Firefighters Dispatched to Front Lines

Like countless others, Fire Battalion Chief Robert McVey of Fountain Valley had been transfixed by the scenes on television: a driver pulled from his car and beaten at Florence and Normandie avenues, Tom’s Liquor Store looted and vandalized.

To his amazement, at 1 a.m. Thursday, McVey found himself half a mile from that very corner in South Los Angeles, fighting a blaze in what he described as “a war zone” with fires everywhere.

“Our first call sent us through that intersection, and the first thought that went through my head was this was where that driver was beaten and where they broke into Tom’s Liquor Store. And my God, there it was, there’s the liquor store,” said McVey, 44, who led a team of five fire engines from Orange County to Los Angeles.

At the request of the Los Angeles City Fire Department, a total of 55 fire engines from Orange County went north to help battle blazes. They made up 11 strike teams, each having from a dozen to 25 firefighters. Each was escorted from fire to fire by several patrol cars of the Los Angeles Police Department. Six crews were released to return home about 7 a.m., and five were still on the front lines by Thursday afternoon.

Fire departments throughout Orange County remained on alert Thursday in case their help was needed.

Judy Jewell, a battalion chief from the Costa Mesa Fire Department, said she had watched the violence erupt on television with co-workers Wednesday night at the station. Hours later, she was in the middle of it.

“You see it on TV, and that’s one thing, but driving in there and seeing the destruction, it makes it real,” Jewell, 37, said.

“I don’t think anyone believed it would be of this magnitude, and to watch all the buildings being burned, and all the smoke columns, it was beyond belief,” she said. “I feel for the business owners who go to work this morning and realize they don’t have a livelihood any more. These people didn’t do anything. They don’t deserve this. It’s just so unfair they had to suffer because of a few.”

Her team worked on about 15 blazes, she said. To maximize manpower as three new fires began every minute, all crews were instructed only to prevent flames from spreading to other buildings and not to save the burning structure unless the fire was fresh, officials said.

“We were not going inside because they’re not safe. We don’t have the facilities to keep recharging our air packs,” McVey said. “We were just knocking them down and going to the next one.

“The attitude was, ‘My God, I can’t believe I’m here.’ The rest of my career, I will never see something like this again.”

Jewell said that for the most part, her team worked silently in shock as they hopscotched from blaze to blaze.

“We just looked at the scene and said, ‘Wow! How can you do this to one another?’ ” Jewell said.

One Orange County firefighter, Lenny Edelman, 32, was shot in the thigh. Edelman, who works for the Santa Ana Fire Department, was in stable condition at a Los Angeles hospital.

Firefighters on Thursday praised the L.A. City Fire Department for efficiently coordinating fire engines from different departments and expressed gratitude that police set up perimeters to protect them at each working site.

Still, McVey said, “as safe as the officers kept us, I think the firefighters would have felt a little more secure if they had bulletproof vests.”

Alan Wilkes, a firefighter from Buena Park, said his team helped keep a blaze, which had gutted several small businesses, from spreading to the Department of Water and Power building at Central Avenue and 46th Street.

“By daylight, 6:30 or so in the morning, there was quite a crowd on the other side of the street. They were just watching; nobody bothered us,” Wilkes, 24, said.

Wilkes said he and his colleagues were too worried about putting out fires to think.

“We weren’t out there putting the blame on anybody. We knew how it happened and what caused it,” he said.