Los Angeles City Fire Inspector John Stuhlman III was running the command post monitoring the Palisades Fire on Tuesday, Jan. 7.
Around midnight, his wife called and asked him to come, but they were too busy, Stuhlman, 35 explains. Three hours later, she called again — a friend who only lived a few blocks away woke up to smoke in her bedroom and a fire in her kitchen. He needed to go.
Stuhlman, who has worked for the department for 23 years, says he was “fortunate enough” to have all his gear in the back of his [department] car.” He’d need it.
When he got to the neighborhood, he recalls “getting hit by debris just flying in the air” as he got everybody he could to evacuate. Then he stayed behind, trying to fight the fire with three garden hoses.
He first tried to save his neighbors house, then his own.
“Then everything just blew up all at once,” he says. “Palm trees exploded, the neighbor’s house exploded. The neighbors to the north, their house exploded.”
He got burned on his nose and his face in portions not protected by his safety goggles. Then, when “the propane tank started hissing and the fire started hitting my house, I realized that it was a lost cause.”
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He ran inside, grabbed a box of important documents and a bag and threw it in the car.
“I was going to go back in…but it was a lost cause,” he says. “I had to walk away from my house with my hands up in the air. And then I realized I stayed too long.”
Trying to leave his house was a harrowing experience. “There used to be a ride at Universal Studios called “Earthquake,” and that’s what it was like, power poles were coming down, a power line did hit my department vehicle and blew up. Trees were coming down.”
There were also people trying to enter the neighborhood. No one was doing traffic control, so he stopped his vehicle, identified himself and dove into helping about 20 people.
“There was zero visibility. They didn’t know what they were getting into,” he says. “Everyone said the same thing, ‘My house is up there.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not. Your house has gone along with mine. Everything’s gone.’ ”
Hours after reconnecting with his wife Monica at a grocery store Starbucks, he tried to get back to his home. But everything around him “was just orange,” he says, adding, “there was no getting back up there.”
After fighting the fire, his eyes were swollen shut, and he had to go to the hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation and facial burns, which became infected. He also injured his knee (when he was trying to get the embers off his neighbor’s house, the wind pushed him off the ladder and his knee hit something, it says).
It took days for the scope of his loss began to dawn on him.
“I wake up at three in the morning and I remember stuff [I wasn’t able to save],” he says. “Oh, dad’s Marine Corps ribbons. My Marine Corps ribbons. And then next morning I wake up, oh, grandpa’s coin collection. The next morning I wake up, oh, grandma’s china. Her wedding dress. Her wedding ring.”
Ultimately, he says the home itself isn’t what he really cares about. “It’s all the report cards I had since first grade, and all my grandma and grandpa’s 1923 pictures…you can’t replace that stuff.”
There was also the flag he was given by the Marines at his dad’s funeral. “I can replace that flag, but it’s not the same,” he says. “I’m a 200-lb. grown man, and I’ve been bawling like a little girl.”
Fortunately, there were some things they did find in the rubble, like his dad’s dog tags, his own dog tags and Stuhlman’s wedding band.
They weren’t able to find his wife’s, but they did locate some melted gold, and he and his wife of 15 years are hoping a jeweler can smelt them and find the diamonds inside.
For now, the couple is staying at a friend’s house in Monrovia with their 2-year-old English lab, Winston — and a GoFundMe has been established to help them rebuild.
“I’ve consoled people who have lost their homes. And I’ve saved, I don’t know how many people’s homes,” he says. “But I can’t save my own home. So that’s going to be sticking with me for a long time.”
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