>>OFFICER ORTIZ: When it really hit me, I looked over and there was this mother bawling and she
had about a twelve-year-old son in the car with her. I just remember looking at
him, how scared he was you know, and it's gonna be ok buddy, we're going to get out of this.
So it was, it was heartbreaking.
>>DISPATCHER PONTILLAS: Calls just kept coming in, um, back-to-back and then we got a call from
Butte County that says just to, just, evacuate Paradise. I worked in Golden
Gate during the Sonoma fires. I've never gotten a call to evacuate a
whole city at the same time.
>>DISPATCHER PARMENTER: We had a dispatcher who didn't know if her
husband had made it out, but was dispatching a radio.
>>DISPATCHER PONTILLAS: And she worked for
like 16 hours that day.
>>DISPATCHER PARMENTER: She did, she worked
>>DISPATCHER PONTILLAS: Not knowing.
>>DISPATCHER PARMENTER: Yeah, but it was part of the whole chaos.
>>OFFICER CALLAHAN: I remember the sergeant coming in and saying "everybody, get your
uniforms on, we gotta go. Paradise is getting evacuated."
The smoke was so thick it was like midnight.
I mean there was no sun coming through at all.
>>OFFICER PARROTT: When we initially got into the town of Paradise there, we started noticing spot fires
that weren't reported and then once we got to the top there, there was traffic everywhere.
>>OFFICER ORTIZ: We were trying to get traffic out of there. It was, it was,
stopped. We knew if we didn't get the traffic flowing, it was gonna be
bad, really bad. We were at the point we were sending cars down bike trails, anything
to get that traffic flowing.
>>FLIGHT OFFICER AIROSO: I've never seen a fire like that. I've never seen so much
actual flames around people fleeing. It was all the way up to the
roadway and in some points it was on the road.
I've never seen devastation like that.
>>OFFICER CALLAHAN: As we came up to the intersection of Pearson
and Clark, we started utilizing the PA, rolling our
windows down telling people "hey, turn around, get out of Paradise."
>>OFFICER LYNCH: We can't get them up at that point to Magalia, we can't get them down Skyway, so we're
really just kind of sitting ducks there.
>>OFFICER PARROTT: So I was directing traffic watching the flames get closer and closer. I can see
my house, I was probably about 400 yards from my house, I could see it. Between
where I was and my house is a ravine. I was kinda making my mind up, okay
when the fire gets to here it's gonna be time to go. Well, that entire ravine lit
on fire at one time about 40 yards wide as long as I could see just lit up
and watched my house catch on fire.
>>OFFICER ORTIZ: There was walls and walls of flames
every direction. I mean up to 20, 30 feet. You could feel the heat. I just remember
that, how powerful that wind was. I saw the flames were coming it was, it was, coming.
It was gonna take us over. And so we were on our PA saying "hey, once this
overtakes us, come running back up towards us. We're all gonna shelter in
place up here." At that point I was asking dispatch, we need air, we need water drops,
it's gonna overtake us.
>>DISPATCHER PARMENTER: And when some officers were asking for air drops and I
had spoken with him and he said that he heard the request and he put it through
to CAL FIRE and then he put it back out but he could no longer copy Officer Ortiz.
>>OFFICER ORTIZ: Few minutes later, sure enough I could hear the helicopters coming, I can hear
him dropping water and the sound it was making, you know, that sizzling sound
and just feeling the, you could feel the wind from the helicopters coming over
and dropping, it was, it bought us some time definitely.
>>OFFICER LYNCH: Pretty surreal yeah
even when that was water droplets hit the patrol vehicle you're just like "oh
thank god." It was like a kind of a little bit of a hope up there.
>>OFFICER PARROTT: The fire had swept south of us and the fire had swept north of us. Our only artery to get
out was where the traffic was. Okay, we're gonna shelter in place in the Ace
Hardware parking lot. I got together with one of the supervisors from probation
and we actually wrote down the names just so we had a log in case we didn't
make it out.
>>FLIGHT OFFICER AIROSO: We heard that they were trapped on the radio, we could hear it in their voice
that they knew something was going to happen and they were just
trying to get as many people away from it as possible, but they were gonna stay with
the ones that they had. We were gonna try to find them a way out. I know they
were stuck at the Ace Hardware near Skyway and we could see where
the holdup was for the traffic getting out of there. Had we had not opened up
Skyway, and had Chico PD and SRT and Chico CHP not been there, and did what
they had done, we probably would've been talking about a different scenario at
this point.
>>DISPATCHER PONTILLAS: We actually had Air Ops from everywhere and he was just calling out
we need to get them off Skyway, we need to get them off Skyway.
I think he's, they're, the ones that saved a lot of people.
>>OFFICER ORTIZ: And at that point like
he said, I mean, we were discussing them, we gotta get these people out of here.
I remember seeing a CAL FIRE truck come down through Skyway and I stopped him
and I say "is that makeable? Can we drive through there?" He's like "it's kind
of sketchy, I mean it's kind of treacherous but you can try." So Joel
and I, you know, we're talking we gotta get these people out of here. So we drove
it, like he said there was fire everywhere and boulders.
We were doing round robins because we had, because they would freeze,
we came up multiple people that were just stopped and froze because the fire
was surrounding them. We get on the PA, calmly tell them to keep going, keep going,
but we were able to get, I think we got probably got at least 200 cars through there.
>>OFFICER LYNCH: You know you, I think you realize what you have to do what the moment kind
of brings you and you just have to take control and you have to do what you need to do.
>>FLIGHT OFFICER AIROSO: The thing that sticks with me is just seeing those people there, seeing
our guys, and listening to our guys on the ground that we're stuck, we're never,
you know I don't know what was going through their head at the time, but to me
it sounded like that they had accepted the fact that they might die and they
might have to make that ultimate sacrifice.