Wildfire Heroes

Chris Vilaubi’s crew at Fire Station 15 responded to 40-50 calls a week near the University Park neighborhood. (photo courtesy of Chris Vilaubi)

Chris Vilaubi spent his life preparing to fight fires. The Firefighter III was stationed at Los Angeles Fire Department Station 15 near University Park when wildfires broke out in L.A. County in January and his crew was called to respond. As winds intensified and flames grew more out of control, Vilaubi stationed an engine in the Pacific Palisades on Sunset Boulevard around 1 a.m. on Jan. 8 to help people evacuate homes and extinguish emerging flames.

“I’ve never seen anything like that between my brush experience and then my structural fighting experience,” he said. “We didn’t know whether to keep our brush equipment on and then switch over to our structural firefighting equipment and then back to the brush equipment.”

Structural gear typically consists of heavy clothing meant to withstand intense heat in a confined area, while brush gear is lighter and allows responders more mobility to escape wildfires. Vilaubi’s crew was ready to change at a moment’s notice because of how rapidly the Palisades fire was evolving from overwhelming winds and water depletion in fire hydrants. After their initial response, his crew left to cover parts of Los Angeles left unattended by the vast personnel deployed to the wildfires around the county.

Over the next weeks, Vilaubi went back and forth between helping residents access homes and recover belongings in the Palisades to covering other parts of the city. Vilaubi said helping people recover from Los Angeles’ worst natural disaster in history was just another part of his job.

“It’s my job description, that’s my passion and that’s what I want to do,” he said. “I always say to people, ‘I’m a paid problem solver.’”

Vilaubi’s father served as an engineer in LAFD and his uncle retired as a captain in the department. Initially not wanting to follow in their footsteps, Vilaubi changed course after training as an emergency medical technician and working as a brush fireman, responding to wildfires. Now a 10-year veteran of the LAFD, Vilaubi said that no day is the same as a firefighter. His team at Fire Station 15 worked 24-hour shifts and responded to 40-50 calls everyday, both to combat fires and provide emergency medical services.

The Palisades fire burned 24,448 acres and destroyed 6,837 structures, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. In the aftermath, Vilaubi helped residents repopulate properties and recover salvageable family heirlooms from the rubble. Some efforts were more successful than others, Vilaubi said, as many properties were unrecognizable beyond a few walls or chimneys. A few weeks after the onslaught of the fire, Vilaubi met Leo Rochman, a UCLA student and baseball content creator, at the site of his grandfather’s home in the Palisades – a house overlooking Will Rogers State Beach that his grandfather built himself. Rochman’s family lost two properties in the fire and asked Vilaubi to help recover his mother’s wedding rings which were placed in the family safe before hurriedly fleeing the fires. Once he saw the rubble, Vilaubi first thought there was no hope of finding the rings. His crew dug through the rubble to locate the safe and used a power saw to break open the metal. The saw broke down but they were eventually able to open the safe with hand tools. Rochman sifted through the ash and found his mother’s rings. He said it was his family’s first moment of hope since the loss of their homes.

“That was something that I needed and they came through. Chris really made the effort,” Rochman said. “It was really the only good at that moment.”

Though helping people is just part of his everyday work, Vilaubi said he could see what it meant to Rochman and his father when they recovered the rings.

“It just means that what I’ve done through my whole career, all the hard work that I put into becoming where I’m at, paid off a little,” Vilaubi said. “At the end of the day, I was glad I can help somebody – that’s all I cared about. It’s just one glimmer of hope in all that destruction.”

Vilaubi helped another Palisades resident recover an urn carrying his father’s ashes. But most residents could only recover a few plates or pieces of their home. Initially worried that people would be angry with firefighters for not stopping the fires, Vilaubi said that everyone he encountered in the Palisades was grateful for his work.

Vilaubi recently started a new assignment as an instructor at the department’s regional training facility, where he trains new recruits, preparing them to go into the field. More than anything, Vilaubi hopes to instill in the younger generation that studying and training hard gives them the best chance of safely returning home everyday.

“Our job is inherently dangerous. We’re one of the only jobs that you go to and can be killed in the line of duty pretty easily,” he said. “As long as I can influence them to remain vigilant, study hard, train hard and keep going back to their families, then I’ve done my job.”