When firefighters told Officer Adrian Woolford of a woman trapped as the Eaton fire spread rapidly, he ran towards her home.
Two of his fellow Pasadena Police Department officers, Chrystian Banuelos and Jonathan Bombardier, saw Woolford and quickly followed him in the smoke-choked darkness.
“I know that, if he was running, he was running in the direction of someone that needed help,” Banuelos said. “None of us had any questions about what our task was. Our task was to save lives. That was our purpose, and that was the only thing we were thinking about the entire day.”
Inside the house, they found two women who hadn’t escaped. Banuelos carried one of the women from the home, while Woolford gathered her wheelchair and other necessities.
Then Bombardier noticed the other woman hadn’t left with them. He went back inside to get her out.
Body-worn camera footage and photos released Thursday, Feb. 6 by the Pasadena Police Department showed the efforts of Woolford, Banuelos, Bombardier and other officers to evacuate residents as clouds of embers blew overhead and flames leaped to homes and businesses.
Officers banged on doors — and in at least one case broke down a door — to find and wake residents and get them to safety, the footage showed.
At Two Palms Care Center, a nursing home in the 2600 block of East Washington Boulevard in Altadena, Pasadena police officers rushed in the dark to awaken frightened, fragile patients, put masks on faces and quickly wheel them to safety before flames destroyed the facility.
“The building’s on fire, man. We’ve got to go,” an officer told one patient before lifting him into a wheelchair.
Officers pushed some patients outside while they were still in their hospital beds. Police then commandeered Pasadena Transit buses to move patients out of the evacuation zone.
In the first hour that the disastrous wildfire spread with the help of strong, gusty winds, Pasadena police deployed 92 officers to evacuate residents before additional first responders arrived, officials said.
Other officers, like Banuelos and Bombardier, weren’t working but got the call about the fire and clocked in to help around 3 a.m.
The Eaton fire destroyed thousands of homes and other structures and killed at least 17 people, but without the efforts of his officers in its first hours, Pasadena Police Chief Gene Harris believes, hundreds more would have died.
“It was a Herculean effort that was undertaken at the snap of a finger,” Harris said, “and our folks really showed up and showed out.”