A Los Angeles man is being hailed as a hero after running into a dangerous fire zone with a garden hose and saving eight of his neighbors’ homes from the Eaton blaze.
“So when I arrived here, the back of my house was on fire. I could see my eaves when I drove up the street. So I got out the hose … I put my yard out,” Pete Villani, a cinematographer who lives in the neighborhood of Altadena, told CBS News:
“Then I went over here to my neighbor’s house, and the fence was on fire … I put that out,” he described, as he pointed at the adjacent home.
Villani, who has credits on major movies including the third installments in both the Spider-Man and Rush Hour series, said he then left the neighborhood for “a couple hours,” only to come back to find the flames getting dangerously close to another neighbor’s home.
He grabbed his hose again and put that out, too.
“Then I went to Eleanor, over here,” he described to CBS, gesturing at another person’s house. “Her backyard was on fire and the fence was on fire, so I went and I put that out.”
He recalled that Eleanor arrived home at the same time and helped him put out a blaze in the yard of another neighbor’s home. Villani said, “Throwing the water in with a scoop, we put that house out.”
“Then after that, it was fire watch and looter watch,” he said.
Altogether, the cinematographer fought the flames in Altadena for about ten hours until the water pressure in his garden hose was gone, CBS reported.
While he put out the fires at eight residences, there is no telling how many more homes would have burned if not for his brave actions that slowed down the blaze.
He even saw “would-be looters scoping out his neighbor’s property,” but scared them away, anchor Christina Fan said.
“That is PETE VILLANI and he saved our home. We love you Pete!!!” a woman wrote in the comments section under the news report.
“This used to be my neighbor, the first house he pointed to is the house I grew up in,” another commenter wrote. “Pete is exactly the type of man to try and help to the fullest extent. Amazing story.”
Yet another woman commented, he “saved my son’s home!”
The Eaton fire remains at just 27 percent containment, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a Sunday afternoon update on X:
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