Trial by fire

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Westwind, Spring 2019

by Amy Wilkinson

IT IS THE deadliest and most destructive fire in California history.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 8, 2018, a Pacific Gas and Electric Company worker reported flames just outside the unincorporated community of Pulga in Northern California’s Butte County. Dry, thirsty brush and dangerously high winds only fueled the blaze, and less than two hours later, the fire was advancing on the nearby town of Paradise (pop. 26,682).

In just a matter of minutes, Paradise would be lost.

While the cause of the savage Camp Fire—which would take 17 days to fully contain—is still under investigation, its devastation is clear: 153,336 acres burned, 18,804 buildings destroyed, and 86 lives lost.

Standing among the ruins is Adventist Health Feather River, a 100-bed acutecare hospital located in Paradise where employees worked feverishly—and often at their own peril—to evacuate 67 patients in just under an hour. What inspires someone to put their own life on the line for another? Is it simply a sense of duty? Or a higher calling? We asked four of the many Walla Walla University alumni who were there to tell us their stories.

THE LONG ROAD

GRANT ASHLOCK WAS running late for work. As the manager of human resources at Feather River, he typically liked to be at his desk and checking email by 7:30 a.m. But that wouldn’t be the case today. In his rush, Ashlock considered skipping a much-needed pit stop at the gas station on the drive from his home in Chico to his office in Paradise, but the prospect of mounting the hill up to the hospital on empty changed his mind.

“I never like to push it going uphill,” the 2012 business administration graduate explains.

And so Ashlock pulled over to fill up on Bruce Road, and it was there that he first noticed the plumes of smoke.

“I saw the fire and thought, ‘Oh, that doesn’t look close,’” he recalls. “We have fires here regularly.”

Indeed, wildfires are a fact of life in Northern California—much like hurricanes are in Florida or tornados in Kansas. The summer before, a blaze had come within four miles of the home Ashlock shares with his wife, Kelsie, a 2012 social work and business administration graduate, and their son, Grayson. But the flames were soon under control and the couple left the very next day for their scheduled vacation to Sun Valley.

On this day, to his relief, Ashlock looked up the fire on his phone and saw that it was miles away in Pulga. But by the time he settled into his office on the sprawling Feather River campus, Ashlock was feeling less and less relieved: He could see flames out his window.

At 8:04 a.m., Ashlock placed a call to his brother, Ryan, one of the hospital’s executives, to report fire on campus. The hospital would declare an evacuation moments later. For Ashlock, his first task was to print out an employee roster to make sure everyone could be accounted for once the evacuation was complete.

“I’m sitting there on my computer opening an Excel file while there are flames probably less than a quarter mile away, just not thinking anything of it,” muses Ashlock. He then grabbed a couple items of sentimental value from his desk and his laptop containing his master’s papers and left the building. As word spread that it was all hands on deck to evacuate patients, Ashlock jumped into his gassed-up Jetta and made a beeline for the ambulance bay, calling wife Kelsie along the way to tell her what was going on.

“She was like, ‘Get out now!’” Ashlock recalls. “And I said, ‘You guys are safe—I want to help.’ I didn’t really have a thought process.”

And so, Ashlock loaded three patients into his car: one in the front seat and two in the back. Turning right out of the hospital grounds the group was greeted by a chilling sight: “The sky is red. [Then] it goes from red to pitch black because the smoke [is] so bad.” And then the line of cars Ashlock was following came to a standstill.

“That was the first time [I was scared],” Ashlock recalls. “I could legitimately die here. If the flames get here I could run but the patients couldn’t.”

Before too long, Ashlock noticed several cop cars whizzing by, going the wrong way in the opposite lane. He made the split-second decision to follow suit, not knowing where the cops were headed but knowing he had to get his patients to safety at Enloe Medical Center in Chico. But with nearly everyone fleeing Paradise that morning, Ashlock continued to run into roadblocks—literally. He spent the next 80 minutes going all of four miles.

After another wrong-way maneuver—this time on Skyway Road, one of Paradise’s main thoroughfares—Ashlock was able to pass “hundreds” of cars, saving at least 30 minutes, and eventually merging onto I-99 headed straight for Enloe. Ashlock’s relief in safely dropping off his charges was short-lived, though, as hours later his own house fell under an evacuation order, forcing him to leave with his wife, son, dog, and two cats. (Their home didn’t sustain any damage.)

Looking back on those harrowing hours, Ashlock knows just how lucky he is.

“I didn’t have the flames on both sides [of the car] creeping along—plenty of my friends who worked there at the time had that,” he says. “For me, I truly believe God was there with me. As I was sitting there in the traffic waiting I prayed, ‘Jesus, please help me get out of here. I’ve got to get these patients to safety.’ To follow the cop the way I did and have him go the right direction, I think God was there with me. And the blessing is all of our patients and employees are all accounted for.”

AN ANSWERED CALL

WE FELT LIKE it was where we were supposed to be,” Tim Williams explains of his family’s move to Northern California in early 2018. After stints around the country as a pastor and an officer in the U.S. Air Force, Williams—along with wife Megan and sons Lincoln, Hudson, and Declan— were ready to put down roots, with Williams accepting the role of director of operations at Feather River. “We were excited about the community and the area. Professionally, it was a huge growth opportunity for me.”

Williams, a 2003 business administration graduate, couldn’t have known then just how providential that move would prove in just a few months’ time.

The day of the fire started like any other Thursday for Williams—aside from the few text messages he received about a blaze in Pulga. But with the fire seemingly too far away to be an imminent threat, Williams got in his car to make the drive from the family’s rental home in Chico to Paradise. He hadn’t even made it to his office, though, before the call came through: The hospital was being evacuated.

“My thought was, well, we’re evacuating— there’s no point in me going to the hospital and doing anything right now because they are already in that process,” explains Williams. “I turned around and drove back down to Chico to set up an incident command to manage the [evacuation] outside of Paradise.”

In short order, Williams commandeered one of the hospital’s physical therapy units in Chico, staffing up and overseeing the operation.

“Our initial focus, obviously, was to ensure the safety of all staff and patients,” says Williams. “Those were really the two key focal points for us that first 72 hours. Then just trying to manage chaos. What’s happening? Who’s doing what? Coordinating with first responders and coordinating with other hospitals that we’re going to send patients to. It’s all that work happening behind the scenes to get everybody in the right direction and make sure everybody is on the same page.”

With his mix of pastoral, military, and managerial experience, Williams couldn’t have been better suited for the juggling act required to help ensure the swift and safe evacuation of the hospital.

“When I was in the Air Force, I ran the medical emergency operations center, so [this was] not foreign at all,” he explains. “Of course, in the military, we train that on a regular basis, so it looks a little bit different on the civilian side. But it’s essentially the same principle: It’s command and control. It’s managing, communicating, directing, coordinating. I have no problem quickly putting that hat on and saying, ‘Here’s what we need to do; here’s the plan; here’s your role.’”

William’s role also meant keeping his emotions in check—often during intense, stressful moments—and relying on staffers to carry out a lot of the emotional heavy-lifting.

“I turned to somebody and I said, ‘I need you to go upstairs to a conference room and I just need you to pray for people. You can’t do anything sitting here, just go pray for people because I can’t do that right now. I can’t be in this emotional mindset.’”

After a harrowing few days, with patients and staff safe, Williams was able to take Saturday off to decompress and begin reflecting on his experience.

“Part of me feels somewhat guilty because I wasn’t actually in the fire,” he says. “We had a ton of employees at the hospital—nurses, administrators—there are literally flames out the back door and they’re watching things burn. I never had that experience. My involvement was making decisions, making sure communication was clear, making sure we were tracking patients, tracking staff, getting everything that we needed. I have a totally different experience than people who were driving away from everything burning.”

Despite some feelings of guilt, Williams concedes that “there was a definite need” for the work he did in the command center—and recognizes his purpose in the overall picture. “If we didn’t feel called there before, we sure felt called leading into that crisis,” he says.

As Jackie Fullerton attempted to evacuate from Paradise, the plastic on her rearview mirror began to melt.

Photo: Jackie Fullerton

Whatever the fate of Feather River may be, Williams is ready, willing, and able to roll up his sleeves and help rebuild—even if his own dream home is no longer a reality. Coincidentally, Williams and his wife had been scheduled to close on a house in Paradise just days after the blaze. Though the structure is still standing, fire damage and insufficient infrastructure (e.g. no potable water) make living in Paradise a near impossibility. So for now, the couple will continue to house hunt and focus on the future of their adopted community.

“We’re here. There’s work to do. There’s a lot of need,” says Williams. “What does the future look like? Let’s figure it out.”

AN EMOTIONAL REUNION

KEVIN FULLERTON COULDN’T find his wife, Jackie.

Both employees of Feather River, Kevin, a 1987 nursing graduate, and Jackie, who also attended, arrived at the hospital moments before the evacuation orders went out. Each went to work helping clear out separate areas of the campus, but by the time Kevin had canvassed the obstetrics, operating, and emergency departments, Jackie was nowhere in sight.

“I went out and showed my badge to the law enforcement people and used that as my exit since I couldn’t find Jackie quickly,” says Kevin, who volunteers with the local sheriff’s office.

Kevin would end up in the passenger seat of a Fish and Game officer’s truck, with orders to drive south and alert residents to the fire—a task that felt like second nature to him.

“As a nurse and as an attachment to law enforcement, you’re always taught to go towards the fire,” says Kevin. “That’s what your calling is in life—that’s what you do, so you don’t instinctively think about your own personal danger. You think about what you need to be doing to help the other people get out.”

As Kevin and the officer made their rounds, Kevin’s phone rang: It was Jackie calling to say goodbye.

Having done her part to help evacuate the hospital, Jackie had set out on her own, fleeing the hospital grounds in her pickup truck. A right onto Pence Road followed by another right onto Pearson Road, and Jackie was trapped in a traffic jam. Flames advanced all around, a veritable “rainstorm of fire,” she says. The plastic on her rearview mirror began dripping like water. The heat inside the cab of her truck became unbearable. For a moment, Jackie considered abandoning her vehicle and continuing on foot, but she quickly realized how futile that would be. It was then that she made the call to Kevin.

“She was frantic and in tears and I said, ‘Jackie, you’ve got to pray. I can’t help you,’” Kevin recalls.

Moments later, a bulldozer appeared beside Jackie’s truck, pushing aside the flaming debris to clear a path. As she and several other vehicles circled around a clearing, Jackie was given orders to return to the hospital.

Meanwhile, Kevin asked the Fish and Game officer if he could pray aloud, and the officer agreed. Halfway through Kevin’s benediction, a call came in with new instructions: They were to help evacuate a nearby nursing home.

“I’m thinking that’s rude—the devil is getting in the way of my prayer,” says Kevin. “But it was God actually giving me something more to focus on so I wouldn’t have to worry about Jackie. Because I was frantic. There wasn’t anything I could do. I was stuck in this patrol car. I’m doing the right thing—I intuitively know there is nothing I can do to help her.”

And with that, Kevin and his partner went back into harm’s way, passing through the fire sparking in lower Paradise and continuing through the active fire in upper Paradise to get to the nursing home.

“I’ll tell you what, that wipes out all your worries about your spouse because you’re sitting here surrounded by fire,” says Kevin. “[The officer] has a fire extinguisher and that’s the only defense you have if things go south.”

The two loaded three patients into the back of the truck and were off again: “It looked like Christmas,” says Kevin, “except all of the decorations on the houses were orange—which happened to be fire.”

Back safely at the hospital, Jackie was joined by several hospital staff and Paradise residents who couldn’t evacuate in time. They hunkered down in a hospital tunnel to wait out the blaze. Once again, Jackie went into what she calls game-face mode, rounding up food, water, and blankets for those who remained.

“I literally had no time to think about what just happened,” Jackie recalls. “These people need help. We had a lot of staff there that had just come through their own horrible experiences, which none of us really knew about until after the fire. You’ve got very scared people that you just need to help be a calming force for, and that’s what I was thinking. I couldn’t even think about what had just happened to me. There was no way.”

After assisting with the second wave of evacuations, Jackie was finally allowed to leave the hospital once again and drove straight to her daughter Kelsey’s home in Chico, since she had no way of knowing whether her own home in Paradise survived the blaze. (The Fullerton home did survive—though with significant smoke damage. The couple is currently living with Kelsey who served as an important communication liaison for the entire Fullerton family during the evacuation.)

It was while Kevin was in the back of the Fish and Game officer’s truck, holding the hand of a nursing home resident, that he received word from Kelsey that Jackie had finally evacuated safely. It would be another three hours before they locked eyes on one another.

“It was emotional,” says Jackie—an understatement, to be sure—of the reunion that she wasn’t even sure would happen.

“It definitely was providential,” she continues. “I went from praying, ‘God, get me out of this’ to ‘God, make it a quick death.’ And all of a sudden we were able to have the path that our bulldozer guy made for us and it was like, ‘Oh, thank you, God! We’re going to get out of this.’ When you’re in a situation where you can’t move and you’ve got no control, there is nothing left but to give control to God and say, ‘Whatever needs to happen, it’s in your hands.”

Kevin, too, recognizes God’s handiwork in his escape.

“What this does is it both renews my faith and it gives me a point that I can look back on,” he says. “A lot of times when you see God’s will enacted in your life it’s through the rearview mirror. This is going to be one of the things I’m going to be able to look back on and see God’s hand directly. We all saw it directly that day. He’s alive and well and cares deeply about me. The fact that I survived that little bad boy, I still have that purpose.”