Glendale Firefighters Battle Emotions

The guys down at Fire Station 28 were taking it slowly Thursday.

The usual jokes--such as how they were going to paint spots on a colleague’s white Labrador retriever to make it look like a traditional firehouse Dalmatian--just weren’t flowing like they normally do.

With every move--unloading the ladders from the truck, figuring out where voting booths should go when the station becomes a polling place next month--they were thinking about Bill and Scott.

Thinking about them. Praying for them.

Bill Jensen and Scott French, burned fighting the raging Malibu fire Tuesday, lay in the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital.

Jensen, just a year away from retirement and present on the fire team only by a fluke, remained in critical condition Thursday with burns over 70% of his body. French, who lives in Ventura, was in good condition, and Ross Torstenbo, a Los Angeles firefighter who was also burned, was in fair condition.

Surgey “Guy” Tomlinson, another burned Los Angeles city firefighter, was released from the burn center early Thursday and went home with his wife and infant daughter.

The hardest part, said Jim Bittle, a colleague of Jensen and French at Glendale’s tiny, close-knit Station 28, is not being able to fire up the lights and sirens and save his friends from the agony of their burns.

“We’re used to helping people,” Bittle said. “It’s frustrating that we can’t really do anything.”

Glendale firefighters have organized a fund to help the two men and their families meet expenses, and they are helping to find people to donate A-positive blood for Jensen, who is the most badly burned of the three men still in the hospital.

Beyond that, there’s not much to do but pray.

And they could not even do that right away. Moments after the news came over Tuesday about Jensen and French, the team was called out on a local fire in Glendale, said Jim Kaufmann, a colleague at Station 28. The men jumped on the truck, rushed to the site and put out the fire. Then, on the grounds of the second fire, they prayed for Bill and Scott.

They were sorry they had to delay their prayers, Kaufmann said, but there was work to do.

Emotions have been running so raw, Bittle said, that he got goose bumps just looking at a sign posted at the Foothill Athletic Club urging passersby to pray for Bill Jensen. Every bit of support holds meaning, said Joe Lopez, another colleague, who described how other shoppers came to him in local grocery stores to ask about the injured men.

At the burn center, firefighters from throughout the region rallied around their injured comrades Thursday. Many, dressed in various fire department caps and T-shirts, have kept a vigil for the injured men since Tuesday, and made themselves available as blood donors.

Glendale Assistant Fire Chief Chris Gray said the firefighters have received hundreds of cards and donations, and asked that anyone wishing to contribute contact the Glendale Fireman’s Club, c/o the Burned Firefighters Fund, Glendale Fire Department Headquarters, 421 Oak St., Glendale 91204, or call the department at 818-548-4029 or 818-548-4814.

French underwent surgery Thursday on his ears, elbow and face. Jensen is breathing through a respirator and doctors hope to operate today, grafting cadaver skin onto some of his burns and following up with an anti-rejection medicine called Cyclosporin to make sure his body accepts the new skin.

“God willing, it will work,” said Dr. Richard A. Grossman, who runs the burn center.

“His spirits are pretty good,” Grossman said, “even though he’s swollen up and feels like a pumpkin.”

French is also in good spirits, said a longtime colleague, engineer Stuart Stefani.

“Talking about it is almost therapy for him,” said Stefani, who donated a pint of blood. “He was talking about how fast everything happened.”

Tomlinson, the L.A. firefighter who was released Thursday, wore bandages on his shoulders and arms that were plainly visible beneath his green Los Angeles Fire Department tank top.

This was his second serious injury. The last one came in 1985, when a wall caved in on him and several comrades as they fought a blaze in a building.

With his wife, Heather, at his side, Tomlinson placed his 3-month old daughter Tabitha in a car seat in the family’s Ford Explorer and prepared to leave. Asked whether he had thought about the baby during his ordeal, he fought back tears.

“I just wanted to make sure she was going to see the real me,” he said.

In Glendale, firefighters, family members and friends took part in a prayer chain for the injured men. Every fifteen minutes for an entire day and night, someone offered a prayer.

On Thursday, the guys from Station 28--there are just 12 of them, counting Jensen and French--joined other Glendale firefighters at a crisis debriefing, a private session in which they could air their feelings of shock and worry.

They talked afterward of French and Jensen. Jensen, who wound up on fire duty Tuesday only because he had agreed to swap shifts with a friend, began as a tree trimmer, and still worked on the side pruning trees. He often shows at the fire station with mounds of sweets from a local bakery whose trees he works on.

French, they said, was an oddly ironic choice for the burn center: He is a fund-raiser for the place.

“He’s heavily involved in the burn foundation,” Bittle said. “He knows Grossman. And now he’s had to utilize their services.”

It was hard, though, even in the nurturing setting of the crisis debriefing, to really let the feelings flow, Bittle said. Firefighters, explained Kaufmann, are used to holding back emotions in order to keep calm in dangerous situations. They’re supposed to be the strong ones, after all.

Nobody really cried Thursday, Kaufmann said, though some eyes filled with tears.

“But,” he said, “they got to talk about it.”