Close Call for Fire Station 35
Firefight at Griffith Park’s Hogback
Trail Bridge
Wednesday, May 16, 2007 - 6:00 pm
By early morning on May 8, the firefighters at Station
35 knew that the possibility of a fire in the tinder-dry hills
of Griffith Park was real. All the factors were in place —
humidity was low, and the brush that had grown high after last
year’s heavy rains was parched.
Feeling the heat: Flames roar toward a crew under the bridge
as a helicopter
drenches the site with water. (COURTESY KCAL 9 NEWS)
At the fire station on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz, a short
jog from the park, that day’s crew was nagged by the
possibility that the winds could pick up. The firefighters’
worst fears were realized around 1:20 p.m., when they got a
knock on the station door.
“It was a male resident in his mid-30s,” recalls Captain Bill
Wick. The unidentified man was alerting them of fire via
“still alarm” — firefighter lingo for a call that doesn’t go
through dispatch or 911. The panicked Los Feliz resident
dragged the captain outside and pointed toward a cloud of
smoke emanating from the hills of the 4,210-acre park, one of
the largest urban parks in the nation.
As one group of emergency medical technicians rushed to help a
burn victim, who was later cited for smoking in a restricted
area and released after being treated for his burns, the rest
of the 14-member crew piled into Station 35’s two engines, a
brush-patrol truck and a fire truck, and raced toward the park
to assess the damage.
By sheer coincidence, Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge,
City Hall’s resident expert on all things Griffith Park, was
driving along Sunset Boulevard when he spotted the cloud of
smoke. Recalls LaBonge, “I get to Maltman Avenue and I say,
‘It doesn’t look good.’” As he tells it, he drove his city car
in a “safe fashion” to Hillhurst Avenue and pulled in behind
the firefighters as they wound their way up Vermont Avenue to
surface streets finally leading into Aberdeen Canyon.
The small convoy ended up northeast of the Roosevelt Municipal
Golf Course on the park’s southern edge, near the Greek
Theatre and Hogback Trail Bridge — a well-known rustic, yet
elegant, overpass for hikers and equestrians. The bridge leads
from lower hiking paths to Dante’s View, a picturesque
two-acre garden created by an Italian immigrant in 1964, and
Glendale Peak, a favorite spot for hikers.
Flame-resistant: Will Heritier and Brian Walker fought for
the bridge. (Photo by Christine Pelisek)
What happened next will probably never be forgotten by
the fire crew — or LaBonge — or TV viewers watching live as
KCAL-9 helicopter pilot Derek Bell and photographer Chris Haug
homed in on the gutsy crew as they confronted a wall of flames
that put their lives in jeopardy.
“I yelled at some guys about the importance of the bridge,”
LaBonge tells the L.A. Weekly, referring to the
50-foot-long Hogback Trail Bridge, built in 2004 for $200,000.
His beloved bridge was directly in the path of the fire, and
LaBonge had noticed a Los Angeles Times staff
photographer’s car parked on the service road, potentially
crowding the passing fire trucks. “I whipped the car out of
the way and called the [city] desk at the Times and
told them I moved it.”
While LaBonge was playing Good Samaritan, the firefighters
were grouping near the blaze and assessing its magnitude,
their fear mounting that it had the potential to destroy not
only the bridge, but other major landmarks, including the
Greek Theatre and the Griffith Observatory, and million-dollar
Los Feliz homes.
“We went up there to stop the fire, and like every structure —
be it an outhouse, bridge or fence — we will try to protect
it,” says Wick, the captain. “But I won’t put my guys in
harm’s way to protect a bridge. It was definitely not our
first priority.”
One of the biggest problems was the inaccessibility of the
fire. Griffith Park has notoriously difficult terrain and is
too steep for ground crews to fight without other help. The
blaze had not grown much, at that point still being described
by authorities as “10 acres of medium brush burning uphill.”
Firefighters sought assistance from water-dropping helicopters
called in immediately from the city and county — but not quick
enough for Station 35 firefighter Will Heritier, who, along
with colleague Brian Walker, two other firefighters and two
park rangers, had climbed up a steep slope by Hogback Trail.
Heritier says he and his fellow firefighters attempted to head
off the blaze roaring toward Hogback Trail Bridge. Fanned by
winds of roughly 10 mph, the blaze “preheated” the brush ahead
of its path, and soon raced out of control.
“When we got there, we saw flames, but it didn’t seem to be
that large-scale yet,” says Heritier days later, sitting at
Station 35’s kitchen table surrounded by cookies, pies and
cheesecakes — gifts from thankful nearby homeowners.
Without warning, a wall of flame roared above them,
licking perilously close to the men who ducked for cover
beneath the wooden bridge they had thought to save. “It
happened real quick,” recalls Heritier. “It just shot up like
a chimney. Did we think it was going to be that large? No!”
In a shot by Haug carried live on CNN and Fox News and
broadcast globally, they hunkered down as embers landed around
them, starting spot fires and even burning one of their hoses.
“It hit our trigger point,” says Wick, meaning the fire rushed
to within an unsafe distance of the crew. “We knew we had five
minutes” before the crew members were hurt — or worse — and
they knew “we couldn’t extinguish it ourselves.”
In a harrowing call heard over the Los Angeles Fire
Department’s radio system, the captain made an emergency
appeal for water to be dumped directly above his men. Says
photographer Haug, who captured the flames rushing toward the
crew, “They basically disappeared in flames. The whole bridge
just turned orange.” Soon, an LAFD helicopter dropped 400
gallons of water — all dramatically shot by the hovering
helicopter from KCAL-9 News — and the men and bridge were
safe.
Thinking that the worst of the afternoon blaze had been
brought under control, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LaBonge
showed up at the park’s helicopter landing pad to congratulate
the firefighters — but the two politicians were quickly told
they had to leave, says Heritier.
It would be many hours before the department’s work was really
done. By the end of last week, the fire had blackened 817
acres, destroying historic Dante’s View and damaging a bird
sanctuary, the Cedar Grove area and restrooms near the
Griffith Park nursery. The four-day blaze forced the temporary
evacuation of portions of nearby Los Feliz and the closing of
freeway off ramps on the Ventura (134) and Golden State (5)
freeways. It prompted (human) evacuations of the Los Angeles
Zoo, Autry historic museum and nearby golf courses.
The one tale that didn’t seem to make headlines was the one
about the small band of firefighters who battled the blaze at
Hogback Trail Bridge. A day after the incident, at a press
conference, LaBonge found one of Station 35’s firefighters,
thumping him on the back and exclaiming, “You saved the
bridge! I was telling them yesterday, ‘We have to save the
bridge.’”
It was the worst Griffith Park fire in three decades, but Wick
downplays the severity of the battle for the bridge. “It
wasn’t a close call. We took a moderate amount of risk for a
tremendous amount of good.”
Adds Heritier, “We call this a career fire. It was historical.
We train for this.”
Still keyed up, LaBonge called the Weekly just after 7
a.m. last Friday, reporting with great relief that the bridge
sustained light damage and that only minor repairs would be
needed.
“Tom [LaBonge] was up there giving the support,” says Wick,
who joked that the council member is regularly at fire scenes,
and for a while “we thought it was him starting the fires.”
Days later, the firefighters at Station 35 acted cool. All in
a day’s work. But as Heritier notes, “We were fortunate
someone didn’t get hurt. It was hard to see and breathe. That
bridge protected us.”