Honoring the Brave : Rescuers Receive Medals and a Victim’s Thanks

Ulises Salvador Pen~a stood up to honor the men in uniform. He had a good reason. Last year, the men in uniform stood up for him.

Pen~a, 44, was trapped in his vacuum truck under the rubble of the Northridge Fashion Center parking structure in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 17, 1994, earthquake.

He was a dead man, for sure.

Yet, thanks to a team of 14 Los Angeles city firefighters, Pen~a emerged about eight hours later. He was badly hurt, but he was alive.

On Thursday, the firefighters responsible for his rescue were awarded Medals of Valor during a ceremony at the Omni Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. Also honored were 51 other firefighters who had saved lives and property after the Northridge quake, including 15 who rescued tenants at the collapsed Northridge Meadows apartment complex.

Former football great Merlin Olsen served as master of ceremonies, and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan offered the city’s appreciation.

“Your careers are bright lights in the history of our city,” Riordan said.

The firefighters, however, were typically modest about their work.

“We were just doing our job,” said Capt. Thomas Burau, who supervised the rescue effort at the Northridge Fashion Center shopping mall. “We just had to take it piece by piece.”

Burau estimated that there were at least 30,000 pounds of concrete near where Pen~a was trapped. Borrowing a Southern California Gas Co. truck, firefighters used jackhammers to break through the concrete and other tools to cut the steel and cable.

They also had to be concerned with gasoline leaking from the vacuum truck and with the ongoing threat of aftershocks.

“It was very challenging because of the obstacles we had to overcome,” Burau said. As for the aftershocks: “We were stuck where we were. There was no place to go.”

Speaking through an interpreter, Pen~a, who now walks with a crutch, said he was quite moved to attend the ceremony honoring the men who saved his life. He said he thought he was going to die that day. He asked one of the firefighters to pray with him.

Another rescuer climbed through a tunnel in the concrete and spoke to Pen~a in Spanish to assure him he would be rescued.

Burau, however, had some doubts.

“We thought we were going to lose him at one point,” he said.

At Northridge Meadows, the scene was equally chaotic. Firefighters were confronted with other obstacles.

For the first hour, Capt. Robert Fickett said, it was just him and three others who had to initiate the rescue attempt.

“If something happened, we were on our own,” Fickett said. “The biggest problem we had was trying to determine who was alive and where they were.”

Once they made contact with the trapped victims, they used hand tools and chain and rotary saws to get through to them.

Firefighters were also honored Thursday for rescue efforts that took place at several homes hit hard by the quake and at the collapsed overpass on the Antelope Valley Freeway, where they found a pregnant woman and her husband trapped in their car.

Two of the 67 firefighters received awards for their service during the 1993 Topanga fire.