On August 30, four days into the fire, Captain Tedmund Hall and Firefighter Specialist Arnie Quinones died when their fire truck fell off a steep hillside near Los Angeles County Fire Department Camp 16 by Mount Gleason. They had been supervising inmate fire crews — joint teams operated by the county fire department and the California Department of Corrections — conducting backfire operations to protect personnel and the camp from the advancing fire front. Their deaths triggered a homicide investigation alongside the arson case. The $94.7 million cost of the firefighting effort was a measure of what it took to contain a fire that burned for fifty-one days through rugged terrain.

The fire burned on the slopes of Mount Wilson, threatening television, radio, and cellular antennas on the summit that provide service to millions of people across the Los Angeles basin. The Mount Wilson Observatory — which houses historically significant telescopes and astronomical research facilities operated by UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley, and Georgia State University — was directly in the fire's path at various points. The observatory survived. Twelve thousand structures in the national forest and in nearby communities including La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena, Glendale, Acton, and Altadena were threatened. Many residents faced mandatory evacuation orders.

The Station Fire closed a 40-mile stretch of Angeles Crest Highway until 2010. It left behind charred slopes visible for years on the mountain wall above the San Gabriel Valley, a landscape that slowly recovered through chaparral regrowth but took a generation to resemble its former state. The deaths of Hall and Quinones and the scale of the fire also produced a lasting policy change: the U.S. Forest Service had banned night flights in wildfires since a helicopter pilot died in 1977. In 2012, responding to lobbying led by Representative Adam Schiff, the agency ended that ban — a direct consequence of lessons learned during the Station Fire's difficult containment.