Station fire 22% contained

Mandatory evacuations for Glendale were to be lifted as early as this morning Tuesday if the controlled burns were successful, officials said.

Dietrich remained cautiously optimistic about the fire..

Putting more firefighters on the ground, along with the aircraft support, would ultimately help put out the massive Station fire, he said. More than 3,600 firefighters were battling the blaze Tuesday evening, according to the forest service.

Against the backdrop of dramatic hillside flames due to the strategic burns, La Crescenta resident Lauri Caruso said she didn’t leave her home on Glencove Avenue when police ordered mandatory evacuations Saturday because “looking around at the fires, I didn’t feel that I was in any imminent danger,” she said.

But Caruso still packed her cars with clothes, family photographs, medicine, cat food and papers.

After being evacuated from her Glencove Avenue home Saturday, Ann Ferraro drove over to her friend Marianne Gazzilli’s home on Pinecrest Drive. It wasn’t long before they were asked to evacuate that place as well.

So the pair ended up at La Cañada High School’s evacuation center.

“I had a thousand people tell me to call, but you don’t want to do that to somebody at 2:30 in the morning,” she said.

The last time that the friends had seen a massive fire tear through the Angeles National Forest and forced evacuations was 1975.

“We didn’t have no such thing as a reverse 911 call,” Ferraro said. “We just had the police coming up with bullhorns, forcing us out literally.”

Gazzilli returned to Ferraro’s home Tuesday after police allowed them to enter the neighborhood, where they both watched helicopters swoop into the canyons and drop water on the controlled burns.

“As horrendous as this is, we have the ideal conditions, no Santa Anas, we weren’t running out of our houses with flames chasing us, so I have always been fearful of this, but it’s the best possible situation,” Gazzilli said.

Gazzilli is a teacher at Mark Keppel Elementary School and was supposed to start school Monday.

The Glendale Unified School District has been updating teachers of the latest conditions, but could only do it a day at a time. School was postponed for a third day this week, with plans to reassess the fire today.

“It’s a constant stress of ‘Do I have to go in?’” she said.