In traumatized Altadena, some residents insist on staying put

Juan Carranza, standing next to a bicycle, told neighbors how National Guard soldiers stopped his nephew from delivering hot Mexican food on the edge of Altadena’s escape zone.

Nearby, next to some avocado trees, producer Kristopher Carbone released a final agonizing shot.

Along the way, Paul Harter pulled his 7-year-old son, Gavin, in a minivan, both of them frantically looking for one of the portable toilets that emergency workers carry.

There was no electricity, no running water, no natural gas. But the remaining residents of Altadena consider themselves lucky that their homes are still alive.

It’s been more than a week since strong winds pushed the Eaton fire down the mountain and into this town of 43,000, where it has killed at least 16 people and destroyed thousands of homes. Since then, the authorities have closed the city and stopped the people living here.

Officials believe that no one should live in the evacuation zone, regardless of their possessions or equipment. Utility crews continue to clear downed power lines, while crews with chain saws remove fallen trees and debris. The burned buildings left toxic materials swirling around, and the ash hung in the air.

But dozens of people insisted on staying in their homes, surviving on what they had in their cupboards and on the generosity of volunteers. Many never left and miraculously survived the inferno that invaded Eaton Canyon and made its way to their rural streets.

As the fire tore through businesses, churches and homes in the early hours of January 8, Shane Jordan ran around his neighborhood. He turned on a hose, attached a sprinkler head to a neighbor’s roof and battled embers the size of rocks.

Mr. Jordana said firefighters were nowhere to be seen, and he thought they were the best suited to deal with wildfires in the mountains. In any case, the Eaton fire damaged most of Altadena but stayed close to its neighborhood on the southern edge of the fire’s edge.

“These little three-square-foot shops have done it,” said Mr. Jordan. Seeing the devastation elsewhere, he said, made him feel like “we’re the last straw.”

Mr. Jordan, father of two children who play the bass guitar and owns a party band business, is fast asleep in his bed at this late hour and keeps a handgun nearby with a few shells in it. -his pocket if he needs to scare off the robbers.

He wakes up at sunrise, boils water for coffee over a small propane fire pit in his back yard and walks around the neighborhood, clearing fallen branches from his neighbors’ yards. . He eats apples and pistachios and, occasionally, baloney sandwiches handed out by volunteers. Every few days, he bathes in his Jacuzzi, which is still filled with hot water from the fireplace.

“I’m just trying to save everything, because I don’t know how long it’s going to last,” he said.

Los Angeles County officials said Thursday that it could be another week — at least — until people are allowed back into the area to check on their homes or what’s left of them.

“We don’t want people to go back to an area and get hurt,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone.

Those who cling to it in Altadena either did not leave the neighborhood or rushed back before the National Guard arrived several days after the fire started. Since then, members of the Guard have put up a tight fence around the town and limited access to emergency workers, executive officers and journalists. The Guard also often prevented people from leaving provisions for their loved ones, according to residents.

Mr. Jordan was prevented from giving a portable power station to someone he hoped would charge it outside the evacuation zone. Other residents reported not being able to get food, medicine or supplies on the outskirts of their neighborhoods.

“I told them this is a criminal,” said Mr. Carranza, 67, a handyman who has lived in the neighborhood for half his life and stayed in the fire. “We can’t take anything.”

Many here believe that the authorities are deliberately blocking supplies to force more people out of the evacuation zone.

“We’re angry, to be honest,” said Mr. Carbone, 54, who works for a Los Angeles County school district.

Deputy Raquel Utley, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, urged residents to evacuate because of the dangers, including poor air quality and a lack of equipment. He said that the deputies will not force people to leave the neighborhood, but when the residents leave, they will not be allowed to enter.

He said that, for a while, guards allowed people to receive items from friends and relatives. “But again,” he said, “it’s best if they need those things, they better leave.”

However, there were those who said that they stayed there because they wanted to go there to protect their houses in case of a strong wind that would catch fire again. Others are so attached to their homes that they can’t imagine going anywhere else – even without clean water and electricity.

“We’ve been here 56 years, and I’m not going anywhere,” said James Triplett, 63, who spent most of last week sitting on a bench in his driveway and talking to everyone who passed by. .

Without gas, the cold and dark nights are the most difficult, said many of the residents. Temperatures sometimes dropped to 40 degrees, and many people slept in warm clothes and bundled up, making their homes look like unfurnished huts.

There is also the difficulty of walking around the house in the dark.

Mr. Triplett has a small solar-powered yard light that he lights up in the sun every day. At night he gathers them to lead him around the house.

Elsewhere in Altadena, further up the hill near where the fire started in Eaton, flames leapt through rows of buildings and left most of them in ruins. brutal and random.

“We’re stuck on an island,” said Tori Kinard, 37, a tennis player who hid at home with her brother and parents; they subsist on portions of Campbell’s soup cans.

Nearby, David and Jane Pierce go through cartons of dehydrated food. An avid backpacker (he’s been to the top of Mount Whitney five times and twice), he eats a lean dinner of beef Bolognese and pasta primavera that he gets from REI, a grocery store in outside.

A few streets over, retired firefighter Ross Torstenbo stayed at his home during the inferno. Outside on the deck, he installed a solar pool that consisted of plastic bags filled with water that was heated by the sun.

To get his medication, he said he asked his daughter, who lives outside the burn zone, to pick up the pills at the pharmacy, meet him at the checkpoint and “throw them over “the line”.

In the desert that became Altadena, any sign of normal life is welcome.

The residents were shocked and delighted when they met on Wednesday, the day the residents wash their garbage. Mr. Jordan ran to his neighbor’s trash can and dumped it in the cul-de-sac. Others frantically filled trash cans with fallen palm leaves and twigs.

Joyce deVicariis, 75, fled the first night of the fire at a friend’s house in Sierra Madre, a nearby town. But that house was also threatened by flames. He decided to return to his home in Pasadena, just south of Altadena.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “And I’m glad I did, because you can’t get in here.”

Her husband, 92, went to the doctor last week and was repeatedly prevented from returning to her husband until he found a security guard.

When a scavenger showed up this week, Ms. deVicariis was happy after days of clearing plants.

“Here he comes,” he said. “My wonderful man. I have never had the pleasure of seeing a murderer in my life.”

Some isolated fires also remain in the Pacific Palisades area, where another fire has destroyed thousands of homes and is believed to have killed at least nine people.

As the fire raged last week, Jeff Ridgway’s friends and neighbors fled, but he stayed to protect the 18-room apartment building where he spent the past 32 years working as a property manager.

Mr. Ridgway, 67, threw buckets of water on a burning eucalyptus tree in the yard. The house survived, and Mr. Since then, Ridgway has been cleaning out dirty food from his residents’ refrigerators, watering plants and trying to sweep up the dust that swirls everywhere.

Some of his friends in Los Angeles – who were banned from entering the evacuation zone – convinced the police to move the care packages containing tangerines and dogs up the hill to them.

“I was camping, actually,” he said. “When it gets dark, I sleep.”

Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting from Pasadena, Calif. Claire Moses the report also contributed.