Fifteen-year-old Israel Jaure was sleeping when a crashing sound awoke him around 7 a.m.
“There were flames everywhere and there was so much noise,” he said
in a phone interview with the Mountain Democrat. “I panicked and
screamed. I knew there was a way out through the back door of the
kitchen and I opened the door to my room. A horrible blast of heat
knocked me down.”
Disoriented, his body numb and his eyes burning, Jaure fell back into
his bedroom and crawled as far from the fire as he could get. He lay on
his back, in a space between the bed and the far wall. His body went
into convulsions. “I was flopping like a fish out of water. It was like
drowning and being burned at the same time. I kept saying ‘God, help me’
over and over.”
Finally the convulsions stopped and Jaure became acutely aware of his
surroundings. ” I could see the flames all around me; I could hear my
mother screaming for me downstairs, even over the noise of the fire.
Then the pain stopped and all I could feel was peace.”
Jaure says he saw instances of his life unroll before him like a
film. “I took the deepest breath of my life and when I let it out, my
eyes dimmed, my hearing went away and I knew I was about to die.”
Jaure said he went to a place of total darkness; a lonely void where
he had no body. “I called out in my mind as loud as I could. I heard a
huge, heavy door open and the sound of thunder.”
Jaure felt himself being lifted and placed on his feet. He fell
forward onto his knees into a huge beam of light. “God spoke to me and
it was like shockwaves going through my body. He told me about my life,
who I was and why I was suffering. Then he took me up on a high plateau
and I could see people as far as the eye could see, dressed in clothing
the color of lightning. I turned to look at God, but he stopped me. I
was upset by this but a man with a shining face said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s
not your time to see Him.’”
Christian lay on the roof of the building resting, his turn-outs
smoking. Then he went back to work fighting the fire. He wouldn’t see
Israel Jaure again for 20 years.
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PART 2:
Rising from the ashes: Rescuer, rescued reunite in El Dorado Hills
ISRAEL JAURE and Jim Christian meet in Christian's El Dorado Hills home. Photo by Elaine Christian
Part 2 of Rising from the Ashes– On April 5, 1991, 15-year-old
Israel Jaure was trapped in his family’s burning second floor apartment
in Eureka. Jim Christian, a 39-year-old Eureka firefighter, dove into
the flames and smoke to rescue him and, with the help of another
firefighter, pulled the burned boy out of the building to safety. This
is the second part of a two-part story detailing the events of the fire
and the reunion of survivor and rescuer 20 years later.
Israel Jaure woke up in an ambulance. “I couldn’t see much of the man
in the ambulance, but I heard him say, ‘He’s awake,’” and I heard the
surprise in his voice.”
He woke again in Eureka’s General Hospital, surrounded by doctors and
nurses trying to enervate him. Then he woke once again, to find himself
wrapped like a mummy. He could hear the engine of the plane flying him
from Eureka to San Francisco. In St. Francis Memorial Hospital, Jaure
woke once more, in a big metal tub of hot water this time. Again medical
staff were surprised at his waking. “The air smelled like bleach and I
lifted my hand to look at it and I could see my veins and muscles. It
was horrible.”
Israel suffered first and second degree burns on 22 percent of his
body and doctors grafted skin from his back and hips onto his hands and
left leg.
“I was a boxer and felt that nothing could hurt me, so I was into
drinking with my friends and partying,” said Jaure. ” Then I was burned
and scarred; my friends looked at me with pity in their eyes. It was a
pretty humbling experience and a dark time for me. It took years to
recover. I coughed up soot for a year and my hair fell out when my skin
started to regrow. I was angry.”
The grueling day-to-day recovery pushed his amazing spiritual
experience during the fire into the background and Jaure admits to years
of anger, wondering why this had happened to him. His parents moved the
family to Arizona two years after the fire. The girl he’d been dating
at the time of the fire in Eureka, Tracy O’Hara, had been at the scene
of the fire and witnessed the rescue. She stuck by Jaure and they
eventually married. They became the parents of six healthy children —
the oldest daughter of their five girls is 16, and their youngest child,
a boy, is almost 3. Tracy, 34, home-schools all the children. Israel,
35, changed the direction of his life and became a corrections officer
working with maximum security prisoners for Pima County in Arizona.
Christian, now 59, moved to El Dorado County in September of 1991,
five months after the fire, becoming assistant fire chief for Diamond
Springs ,and after his retirement as fire chief in 2003, a fire
management consultant and division supervisor on the Northern California
Interagency Incident Management Team. Most recently, he oversaw the
application of the Incident Command System to the recovery process at
the San Bruno pipeline explosion.
Of the Jaure fire he said, “It made such an impact on me. I’d been in
peril in other fires, but not by my own choice. Firemen get to do
really cool things, but when the time comes to step off the abyss and
you don’t know if you will be coming back, will you do it? I thought I
was alone and I was scared to death. I made the decision to go in
because if there was a kid in there and I didn’t go in, how would I live
with myself?
“I thought about the incident every day and I put a photo of the
house on my desk when I became assistant chief to remind me of where I
came from and what firefighters are supposed to do. I wondered what kind
of person Israel was. I knew he had been in continuation school. Had he
become a good guy or not?” Eventually, to help himself process the
impact of the event, he wrote an accounting of the fire and the rescue.
Christian told few about the incident that impacted him, but this
year, 20 years after the fire, he shared his story with a friend and
admitted that he had always wondered what happened to Israel. The friend
did some Internet research and returned with two possibilities for
Israel Jaure. Christian checked them out and one of them led to Tracy
O’Hara Jaure’s Facebook page. He e-mailed her, asking if she were the
wife of Israel Jaure of Eureka who had been in a fire 20 years earlier.
When Tracy replied in the affirmative, Christian told her he had been
involved in the rescue.
“It was my day off, ” Israel Jaure remembered. “She told me, ‘You’ll
never believe who e-mailed me.’” Jaure e-mailed Christian back thanking
him for whatever part he had played in the rescue. “I never expected
him to be the guy who came in and got me.” The two exchanged phone
numbers.
“He told me to call him anytime, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to
intrude,” said Christian. Finally, he made the call and the two shared
the details of the fire with each other in an emotional conversation.
On the weekend of April 17, the Jaure family came to California to
visit Tracy’s father in Valley Springs and made a five-hour stopover at
Jim and Elaine Christian’s home in El Dorado Hills. Both men said they
felt an instant connection.
“I felt like I was going to visit my second father, one I had never
met,” said Jaure. “It blew me away that I got to see the man who saved
me.”
“They were like family we hadn’t met yet,” said Christian.”It was the
most amazing and cathartic thing that happened to me in a long time.”
As a surprise for Jaure and his family, Christian had asked his
friend, retiring firefighter Mike Wilson of the El Dorado Hills station,
to drive the ladder truck by his home . On his last run as a
firefighter, Wilson brought Station Truck 85 to show Jaure’s children.
They knew the story of the fire and their father’s spiritual experience.
”I wanted them to know that there is something bigger; something
beyond going to work everyday,” said Jaure.
Jaure had a surprise for Christian too — a silver pocket watch
engraved with Christian’s name and “April 5, 1991,” the date of the
fire. “Then he rolled up his sleeve and showed me the tattoo, ” said
Christian, “I was trying not to lose it, but my wife looked and burst
into tears and that was it.”
The tattoo on Jaure’s right bicep is new. “I wanted to do something
for him,” said Jaure. The black ink tattoo is a large Maltese Cross with
a pair of crossed fire axes in the middle. “April 5, 1991″ is tattooed
above and below the axes and the words, ” James”, ” Christian,” ”Fire”
and “Dept.” fill the arms of the cross.
For both men the reunion was a powerful experience.
“It was like a reminder of what God had promised me that day,”said
Jaure.” I’ve had 20 years of life, we have six children and I am big and
strong enough to deal with the prisoners on my job. I realized that God
sees far and he was truly looking out for my interests.”
For Christian, it was all about redemption. “I’m not a perfect guy,
but in the low times, I remembered that I had done something good once
and it sustained me. To find out that Israel is a nice guy with a great
family meant a lot.”
Both men declare their intention to keep in contact. “This is a
lifelong connection,” said Jaure. When Jaure’s 16-year-old daughter
thanked Christian for her life, it was the first time he realized the
far-reaching impacts of what had happened during that fire 20 years
earlier.
“The vast majority of people don’t come back to tell you what
happened to them after they survive. I’m glad I know it was a good
outcome,” said Christian.
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