Fire Lover (2 page)

And Billy thought. Well, he got out, didn't he? Maybe Ada and Matthew did too. Maybe.

Billy ran to the fire captain and cried out that he had escaped but his wife and grandson were trapped, maybe only ten feet inside the door.

"Did the fire doors roll down?" the fire captain yelled.

Billy didn't know what a fire door was, but he said, "No, I didn't see any doors close."

Eisele later reported that he had all the confidence in the world that if somebody was only ten feet inside that door he could go in and get them out, so he said to Billy, "Don't worry, we'll take care of that!"

And then Eisele gathered his firefighters for a rescue attack. He ordered that they pull three folds of two-and-a-half-inch hose, each fold being fifty feet long, in a try to make a quick knockdown and rescue. They charged the line with water and made their approach.

The fog nozzle was like a giant shower head designed to break up water particles and consume BTUs, drawing the heat from a fire. Because fire needs oxygen, heat, and fuel to survive, the fog nozzle was meant to disrupt the fire triangle by turning heat into steam, in effect, shooting steam at the fire to lower the temperature. It was all logical, very logical.

So after sending his sixth firefighter to find and shut down utilities, especially natural gas, the captain and his men entered through the southwest door, where suddenly they were looking into a blinding orange inferno.

They tried to attack under those flames, vivid orange but with a weird blue-green tint, but they only got a few feet inside. The fire had obviously flashed over. There were no aisles, there were no people, there was nothing but fire. Everything was aflame. But now came an eerie sound commingled with the hiss of the burning foam. The battery-powered display smoke detectors were going off, one after another. And the firefighters could hear high
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pitched squeals within the flames, like animals burning alive.

Captain Eisele yelled at the nozzle man to hit the Celotex ceiling tiles, but the 225
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gallon nozzle created so much steam in the superheated air, emitted so much nozzle pressure, that it blasted the firefighters back out the door.

While other engines were still racing to Ole's Home Center, Eisele ordered a one
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and-three-fourths-inch attack line to be brought to another entry, but learned that the fire doors had in fact rolled down and could not be pried open. The captain sent a man up to ventilate the roof because the fire had not burned through yet. When the firefighter cut the hole, flames shot into the sky, pulling heat with them in a chimney effect, but it was too little, too late. It was about seven minutes into the fire and the entire roof was perilously threatened, so Eisele had to order his firefighter back down.

And where in the hell was Engine 41, he wondered, yelling into the radio. And why did he hear an engine being radio
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dispatched in the wrong direction?

What Captain Eisele didn't know at the time was that there was another, nearly simultaneous fire at Von's Market, only blocks from Ole's Home Center. He would later say that it was unheard of: two South Pasadena fires in close proximity? In retail establishments, during business hours? Unheard of!

It was indeed a bizarre evening for firefighters in that part of the San Gabriel Valley. Prior to the Ole's fire and the fire at Von's Market, there had been a fire in nearby Pasadena, at Albertson's Market on East Sierra Madre Boulevard, about seven miles from Ole's. Arson investigator Scott McClure had arrived at Albertson's at 6:45 p. M., and met with a battalion chief for a quick briefing.

McClure had found the point of origin easily enough, in the grocery racks piled high with bags of potato chips. At 7:45 p. M. McClure called dispatch and requested that they send arson investigator John Orr from nearby Glendale Fire Department, probably the most accomplished arson sleuth within the several fire departments that rendered mutual aid in the area.

John Orr showed up very quickly, and he explained to McClure about the volatility of potato chips, that the oils in the chips and the bag material are highly combustible, a sack of solid fuel. John Orr told McClure that in his opinion, the Albertson's fire was deliberately set, as is usually the case with fires in retail stores during business hours when customers are present. When McClure later finished his investigation and returned to his car, he heard radio reports of the disaster that was unfolding seven miles away at Ole's Home Center and he sped toward the scene.

When he arrived at Ole's John Orr was already there.

After he'd ordered his firefighter off the roof of Ole's, and after the interior attack was aborted, Captain Eisele found John Orr standing at the rear of his engine carrying a thirty-five-millimeter camera.

"John! What're you doing here?" Eisele asked.

"Passing by," John Orr said. "Do you mind if I shoot some pictures?"

Eisele wished that Orr had turnout gear in his car, but since the arson investigator was in civilian clothes and hadn't offered to help, the fire captain assumed he did not.

"Help yourself, I've got work to do," Eisele said.

And while Eisele awaited the arrival of engine companies, and while Jim Obdam was led to the back of an ambulance, and while Billy Deal stood in front of Ole's Home Center, where he would remain for twenty-two hours, and while John Orr shot film of the conflagration, the roof caved in and a geyser of flame and sparks exploded high into the night.

In the parking lot of Ole's, the sister-in
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law of Carolyn Krause, who was a community-service officer for the Glendale Police Department, saw a blue Dodge that belonged to the Glendale arson unit, and standing by the car were John Orr and his partner, police officer Dennis Wilson.

After checking in vain at the triage area for her missing sister-in-law, Karen Krause approached the arson investigators and told them that Carolyn Krause was missing.

John Orr told her that they would keep an eye out for Carolyn, but that until the fire was suppressed nobody could get near the building except the firefighters
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the implication being that a search for bodies would be hours away.

Karen Krause stayed as the rest of the family arrived, and they remained for several hours. Waiting.

The fire chief of South Pasadena was at a fire-prevention class in Los Angeles when he learned of the disaster at Ole's. Chief Gene Murry excused himself, jumped in his staff car, and sped to South Pasadena, arriving close to 8:30 p. M.

He saw that one of the crews was attempting to breach an exterior wall in order to penetrate it with heavy "master stream poles," an appliance that could deliver more than five hundred gallons of water per minute. While Chief Murry was assuming command, he learned of the fire in progress at Von's Market on the same street, just a few minutes away. He couldn't believe it.

Chief Murry spotted John Orr snapping photos, and asked if he would assist by going to Von's to conduct an investigation. It wouldn't be until midnight that the fire chief could declare that 125 firefighters had the Ole's blaze under control.

Moments before the smoke was observed in the housewares department, Patricia Parham, the mother of Carolyn Krause, had gone to Ole's Home Center to see her only daughter. Patricia Parham was with Carolyn's two children: her son, age three, and her two-year-old daughter. Mrs. Parham picked up her daughter's house keys so that she could take the grandchildren home and put them to bed.

Back at Carolyn's house, Mrs. Parham received three phone calls in quick succession, one from Carolyn's father-in-law, one from Carolyn's sister-in-law, and one from Carolyn's brother. When Mrs. Parham raced back to Ole's parking lot, the building was engulfed, and she never saw her daughter again.

Sometime after 8:00 p. M. the phone rang in the Cetina residence. Luis, Jimmy's older brother, picked it up and a family friend said, "How's your brother? Is he home?"

She seemed upset, so Luis said, "Why?"

And she said, "Because there's a fire where he works."

Luis's mother asked him in Spanish what was wrong, but Luis answered, nothing. Then he ran out to his car and drove to Ole's.

Fair Oaks was cordoned off by police cars, so he had to detour and take Orange Grove Avenue, finally parking in a handicapped zone near Ole's. He jumped from the car, leaving the lights on and his keys inside, and just started to run, until a cop stopped him and said, "You can't leave your car there."

Luis turned to him and cried, "My brother works there!"

The cop hesitated, but let him go.

When Luis reached the flaming building he spotted an employee whose name he couldn't remember, and he yelled, "Where's my brother?"

The young man said, "I don't know!" Then he added, "I think he might still be in the building!"

Luis Cetina then ran to the north side of the building and entered an open area, splashing through four inches of water where the sprinklers had activated.

Another Ole's employee whom he recognized was standing there watching, and Luis shouted, "Where's my brother?"

The young man said to him, "I saw him a little while ago! He went back inside!"

"Back inside?" Luis cried.

"Yeah, there were people banging on the door! One of those fire doors that dropped down!"

Then Luis Cetina, not knowing where to run, circled around to the back, to the door through which Jim Obdam had escaped. The door was open now, but impassable. Luis returned back the other way to the fire door that had previously served as the main entrance to a Thrifty Drug Store that formerly occupied a space in the strip mall.

Luis stayed right there, where there also used to be a Laundromat at which the children would wait while their mother washed the family's clothes. Their dad would sometimes buy them an ice cream there at Thrifty's, when he could afford it.

It was two o'clock in the morning before he went home to face his mother with the truth.

Matthew Troidl was at home with his wife, Kim, and their five-year-old daughter, Bethany. Matthew William, his two-and-a-half-year-old son, was with his grandparents, and while Matthew Troidl's wife was speaking on the phone, there was an emergency breakthrough on the line. It came from one of her brothers, who said that Billy Deal had called about a fire at Ole's, and that Billy couldn't find Ada and Matthew William.

While en route to Ole's, Matthew Troidl and his wife kept reassuring each other that it was probably a small fire, maybe a trash can or Dumpster, and that it had just caused some confusion. That's all it was. Confusion.

But when they arrived, they saw the ventilated roof shooting flames one hundred feet in the air. And there were police cars, and fire engines, and ambulances, and chaos. But they managed to find Billy Deal in all that pandemonium and he told them the worst.

Matthew Troidl said later that he had all kinds of crazy thoughts. Maybe they'd gotten out a back door! Maybe they'd been hurt and were already at a hospital! Maybe they'd crawled up in the air-conditioning vent and were okay! Maybe. So many of them just kept thinking, maybe.

The man designated to lead a six-man investigative team the next morning was Sergeant Jack Palmer, a twenty-five-year law-enforcement veteran assigned to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department arson-and-explosives detail. He had investigated nearly five thousand fires in his twelve years as an arson cop, and had the resources of the county of Los Angeles on which to draw. The tiny South Pasadena Fire Department needed vast assistance for this major disaster, and the LASD in their green jumpsuits
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the Lean Green Machine
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were there in force.

Sergeant Palmer immediately did his walk-around of the ravaged structure, looking for the fire's point of origin. The west portion of Ole's was destroyed, and the east side showed heat and water damage from the sprinklers that had gone off.

Skip loaders and bulldozers were already moving debris while the investigators, armed with shovels and wheelbarrows, tried to find the bodies of the four missing victims. Each time a skip loader would snare a load, investigators had to look inside for remnants of charred human beings.

Sergeant Palmer saw the crane remove twisted steel beams from the center of the building where the roof had collapsed, and talked with an employee who had been called to the scene. Palmer was told that plastic products had been on display, but he was not told that there were racks full of polyurethane foam products, which, he would later say, "go like wildfire."

After his hour-and-a-half investigation, the arson cop decided that he was unable to eliminate as a fire cause the possibility of electrical shorting in the attic area. He later said that this fire was very hard to read because there was so much potential fuel in the store, and that overhead burning, which caused ceiling material to drop and start secondary fires, could have ignited numerous hot spots.

Jim Obdam was interviewed by Sergeant Palmer, and he did tell the investigator that he'd observed a column of dark smoke nearly two feet in diameter in the southeast part of the store, by the housewares section. But Palmer never interviewed Anthony Colantuano, the employee who had seen not only smoke in that area, but fire burning in the racks, an amazingly fast fire that chased him and created a draft of its own, blowing him out the door.