When bus driver Garrett Wright clocked in for work well before sunrise Jan. 8, his community was on fire.

His usual route through Pasadena was canceled.

But supervisors gave him a choice: go home or drive toward the flames.

“It wasn’t a thought,” Wright said. “Let’s go. I got the license, and I got the bus. I didn’t come here just to go back home.”

He joined a convoy of Pasadena Transit buses and first responders, barreling through thick smoke toward the MonteCedro retirement community in Altadena, where 200 residents needed help.

Overnight, the Eaton Fire had exploded into a 10,000-acre inferno, triggering evacuations from thousands of homes — and from dozens of nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Eleven Pasadena bus drivers stepped up to ferry hundreds of residents away from four residential care facilities threatened by the wildfire, the agency said. The effort worked so well that an L.A. County-commissioned after-action review called it a “best practice.”

Here are some of their stories:

Driving into danger

“It was pitch black,” recalled Nicole Ambriz, one of Wright’s colleagues. “I could not even see the bus in front of me who was also being escorted.”

Wright said he surveyed the scene as they neared a three-story retirement community.

“I look to my left and it's like hell,” he said. “Everything is on fire. My hometown is on fire.”

The city of Pasadena had first asked for Pasadena Transit’s help a day earlier, Jan. 7, when drivers helped evacuate Pasadena Park Healthcare & Wellness Center in northeast Pasadena, according to the agency.

At dawn on Jan. 8, Wright lowered the ramp on the bus he was driving outside the MonteCedro retirement community. Firefighters hurried four residents on board.

“They wheeled in two elderly women, one of them with an oxygen tank,” Wright said. “They had hospital robes on, you know what I'm saying? Barefooted. And they're seniors, respectfully.”

Garrett Wright driving evacuees from MonteCedro in Altadena to the evacuation shelter in Pasadena.

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Courtesy a Montecedro resident

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The drivers moved quickly to get to safety. And they admit they skipped some safety protocols.

“ Our typical safety is to strap all four sides of the wheelchair down, but they didn't even have time to be doing that,” Ambriz said. “It was just like, ‘Hey, try to hold onto them as much as you can to try to get everybody out.’”

The drivers rushed evacuees to a temporary evacuation shelter at the Pasadena Convention Center, then circled back to pick up more.

They also rescued residents from St. Vincent Healthcare and Camellia Gardens Care Center, a pair of nursing homes in northwest Pasadena.

“It was chaotic,” Ambriz said. “Like, what am I getting myself into? This bus is long, like it's heavy. Can I maneuver with how big and wide everything is?”

They knew the roads. But Ambriz said she wasn’t prepared for the thick smoke, downed trees and panicked drivers.

“I wasn't trained for that,” she said. “But at that point, it kicks into flight-or-fight mode. All the fear, you leave it, and it's just you and the bus and trying to get out.”

Nicole Ambriz in the driver's seat of a Pasadena Transit bus.

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Joshua Letona

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LAist

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Transportation planning

Residential care facilities are required by law to have their own emergency evacuation plans. Those plans are supposed to be in writing and list the names of specific transportation companies and relocation sites.

In January, some of the facilities that were evacuated had outdated plans, according to available public records reviewed by LAist. Others sites had plans designed to handle isolated incidents but did not account for a disaster as large as the fast-moving Eaton Fire, which forced evacuations from dozens of care facilities at once.

Most relied on a mix of ambulances, other emergency vehicles, facility-owned vehicles and personal cars to quickly move residents out of harm’s way.

L.A. County’s emergency plan designates L.A. Metro as its primary source of mass transportation equipment during emergencies. During January’s wildfires, the transit agency didn’t move any evacuees from nursing homes, but it did send buses to help evacuate residents in the Hollywood Hills, a spokesperson told LAist.

Garrett Wright, 36, has been driving for Pasadena Transit for three years. In January, Wright volunteered to evacuate care facilities in the community where he was raised.

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Aaron Schrank

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LAist

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The authors of the recent after-action report, the McChrystal Group, recommended “formalizing” more of these agreements with transit providers before the next emergency.

But making transportation plans for emergencies in a place as sprawling as L.A. County is complex, and it's difficult to know where to start, officials said.

“It's hard to predict where a fire or a disaster is going to occur,” said Emily Montanez, an associate director with the county Office of Emergency Management. “So how far in the weeds can we get into a specific contract? There's 4,700 square miles of county and 88 cities.”

Some cities, like Pasadena, have their own agreements with transit agencies.

“Obviously, it's a great idea,” said Pasadena Transit’s general manager, Letty Ochoa. “It saved over 500 lives, so of course, sign us up.”

Ambriz said she and the other bus drivers did what any “decent human being” would have done in the same situation.

They stepped up to help.

“ I would do it again in a heartbeat if I needed to,” Ambriz said.