LA fire survivors moving home to disaster zone
ALTADENA, California — Ranjit Singh knows he is one of the lucky ones.
Wildfire torched the houses across the street from his liquor and convenience store. It burned through the plant materials shop on the corner. It destroyed his customers’ homes and all sense of safety in Altadena, a community of about 44,000 located just north of Los Angeles.
But his 40-year-old business is still standing, albeit smoky. So is his house in La Cañada, a few miles away. And thanks to his son and a garden hose, so is Aveson Global Leadership Academy, a home-away-from-home to students who call him “Papa” when they troop over to his store each afternoon to buy chips, candy and soda.
Nonetheless, Singh can’t sleep at night. He is distraught about his smoke-charred store, the intact school and the rubble surrounding it all.
“These are my customers,” he said. “I’m OK, but what about my customers? I want my neighbors back.”
The Eaton Fire burned thousands of structures across Altadena. Streets that were lined with homes, schools, mom-and-pop shops, churches, popular restaurants and historical landmarks have turned into a scene akin to a war zone, with trees, power lines and ash littering the landscape.
Singh — and others like him — are now grappling with how to live and work amid the wreckage. They are on the front lines of the community’s recovery, a process they fear may never be complete.
Their feelings are complicated. Those with homes intact are grateful but devastated for their neighbors whose lots are in ruins. But they are also grieving the loss of their social networks, routines and familiarity with their community.
“That person has a house. That person is going to stay there. They do not know whether those neighbors are going to stay,” said Vickie Mays, a psychology professor at the University of California Los Angeles. “So they have a lot of anxiety around, ‘What is this neighborhood going to be like?'”
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Many people also remain displaced and could stay that way for a while. Homes that remain standing still may have severe smoke damage inside. Impacted areas of the community are covered in toxic ash and have poor air quality. In most cases, local water remains unsafe to drink or bathe in. Some neighborhoods remain without power and other utilities.
“We feel like we won Satan’s lottery. It’s such a weird feeling. We’re really grateful, but we’re really devastated,” said Lara Jo Regan, an Altadena resident who knows her house survived the flames and described herself as “one of the lucky ones,” but has been unable to return home. “Yeah, our house is there, but our home and our community is gone.”
Most fire-torn neighborhoods remain closed to residents. Even career firefighters say the situation behind the barricades — manned by local law enforcement and the National Guard — is unlike anything they’ve ever seen.
“I don’t even know where you go from here,” said Joshua Sprague, a battalion chief with the Victorville Fire Department who got called into the Altadena area to battle the wildfire. “I’ve driven around a few of the divisions, coming back and forth, and just the devastation — it’s everywhere. So I don’t even know where they begin. I don’t even know how this starts.”
‘A loving community’: Idyllic Altadena went up in flames
Melinda Bagnerise loves Altadena.
She’s from Indiana but has lived in and near the unincorporated, working-class community for decades. To her, it is about as close to idyllic as a place could get.
“I’ve lived other places, but it’s always good to come back to where your roots are,” Bagnerise said. “It just always feels like home here.”
Altadena was for decades a refuge for Black residents from the American South. Its neighborhoods integrated as discriminatory real estate redlining practices ended in the 1960s, and it quickly became one of the few places in Southern California where people of different colors lived side by side.
Residents take pride in its diversity and scenery. It’s nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and home to small business entrepreneurs, artists and activists. Homes sit on generous lots with lush foliage. There’s easy access to hiking trails and to downtown Los Angeles, which is about 35 minutes away in typical traffic.
Bagnerise said her neighborhood is “like no other place you would want to be.”
“It’s just a loving community,” she said. “Different backgrounds and ethnicities, but everybody got along. It was no problem.”
Historically, the mountains have done more than just provide pretty views. Sean Katt, an engineer with the Pasadena Fire Department, said they create a natural barrier that protects the area from the Santa Ana winds — strong inland gusts that affect much of the California coast. That means it takes a “unique wind pattern” to burn Altadena and Pasadena.
“But when it does happen, it’s known to be very bad for us,” Katt said.
The first call came into the Pasadena Fire Department about 6:40 p.m. from a house on Canyon Close Road, which hugs the west rim of Eaton Canyon and abuts the Altadena area. Simultaneously, calls started coming into Los Angeles County’s stations.
There was a fire — and with high winds, it was moving fast.
Katt and other firefighters were dispatched. The fire was on top of them within a few minutes of their arrival.
The hours that followed were something out of a nightmare. Katt and his team kept relocating to fight the flames as the winds howled and the fire grew bigger and bigger. They saved some homes. They lost others.
“We would probably describe it to you as a war zone,” he said. “All you can see is smoke and orange glow — until you see flames.”
Eventually, Katt’s focus became saving lives, not structures. By the morning, he had rescued four people, including a pair of elderly women with disabilities from a home on Mariposa Street.
Days later, as Katt crept his fire engine through the streets, he couldn’t recognize the charred remains of that house on sight alone. The devastation was so severe that he had to go by the curb numbers — a common occurrence in the areas of town that were most severely burned.
“It was like, Altadena: control-alt-delete,” said Jeff Grogan, a captain with the Pasadena Fire Department who also fought the blaze. “Schools, doctors, grocery store, everything.”
Bagnerise got lucky. She went back to her home on Wednesday for the first time since evacuating to find it standing. She sobbed — at first out of relief, and then out of horror when she saw large chunks of ember in her yard.
“It let me know how close my home was to burning,” she said. “And it just puts everything into perspective.”
‘Recovery mode’: Community mops up the ashes
At the same time the firefighters were battling the blaze, Arto Sultanyan was fighting it, too.
He made his wife and three children — a 10-year-old, 7-year-old and 6-year-old — head to a hotel when the evacuation orders came. Sultanyan stayed behind to defend his home and small farm with his respirator mask and garden hose.Sultanyan ran from fire to fire, keeping his house and a neighbor’s from being set ablaze. Embers flew through the air, burning holes in his clothing. When the water ran out, he started grabbing buckets from his pool.
He made it through the night with his house intact, but he said the experience changed him.
“What I did — I heard another guy had perished,” Sultanyan said. “His wife left, and when they came back, he was in the driveway with the hose on. So, would I do it again? No, I wouldn’t. But at the moment, I was both feet in. We’re not stopping. We had to fight.”
In the days after, Sultanyan lived in a disaster zone, his home without water or electricity. Until recently, his neighborhood was under an evacuation order, so he couldn’t leave to get food or other supplies — otherwise, he would not have been able to get back in.
Much of the community remains closed to the public. Law enforcement, firefighters, utility companies and media can get in. Everybody else — including homeowners — are barred from entering most burned areas.
It’s a situation that is causing rising tensions in Altadena. Residents want to be able to go home — even if what that means is sifting through ash and rubble to see if any treasured belongings survived.
“It’s kind of tough,” said Regan, who is staying with her daughter and her husband at a Motel 6 in Pasadena. “The hotels want you to tell them by 11 (a.m.) if you’re staying for another night, and you don’t know.”
Erik Hernandez, a deputy fire marshal for Napa County and public information officer for the Eaton Fire, said officials are in “recovery mode.” Before residents can reenter their neighborhoods — or “repopulate,” in firespeak — a small army of first responders and utility workers must ensure the area is safe for civilians.
Officials must clear debris from roads, conduct search-and-rescue operations, repair utility infrastructure and document damage to each property. They’re also responsible for eliminating hazards like lithium batteries, which are common in household appliances and can explode after being exposed to intense heat, and freestanding chimneys, which can collapse suddenly and injure anyone in the vicinity.
Once residents return, firefighters say they will have to take safety precautions, particularly if they intend to search through the wreckage of their homes.
“We’ve been instructed from our division level that if people came in, say, to this residence behind us, we’ll assist them to try to look for things,” said Sprague, the Victorville battalion chief, gesturing to a destroyed home. “But it’s really an unsafe act at this point.”
Even the lucky ones with standing houses likely won’t be able to move right back in. Smoke damage is common in buildings that survive fires. Toxic ash is everywhere in the most badly burned parts of the community, and officials suspect some neighborhoods’ water supplies are contaminated.
“The remediation and the recovery, it’s going to be very lengthy,” Hernandez said.
Some might not be able to wait too long. Most Altadena residents aren’t as wealthy as those of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, which grabbed national attention as its mansions burned.
“You’ve got a different kind of job security. You’ve got a different income level,” said Mays, the UCLA professor, whose research focuses on racial disparities in mental and physical health. “The occupations that people have there may be very different, and the largess of their bank accounts and capital may be very different.”
Regan said her husband still works, and both of them are seniors who receive Social Security payments. That makes it financially feasible for them to stay at a budget motel for “a couple of weeks.” After that, the cost of temporary housing could start cutting into her daughter’s college fund.
Even if the evacuation order lifts on her neighborhood, it’ll be rough living for a while. The belongings Regan brought with her from her home reek of smoke, and while her neighborhood escaped the fire relatively unscathed, it is surrounded by ones that were burned to the ground.
“I don’t know if I’d want to be back with all this around,” Sprague said. “But you might not have a choice. Most of the local hotels are full. They had evacuation centers, but a week into this, people are looking for something more than a cot to sleep on.”
‘Hard times’: Amid hopes and fears, will Altadena recover?
Jenn Tolbert, the head of St. Mark’s School in Altadena, knew her home and campus were gone when her alarm company started sending notifications.
“The heat sensors were going off, and I suspected and feared the worst at that point,” she said. “It was almost as if I was watching from a distance my campus and my house go down.”
About 325 students attend the Episcopal school, which serves preschoolers through sixth-graders. One building on its campus survived — a brand-new preschool. A few other items also made it through: the sign in front of the school, a lion-shaped bollard representing its mascot, and several lunch tables.
“That’s the miracle that we’re hanging on to. That gives us hope for the future,” Tolbert said.
It’s unclear exactly what recovery from the fire ultimately will look like in Altadena. Many residents are scared their neighbors will be forced out of the community because they do not have the funds to rebuild.
Many homes had been passed down from generation to generation, particularly among Black and Hispanic families who moved to the area decades ago and seized the opportunity to purchase property in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
However, some of those homes may be uninsured or underinsured. Without a mortgage, homeowners aren’t technically required to carry home insurance, so some residents may have let theirs lapse or never updated their policy to keep pace with rising home costs.
“Those are the people that I’m really frightened for, scared for,” said Glyn Samuel, a lifelong Altadena resident. “They’re a large part of our community. If we lost them, it’s not going to be the same.”
Mays said one telling sign is the donation requests being listed by Altadena residents on fundraising platforms such as GoFundMe.
“People are asking for $100,000. They’re not asking for $10,000 or $15,000 to just get through a period because these individuals are faced with resources that are needed to replace a house. Some others will have the capital, in Pacific Palisades and other places, to rebuild,” she said. “There’s a concern about whether these families will be able to rebuild.”
But along with the fear, many residents remain hopeful. Bagnerise said she worries her neighborhood might get bought up by companies looking to make a buck on home rentals or flips but is keeping faith Altadena will prove its resiliency, as it has for decades.
“Altadena’s going to come back stronger than what we are,” she said. “We all just need to stick together.”
Others are starting to take action as the shock of the fires subsides. Singh plans to reopen his store as soon as possible to provide his community with tools, groceries and other items that he typically does not carry. By turning his liquor store into a general store, he and his employees hope to contribute to rebuilding efforts.
“We love this neighborhood,” he said. “We will give whatever we can until we die.”
Tolbert knows her school will be critical to helping students and their families recover in the coming months. She spent Friday touring temporary spaces that will allow the school to reopen and provide for her community’s social and emotional needs.
“I believe that our students are witnessing one of the best lessons that we will ever teach them in life,” she said. ” When hard times come — and they will come, this will not be the only thing we face — how do you get through it? You get through it with the strength of your community.”
Sultanyan broke the news to his children that the family’s tortoise, Chief, died in the fire. He said the kids “didn’t take it that bad.”
“When my son came, he went right up to the chicken coop and all that was left was screws,” Sultanyan said. “He said, ‘I’ve got the screws. All I need is wood to rebuild.'”
Sultanyan is also starting to process what he experienced during the fire — and in the days afterward.
“At least I still have my home, my health, my family,” he said. “But my God, what did we go through?”
Sasha Hupka covers county government and election administration for The Arizona Republic. She reported this story for the USA Today Network on a special assignment from Los Angeles. Reach her at [email protected]. Follow her on X: @SashaHupka. Follow her on Instagram or Threads: @sashahupkasnaps. Follow her on Bluesky: @sashahupka.bsky.social.
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