Yahoo Lifestyle Firefighter Dad Spent Night Fighting L.A. Fires, Then Was Told to Go Home. But It Had Burned Down
"I can go be with my family, but I don't have a home at this point," Charlie Hawes remembers saying
courtesy of Charlie Hawes
Charlie Hawes and son LiamFirefighter Charlie Hawes was working when the Eaton Fire broke out on Tuesday, Jan. 7
The single dad tells PEOPLE that he immediately called his parents to tell them they needed to get ready to leave their home, where he also lived with his 2-year-old son
Sadly, he was also the one to give them a call to tell them that it was gone
Firefighter Charlie Hawes was on day four of his 96-hour shift when the Eaton Fire broke out near his Altadena home on Tuesday, Jan. 7.
He was just about to grab dinner at 6:30 p.m. when a call came in about a vegetation fire in the canyon. “It was right underneath one of the high voltage lines,” he tells PEOPLE, sharing that his unit was one of the first on the scene.
Immediately he remembers thinking to himself, “I'm calling my family because I know where the wind is blowing" — and it was in the direction of the family home where the single dad and his 2-year-old son lived with his parents and 95-year-old grandpa.
Hawes says his mother was frantic when he got her on the phone, but he told her to calm down and get ready to leave.
As evacuations in the neighborhood picked up, Hawes was reassigned to a street "which is literally a minute away from my parents' house," he says — and the people fleeing the fires were family friends.
“I'm like, 'You guys got to get your stuff and get out now. The fire's coming in this direction. We're going to do everything that we can to protect your guys' homes,' " he recalls saying.
“But little did we know it really wasn't up to us," he adds. "The weather took control of the situation. And when you have gusts that were 80 to 100 miles an hour and sustained winds of 40 to 50 miles an hour, there's nothing that we could have done."
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As he helped evacuate the neighborhood and set up lines to try and protect structures, he heard a call on the radio that homes were already beginning to get burned. "That's when I was like, "Oh, geez, this is really not good,' " he says.
He turned around and called his parents, telling them, "You guys need to leave now. It's coming this way."
Although Hawes knows Altadena "like the back of my hand," he says it was hard to focus on the task at hand when he knew what was at stake for his family.
And as he saw the glow of fire moved, he heard on the radio that they were losing homes closer and closer to where his parents had lived for 27 years.
“That's when I knew, I was like, 'Oh my God, my parents are going to lose everything,' ” he says. “I did ask my captain, 'Hey, can we please go check my parents' house?' And unfortunately, we had a job to do in that area, and we couldn't."
courtesy of Charlie Hawes
Firefighter Charlie Hawes and his son LiamAt one point, while looking for a fire hydrant, he suggested the one in front of his family's home. The crew repositioned, and after the spot was put out, Hawes decided he had to go check on his parents house.
“It was literally right there...so I walked up the street," he says. That's when he saw that "the whole roof was on fire.”
It was like a living nightmare, he says.
As a firefighter, he’s trained to disconnect emotionally to be able to do his job, but it was too hard when it was his own home.
“I was angry. I was angry at myself for not being able to do anything,” he says. “I was just so angry at myself and angry at the situation, angry that the fire started, and just I was sobbing, crying, just trying to get myself, hold myself together.”
At the end of the night, he was told to go home to his family.
He says, "I was like, 'You guys are saying the wrong thing. I don't have a home. I can go be with my family, but I don't have a home at this point.' "
Related: Man Who Lost Father and Brother in Eaton Fire Reveals Dad’s Last Words as Flames Closed In
He went back to headquarters and called his parents. “My mom was very calm over the phone. I'm still sobbing and trying to tell her, 'Hey, the house is gone.' And she's like, 'Are you sure?' And then I questioned myself even, did I see that? Did I even really see that happening?”
But then she reminded him of the most important things: that everybody is safe, and that they were going to be okay.
Three days later, he went back to work. “I wanted to feel normal,” he says. “We had lost everything."
The firefighter's parents have since found a rental in Valencia, and for now, that's where he and his toddler are staying. However, he was was forced to find a new home for his beloved 5-year-old black lab, Murphy. “I sobbed,” he says. “I raised him since he was a puppy.”
A GoFundMe has been established to help Hawes and his family rebuild during this difficult time — and within 24 hours, over $50,000 had been raised. (As of Wednesday, Jan. 29, that amount has more than tripled.)
In the meantime, he's back at work, fighting fires.
“We have a community to serve. We have a duty to serve. We took an oath to serve the community,” he says. “You don't really have the opportunity in these moments to just roll over and just give up. You have to keep going because we're it, there's nobody else coming when you call 911. So we've got to be there for the community.”
Click here to learn more about how to help the victims of the L.A. fires.
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