and they're all like, "There's cars going around us, and they don't look right."

So now it's like we really don't have anyone to spare to go over there yet. You almost got to let it happen.

Jon Becker: Which is madding.

Bobby Crease: It is absolutely maddening. Yeah, really is.

Trey Sorenson: At this time we're still doing rescues.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Trey Sorenson: It's daylight.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you're still rescuing evacuating people.

Trey Sorenson: It's 10 in the morning, we got houses-- Page 34 of

Jon Becker: And the cockroaches are stealing the neighborhood.

Bobby Crease: Yeah probably. I will say the next day I get relieved at 8:00. I come back about 6 hours later, and I get back down to the CP. We've got I think 80 mutual aid cops there now. So our night side was relieved. We have about 80 mutual aid cops from literally not just our own mutual aid area, there's several mutual aid groups, or areas within the county, and almost all of them have sent cops to us. So I think we had 80 mutual aid cops on top of what we were deploying as well.

Trey Sorenson: I will never forget that it's probably I don't know what time it is, but I end up at the command post, and there's a four piece of chicken nuggets from the night before, and they're like "Want some chicken nuggets?" I said, "Sure."

Jon Becker: Big win.

Trey Sorenson: Or whatever you can get your hands on.

Bobby Crease: Yeah. Best chicken nuggets I've ever had.

Trey Sorenson: Truly. I walk out, and I see there's some cops there, and I'm reading their patches and I'm like "Oh Palisades." I'm like "That's cool, they're already here”. I look, and it's the chief.

Jon Becker: Nice.

Trey Sorenson: I said, "Oh shit." That's when it hits you like this is ugly. People recognize it. The chief is out doing traffic control like that's cold blooded. No one told him to come out here. Mind you, 12 hours before this thing kicked off, the Palisades fire kicked. So your mutual aid response is not your normal mutual aid response. We have Pasadena engines in, and a battalion chief at the Palisades fire because it broke out before our fire.

Jon Becker: Yes.

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Trey Sorenson: Glendel, Burbank all those resources are already there, and that campaign is not going to release resources because they're doing the same thing we're doing.

Jon Becker: That's the thing that also sets a stage for this whole thing is that the Palisades fire is already burning. Everybody sent mutual aid to the Palisades fire. Now you guys go off, and now everybody's having to have their mutual aids and split. I know just living east of you guys, I was seeing fire engines coming in from places I didn't even recognize the name of coming in to fight fire. I think that’s probably a good point for us to transition to lessons learned. I don't think you can prepare for a disaster this size.

Bobby Crease: No. There's always things that you can improve on but preparation this is a once in a hundred year event maybe.

Trey Sorenson: I was asked this before, and they said, “Well what could you have done better to prepare for this?” I said, “There is none. You can't right this. This is mother nature, you're not going to control her or fix her.” What we did have is legitimate savages, badasses making sound decisions under pressure that save lives.

Bobby Crease: Yeah, Louisa one of our SWAT guys said, "I've got the Bearcat because we can't move people in wheelchairs." In my head I'm saying, "Hell yes”. That's what I'm talking about independent action. Independent action has this bad tone to it. People freelancing. That's not independent action. It's a person making a sound decision based on his training skills and abilities, and that is exactly what happened. Without these people making these decisions, Milton White going and getting buses, no one ever taught you to go get a damn bus.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you were never taught to hijack a bus in the police academy.

Trey Sorenson: Those are the things that help this.

Bobby Crease: Truly emphasizing critical decision-m, and allowing them the freedom to do it without asking.

Jon Becker: I think that's an interesting point, pushing authority down.

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Bobby Crease: Literally the low we're talking about all the way down to parking enforcement.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you are delegating a parking enforcement person, "Yep you're in charge of this intersection. Make it good god speed."

Bobby Crease: They were in charge of trying to keep looters out of Hastings Ranch.

Jon Becker: Without guns.

Bobby Crease: Without guns yes.

Jon Becker: We're going to write you five tickets.

Bobby Crease: Yep.

Jon Becker: When you look at the scope of this thing even I know with the Palisades fire, and something this fire even the water supply right it's being overtasked by leaks, and people turning their sprinklers on. You had all this conversation afterwards, “Oh California has these water problems. They didn't have enough water.” No water supply system in the world can account for 10,000 homes having all of their faucets turned on because their roof just crushed everything. I think looking at it from an infrastructure standpoint, you've got to think about “Okay you're not going to have the normal infrastructure, even like radio communication”. You talked earlier about towers coming under threat. How do you even deal with that? Let's talk about radio for a minute.

Bobby Crease: We realized this early on, and it was a conversation that I had with Barry pretty early on. We've discussed this in the past because radios fail, towers fail and for whatever reason and going back and listening to the radio traffic, you could hear the spottiness. It's cutting in and out, and whether that's just purely from the wind, the smoke or the heat or all of them combined we were having trouble with our radio, our digital signature clicking through for us to be able to communicate back and forth.

Sometimes you had to wait what seemed like forever but probably 10 or 15 seconds for that to key in and the signal to actually capture, so that you could actually talk on the radio.

Page 37 of We did talk about okay what's our backup if this happens. Our backup is that we switched to simplex. Problem with simplex is it's driven simply by battery power from radio to radio. Where we were at initially we weren't going to be able to communicate with dispatch on simplex. There's a fix for that. We preposition cars who have more power than your portable radio throughout the city. We've already identified areas.

Pasadena City College is right in the middle; it's got a four-story parking structure. We put a police car on top of there and that's our relay, that's one of our relays. We have to do that at different points throughout the city. The problem is, and I take full responsibility for it, we never relayed that to our officers in the field. “Hey, guys if there's a radial failure, we're going to switch the simplex, we'll put some repeaters, some cars in place so that we can relay information.”

In a normal circumstance, we'd be able to use a helicopter as well because the helicopter can get the signal from wherever they want, and they can transmit anywhere in the city on simplex.

Jon Becker: Not 100 mile an hour winds.

Bobby Crease: Not 100 mile an hour winds. No helicopter. So that was definitely one of those lessons learned where we could have come back, and put that out so everybody had that information. Because had the rail radios completely failed, cops would have been still working but we'd had no idea where they were and accountability starts to become an issue at that point.

Jon Becker: You may lose somebody literally.

Bobby Crease: Yeah. Exactly. Even something as simple as Trey letting cops know not to go above a certain point in the city, is huge.

Jon Becker: Because if your radios don't work, they never hear it.

Bobby Crease: Right, they never hear it.

Jon Becker: So it also strikes me that the tactics that you've trained for, the things that how to do, if you're a firefighter fighting a structure fire, you know how to fight a structure fire, you know how to fight a brush fire. Those tactics are not going to work with this adversary. You're not going to go into brush fire mode because as you described a conflagration, but you're also not going to try and fight all the structure fires because there's going to be 9,000 of them literally.

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Trey Sorenson: A normal structure fire in the Verdugo system, you're going to get three to four fire engines, two ladder trucks, an ambulance, and a battalion chief. It's confirmed fire, you get a second chief. You have an engine that's in charge of five houses on fire, and all you're trying to do is keep it in check, so it doesn't catch that sixth one on fire that runs it to the rest of the city. Those were the things that the fire guys really did great on. If you look at the fire where it was pushed to. I had no intel on the fire side. I'm hearing things and then the next morning. I go back and the engines are still. They're holding it at Woodbury, not letting it get into our area. It's impressive, you get two engines keeping a whole block in check, so it doesn't get into Pasadena.

So there's a lot of those stories, and just people pulling stuff. It sounds cliche to do hero shit, but you're not thinking about it. You're listening to the cops on the radio. “Hey, this whole house is on fire. We're going in. We hear someone screaming.” They go in, they say, "We got him out right?" Going back to the radio traffic, I think more important than that is discipline. The radio discipline was phenomenal. That's why this was also successful. How many times in these critical incidents you're trying to get critical intel out, and you're bonking because someone else is talking about some dumb shit that's two blocks away that doesn't apply? People didn't talk and then when they did in the beginning Glockson said, “No, we're not doing that. No, you're not doing that.” I thought, this is 30 minutes into this, and I said, “Oh, this is going to be okay because true leaders say no.” He's not a yes-man. “Oh yeah, we'll get to that later.” “No, we're not doing that, that is not a priority right now.” You hear that a couple times, and then people say, "Okay don't ask dumb shit." That's clearly not what we're dealing with.

Bobby Crease: That actually makes a big difference.

Jon Becker: Trey's rules of emergency management, number one: Don't ask dumb shit on the radio.

Trey Sorenson: I think that really helped the discipline. Guys did so much stuff that we'll never know about which is great.

Jon Becker: Just even watching the body worn, and some of the vehicle camera stuff like the assisted living facility is kind of the obvious 300 people, and very conspicuous. That becomes kind of the paradigm of what we're going to look at. Watching the body worn there's probably 500 examples of a cop kicking in a door, and picking up Nana, and throwing her in a car, and sending her on her way that we may never know about, simply because nobody's going to sit and watch all of the body worn and some of them might even have their cameras on.

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Bobby Crease: Yeah. I can tell you he brought up Brad May earlier. That guy was doing great work. He went to--

Trey Sorenson: He evacuated his family before this.

Bobby Crease: Yeah because they live in Hastings and went right back to work. Never got to his office where his body camera was at, so we don't have any of his footage. I was going through and I was looking and I finally had to ask him and he was like “I didn't have it because I never went back to the office to grab it” because he was doing stuff.

“Hey, we don't have masks, and we don't have goggles, so what do we do?” Flew down to Home Depot, they gave him everything they had, and he started just literally driving down the street, throwing goggles and masks at guys. “Hey, put these on. Put these on.

Put these on.” So little things like that.

Monica Quay another lieutenant but didn't turn on her body camera because it was not something watch commanders do. She was out literally in the middle of it getting work done.

Trey Sorenson: At the con home, she comes up to me and she said, "What do you need?" And I said, "I need you to keep your eyes on the back of this building. When it catches fire, let me know." She's said, "Copy that." And she's out in it. She's out in it, and she's giving me updates and it's like, "Those are my triggers." She's said, "Trey you up?" I said, "Yep." She's said, "Uh the back of the building's on fire." I said, "All right, copy that."

She's calm.

Everyone on the radio Corporal Miles, all these things, I forgot about all of this. I'm reviewing the radio this week, and I'm at my desk and I'm reliving everything. I'm like "Holy shit." The calmness on the radio, there's points where you're like, "That guy needs help." A lot of the time it was me.

Bobby Crease: I will say we did have two of the more experienced teams working that night, patrol teams.

Jon Becker: Which helps.

Bobby Crease: So that definitely made a difference. From all the way up to all the way down to the bottom of the ladder, it's like you could see the experience guys weren't saying frivolous shit on the radio a few questions were asked, and Barry shut him down right away. Just having the confidence to rely on Trey and Barry, I don't have to second Page 40 of guess their opinions, or their questions or their or their decisions. If they said, it's happening and that's just the way it is, and we're moving on now to to what's next, and what needs to be handled next.

Jon Becker: I want to kind of rapid fire some of the lessons learned here in the time we have left. So how do you harness the expertise of this. You've got all of these resources, how do you harness that expertise when you're trying to run this operation from a distance?

Bobby Crease: Well trusting guys make decisions is definitely one but that starts way before that. It's like what are you talking about in your briefings, are you giving guys the latitude to make decisions when they're in the field on just a normal call? I'm not overseeing them. I'm not micromanaging them, because that's how they gain the confidence to be able to make those decisions down the road when these types of incidents happen. So a lot of that just comes from years of training and leadership, and just our own classes that we've done together and things like that.

Jon Becker: It's also relationships.

Bobby Crease: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Everything we debrief on this show, comes back to these relationships. The mutual aid relationships, the relationships between the agencies, and the relationships in the agency. It's knowing, I know Trey, I trust Trey, tell me what I'm doing. Okay good to go.

Bobby Crease: Yes.

Jon Becker: I think it's easy to overlook those things and not place enough emphasis on this kind of-- in the end it's just a group of people trying to do a common task, and they have to trust and work with each other.

Trey Sorenson: Yes. That's a huge point. Eight years ago when I went into arson my old chief Reiter said, "I don't care if you solve one arson. Fix the relationship between PD and fire." That was my mission. That was whatever eight years ago in 2017, and that was my goal, and it just happened. I developed this relationship with robbery homicide, and commander Gomez was a sergeant at the time. We became friends. He's one of my closest and dearest friends. He trusts me. He trusts me with an operation early in my Page 41 of career, and I've got 90 cops hit in five locations on an arson case. He's said, "Okay”.

That's where it started.

The fire chiefs trust me with the PD guys. I'm not micromanaged by them. There's also a trust there that I'm going to do my job. Bobby and I go back to when he was on the Marshalls team. He called me at 3 in the morning, “Hey, we're doing a hit, a high-risk hit, can you come be the medic?” “Yeah, I'm in”. I will never say no to helping somebody. He trusts me. I trust him. I trust Barry.

It goes back to room 326. I had no intel other than Barry telling me it's room 326. It's that trust, and that's why all these people, and there's so much against us, and teamwork is what did it. It's the cops playing with the firemen. We have this relationship. For those watching, if you're in the command decision mode work on that. Have a fire guy assigned. There's no reason that an arson guy shouldn't be assigned to the police department. Put him in property. Put him in something where you have that relationship. We get to the command post at the Rose Bowl, and the guy that's running body recovery from CalEOS side, he's on the overhead team says, "How did no one die in Pasadena?" I said, "I don't know but I'd like to think of our comms, and our communication. They trusted me. I trusted him."

Jon Becker: No one died in Pasadena because you guys did a fucking amazing job. Let's just call it what it is. It's as if no one died in Pasadena because Pasadena Police and Fire evacuated everybody that was in front of the fire.

Bobby Crease: 100% goes back to the relationship though. If that relationship is not there, it doesn't have the same effect.

Jon Becker: I think it's easy for police departments and fire departments as much as they tease each other to get sideways with one another. I think that in this case the fact that you are a child of both worlds. You've been to SWAT school, but you're a firefighter and you're the SWAT medic. I think that that tie not only means you speak both languages, but also culturally you become a pivot point to pull the two agencies together.

Trey Sorenson: Correct. I didn't realize that until this. You throw it into catastrophe, you throw it into the worst case scenario, and it works. If we don't do that and all of a sudden I'm the arson guy, and I work out of the fire department I show up and I'm trying to run shit or coordinate things, they're not going to have any buy in from me.

Bobby Crease: Who's this guy?

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Trey Sorenson: We eat lunch together. We eat lunch every day. We go to our kids'

birthday parties. I'm invited to more cop stuff than I am fireman stuff. The firemen all call me a cop now, so that's where the badgering comes, it's from the fireman stuff.

Jon Becker: Well it should actually come from both sides if it's done correctly.

Trey Sorenson: It does still.

Jon Becker: Being a child of both worlds yeah being a child of both worlds means you're taunted by both worlds.

Trey Sorenson: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: That's how it's supposed to be. It's easy to look back at these things and go, "Well nobody died." But what always strikes me in these situations is nobody died because there were people driving into a fire zone, running into a freaking convalescent hospital, and carrying people out, and rolling them out on their beds, and all the stuff that you see in the body worn. It's difficult. None of these people will ever know who you were. There are thousands of people who got out of their houses because some cop that they didn't even know, or will never get their name or anything else knocked on their door or kicked in their, or pulled him out, or a firefighter stood on a hillside while fire was spitting in his face keeping the fire from getting to their house. I think that part of the reason I wanted to sit down with you guys was, it is moments like this when hopefully the public takes a second and realizes you're alive because somebody stood between you, and the fire. The footage of the motor cop driving through what looks like a steel foundry.

Bobby Crease: Literally.

Jon Becker: None of these people will ever thank you but on behalf of those people, thank you.

Bobby Crease: Yes.

Jon Becker: Guys, I appreciate you sitting down with me and again thanks.

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Trey Sorenson: Absolutely. Thanks. Appreciate it Jon.

Bobby Crease: Appreciate it.