By Robert Salonga
The Mercury News
OAKLAND, Calif. — When he heard reports of the intense fire, the Rev. Jayson Landeza raced over to the 31st Avenue warehouse. The Friday-night scene was startling, even for the Oakland Fire Department’s longtime chaplain.
Landeza saw bunches of young people who managed to escape the quickly erupting inferno.
“A lot of folks were saying, ‘We have friends in there.’ Then it became clear to those of us on the scene, the firefighters in particular: ‘My God, this is bad.’ ”
It turned out to be even worse: Three-dozen people were killed in Oakland’s deadliest fire. In some places, the bodies were on top of one another, including a pair seemingly locked in an embrace as they died. For the dozens of emergency personnel who responded to the fire and then searched the gutted Ghost Ship warehouse, the experience has been “heart-wrenching.” For some it hit home with the news that one of their own had lost a child in the three-alarm fire.
The search for the dead was nearly complete Tuesday, but for the emergency personnel, the memory of their meticulous and grisly work will stay with them for a long time.
Coroner’s Sgt. Howard Baron of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, a law-enforcement veteran of two decades, recalled feeling deeply the sheer volume of the loss when he got his first glimpse of the aftermath early Saturday.
“We see death in the coroner’s bureau. But when you see a mass (event) like this, trying to identify everybody, the way some of the bodies were intertwined with each other … sometimes you’re never prepared enough,” Baron recalled, taking a moment to compose himself. “There were certain pockets where there were more people together, within the rubble, on top of each other.”
Baron likened it to a movie scene, “but this was real.”
Oakland fire Capt. Christopher Foley, based at Station Four down the street from the Ghost Ship, got word about just how bad it was from the colleagues he was relieving the following morning. Then he started receiving frantic text messages from friends asking about loved ones thought to have been there the night of the fire.
“I knew we were up against something we had never seen and hope we never see again,” Foley said. “This was of a scale unlike anything I’ve ever been to.”
Foley said he and colleagues from both his own department and personnel from the array of agencies, local and beyond, somberly and slowly made their way through the rubble. Cranes and other heavy machinery were brought in, but when it got to the granular level of the search and recovery, the men and women softened their approach.
“We wanted to make sure for families who have suffered this unspeakable event, we do whatever we can to bring closure and preserve their loved ones and make sure they get their friends and family back to them.”
Baron, the coroner’s sergeant, at some points perched himself with firefighters from an elevated position to direct colleagues.
“We were able to look down inside,” he said. “It’s as unbelievable as you can imagine. When you see death, especially in a mass-casualty type of way, it’s overwhelming, even for people who do this for a living.”
The cranes that were initially used to get a glimpse, and later used to tear down some of the building’s facade, were sometimes necessary to remove victims on an unstable second floor.
“We had to use baskets and hoist and get them out of the building in the safest way possible,” Baron said.
The days of recovery work were, sadly, particularly resonant for Baron: His Sheriff’s colleague Phil McGill lost his 17-year-old son, Draven, in the fire. It imbued even more care into Baron’s approach to the search.
“We had one of our own deputies who I’ve worked along with, have a family member in there,” Baron said. “I tell everybody when you’re doing this, you’ve got to do it like it was someone related to you.”
With the recovery effort mostly complete, some of the attention for the scores of men and women who have worked at the fire site now shifts to their own recovery, in the immediate term and beyond.
Foley is helping spearhead a nascent post-traumatic stress program aimed at providing peer counseling and support for his fire colleagues.
“This is not a local event, this is something on every corner of the planet, and we have to put ourselves asides sometimes and keep working,” Foley said. “There are people here where this is the fires fire they’ve been to in their lives. We need to tell them it’s okay to grieve and (feel) the effect of this great tragedy.”
“Once all the cameras are gone and this incident is long behind us,” Foley added, “This is going to stick with the people who are here for the rest of their lives.”
Landeza, the fire chaplain, recalled the March 2009 deaths of four Oakland police officers in a single day as the last time the city felt this rocked by a devastating loss.
“You can never make an equivalence, but it had that kind of effect on our own city,” he said. “You see stuff in Oakland all the time, but you don’t see this. This is just sad. Damn sad.”
Copyright 2016 the San Jose Mercury News