A store owner's wild week in the LA fires: 'There's no evacuating. We're here.'

ALTADENA, Calif. (BRAIN) — At one moment during this long week — before he helped save a neighbor's home from the Eaton wildfire, before he helped recover Claire, a horse that took off in the fire, and before he visited the smoldering ruins of the bike shop he’s run for 40 years and pulled two treasured bike tools from the ashes “still hot as hell” — Steve Salinas found himself outside his brother’s home at the edge of the San Gabriel mountains with a hose in his hands.

There was an orange glow in the sky above the ridge behind the house. Salinas, owner of Steve’s Bike Shop in Altadena, was preparing a neighbor for what would come next.  

“I’m kinda giving the tutorial on what to expect,” Salinas told BRAIN on Saturday. “It’s going to crest (the ridge) and then the flames are going to kind of walk down the hill toward us very slowly and we’re going to have a lot of time. And then it’s going to come up at us fast, and it’s gonna be windy and it’s gonna be hot,” Salinas said he told his neighbor. Salinas' sons Raleigh and Foster and his nephew also were helping.

After the lesson, Salinas left for a bit and then came back and talked to the neighbor again as the fire was creeping down the hill toward the homes. “He’s like, ’So when do we go? When is it bad enough that we evacuate?’ And I go, ‘We don’t. There’s no evacuating. We’re here,’” Salinas said with a chuckle.

“We just stay our fucking ground,” he told the neighbor.

‘This one is different’

The Eaton fire is one of at least five distinct wildfires that broke out in the LA area this week. The Eaton fire alone has burned 14,100 acres at last count, killing five people and 972 buildings confirmed destroyed, including at least two bike shops: Steve’s Bike Shop and Open Road Cycles, which are about two blocks away from each other. 

Officials said aerial photos showed as many as 7,081 structures may have been damaged. On Saturday morning, they said the Eaton fire was 15% contained.

Small wildfires are common in the area, but Salinas said they rarely spread down so far from the forest. “Usually it doesn’t go more than a house in (from the edge of the forest),” he said. “The firefighters hit it hard and that takes care of it. But this one is different,” he said.  

While officials strongly discourage it and evacuation orders are mandatory, he said many property owners in the area prepare to save their own homes and businesses, sometimes using swimming pools and tubs as water sources. “Everyone I know whose house didn’t burn, it’s because they stayed,” he said. 

"It’s not that hard: The fire comes up and you just fucking squirt it with water. It’s hot! It’s just, I don’t know, if you feel like your clothes are gonna catch fire you just get your clothes wet. It’s all good," he said.

Salinas’ house, in Pasadena, had to be evacuated but was not affected by the fire. During the worst of the fire, Salinas was driving around the town where he’s lived his whole life, helping neighbors and relatives protect their property, evacuating the horses he and his wife own from their stables, and also delivering Claire to safety, which was recorded on a KTLA News TikTok video.

On Wednesday morning, he was on the roof of the home of a friend, the owner of a hardware store that is next door to the bike shop. An LA Times photographer took a photo of Steve on the roof, which appeared on the cover of the paper. At the time, Salinas didn’t think his store, in a brick building a little more than a mile south of the Angeles National Forest boundary, was in danger. 

But soon after the LA Times took the picture of him on the roof, he got a call from someone telling him that the store was likely gone.

On Saturday, Salinas was using time stamps on his cell phone photos to try to reconstruct his week. The next photo he took after leaving the rooftop where the LA Times saw him is the one below of a firefighter hosing down his shop. 

"It was an amazing feeling, looking at that and trying to get my head around it," he said. 

 Thursday morning, Salinas returned to the shop and dug around in the ashes to retrieve two of his most treasured tools — a Phil Wood spoke threading machine and a fender rolling machine. 

'A good shop that took care of its community'

Steve’s Bike Shop was founded by another Steve, Steve Segner, around 1980. For a time it was called Steve’s Pet and Bike, a rarely seen hybrid retail model; the store also sold Western wear back in the day. Steve Salinas started working there in 1985 when he was 14, and by the time he graduated high school he was running the business and bought it from its founder. 

About 10 years ago, Salinas moved the business to its current location on East Mariposa Street. He described it as “a mid-range shop” that carries Retrospec and KHS bikes. It also boasted a collection of historic and vintage bikes, including a Bob Jackson touring bike, some Schwinn Stingrays, some early Webco BMX bikes and more. 

Cody Phillips, who now works in OEM sales for WTB from a home in Vermont, grew up in Altadena and worked at Steve’s Bike Shop when he was in high school. 

“This shop was not a rich shop, but it was a good shop that took care of its community and its community took care of it in return,” Phillips told BRAIN. 

Phillips learned about community at the store. He said that when customers asked for a new tube, instead of a patch, to fix a flat, Salinas would save the old tube. “This is the point where many shops would simply swap the tubes and throw the old ones away,” Phillips said. But Salinas kept the old tube, patching it if necessary and keeping it on a rack in the back. “If a homeless person, or low-income individual who relied on their bike for transportation, came in he would change their flat and replace their tube free of charge (with the saved tube),” Phillips said. 

Salinas prides himself on having a huge collection of bike tools at the shop, including “every freewheel remover tool that exists,” plus a lathe and an old 110-volt milling machine he uses on restorations and other projects, and the Phil spoke machine and fender roller tool he was able to take from the ruins this week. Salinas is hopeful he can recover more of his tools eventually. 

“The tool box didn’t fall over, it’s still there, so the tools should all still be there, hot in the drawer,” he said.

After the holiday selling season, store inventory was relatively low; He couldn’t hazard a guess at the value of the lost inventory, tools and other property in the building.

Luckily there were relatively few customers’ bikes in for repair when the fire broke out. “We had made a big push to get them out before the weekend,” he said. “There was a wheel we had re-spoked and an inexpensive kids bike. There’s only one (customer bike) that I’m losing sleep over,” he said.  

This weekend officials are keeping the area locked down with roadblocks at every intersection. 

Making his rounds on Friday, Salinas stopped by his insurance agency’s office in person.  

“He said, ‘hmmmm, let me look …'" Salinas said. He learned that the shop had general liability coverage but no fire insurance on the contents. Fire coverage would have tripled his costs and Salinas had figured that being so far from the mountains, there was little danger.  

The building’s owner, however, had fire insurance and is already making plans to rebuild. 

Salinas doesn’t know if he will find a new location or move back into the same space after it’s rebuilt. 

He has enough tools at home and a workstand in an off-site storage area so he can start taking on some repairs and other projects and assemble new bikes. He plans to drive to Retrospec soon to pick up three bikes that customers ordered and paid for already. Even as the shop was still smoldering on Friday, he was taking calls from a movie production company that needed a custom track bike for a film shoot.

“It’s not that hard to get going again. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle, but it’s not rocket science,” he said.

Editor's note: The homes that Salinas was helping protect, including his brothers, all survived the fire. Steve Lubanski, the owner of High Road Cycles, the other burned store two blocks from Steve's Bike Shop, told BRAIN he does not plan to re-open. However Lubanski is focused on re-opening the Bunny Museum, which he operated with his wife. Supporters of Steve's Bike Shop, the Bunny Museum and other victims of the fire have set up GoFundMe campaigns. Links are in a separate article.