Relief, Survivor's Guilt, and Neighborhood Connections in the Altadena Eaton Fire
We've experienced whiplashed emotions for the past week
We evacuated with our power out on Tuesday night, Jan. 7, with an angry red glow moving our direction and stayed in a hotel about 15 miles away.
On Wednesday morning, 5:30 am we turned on the news and saw a line of homes about a half mile from ours engulfed in flames.
My daughter arrived at our house about 7am and I arrived an hour later. She and another man helped control a fire on a garage next door. She called for my wife to call 9–1–1 and they kept the fire at bay until a fire crew arrived, doused it, and moved on to the next emergency.
The house two doors down from us was already destroyed.
During Wednesday, neighbors on our street came together, spraying water, removing brush, and forming a text messaging group.
By Thursday the 9th and since then I’ve felt grief over seeing a neighbor’s home destroyed, staggered by the immense devastation, and handling the sorrow of wondering how to help many friends and acquaintances who lost the homes they either owned or rented.
Homes and businesses within a half-mile to one mile of my place have been totally destroyed. I’ve seen videos and I’m sure the shock and grief will compound once we’re allowed to move freely around and see the utter devastation.
Here’s how I’m processing.
Altadena: urban and rural
Altadena is home to 44,000 people and has a volunteer “town council” who advises our local county supervisor. We’re unincorporated meaning we use services from the county and Pasadena.
We’re only 16 miles from downtown Los Angeles and a few miles from the famous Rose Bowl yet the area is on the edge of the Angeles National Forest making for an odd mix of urban and rural living with numerous hiking trails nearby that allow you to travel into the surrounding San Gabriel Mountains.
There’s a historical nature to the area dating back to the early 1900s with the famous Zane Grey being one of the most famous residents.
We live at the south of the 9-hole Altadena Golf Course, a place that’s home to a variety of birds. Behind our home is a small reservoir and a maintenance area for the county and golf course.
The fire’s strange path
My understanding is the fire started in Eaton Canyon which is two miles east of our home and burned homes south. The local Jewish temple burned, a medical plaza was destroyed along with a convalescent home where my father-in-law needed to stay for a few months in 2022.
Those buildings were closest to Eaton Canyon and we weren’t surprised they had burned.
But then on the news around 5:30 a.m. we saw flames tearing through homes on Mendocino, rushing to Lake Avenue, and traveling north and south on adjacent streets.
The fire somehow skipped a large swath of neighborhoods and shot west about 1 ½ miles into the Altadena business district and utterly incinerating block after block of residences.
During past wildfires like a major fire in 1993 and the more recent Station Fire, the flames were usually contained within the canyon, forcing evacuations along the forest’s edges and burning some homes.
This was different. Entire neighborhoods from north of us to west Altadena were devastated, these were residences and businesses with no surrounding brush.
Neighbors supporting neighbors
Quick action by my daughter and a neighbor may have saved our house and many other houses on our street.
The neighbor, who lives on the opposite side of the street, arrived about 6:30 a.m. His garage burned but he put out fire on neighboring garages.
During that time, there wasn’t a firefighting presence.
The strangest feeling was around 9 am and I was drawing buckets of water from my next-door neighbor’s pool to douse flaming timbers in the house that had burned down. A line of slow-moving fire trucks rolled by, heading to a much hotter spot, and the firemen just gazed at me and I wondered what they thought.
Under normal circumstances, they would have stopped and put out the flames but this was a horrible fire, not a normal one and other homes were still burning.
I stayed overnight in my home from Thursday night through Friday morning and after midnight, a couple of neighbors and I headed onto the golf course, finding hotspots and pouring buckets of water.
We chopped up a log that was on fire and put out other embers less than 100 yards behind our houses.
The small reservoir behind our house was empty.
We called a unit after locating an extensive hot spot and the firemen came around 1am and said they’d only be concerned if it was a few feet from a structure.
The firefighters changed by Sunday and the new crew was from Idaho. Our neighbor pointed out the root fires and the commander ordered water drops over the golf course and said he’d turn it into a giant mud pit.
Neighbor texting neighbor
This is an absolute disaster for our area with more than 7,000 structures gone and several thousand more damaged.
We’ve known some of our neighbors before and have been friendly, but now we’re depending on each other for our well-being.
My world this past week has been our street. I’ve not been able to travel beyond our block to see the area and have been immersed in caring for my home and the surrounding houses.
Friends out of state knew more than I did about what was happening throughout LA since we had no electricity and water. I had a small generator and had to conserve my cell phone and laptop.
Our text message group contains most people on our street and has kept us aware of roadblocks to our street and how to navigate them — ahem, get by them sometimes to check on our properties and feed our cats.
The texting has been a boost to our overall well-being and emotional stability.
We will rebuild
Rebuilding the community will take years as it does in other disaster areas. I always feared a major earthquake would level parts of LA and perhaps our street but not a wildfire.
The fires were always extinguished and scorched a limited number of homes here and there. Until this time.
I can’t get over the fact that what we knew is totally gone.
The Aldi store where we shopped, our mechanic who gave us good deals, the hardware store, a coffee shop, and all the many homes we used to walk by and run by. All gone.
By God’s grace and mercy, we will rebuild but first it will take dealing with more grief and living with the constant reminder that a disaster hit us hard.
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