The Eaton Fire

This is just me collecting my thoughts about the past 3 days.

I just turned on my computer after getting it set back up. Waves of emotions: relief, grief, survivor guilt, everything on loop. We have one of Audrey’s friends staying with us whose house is still standing but is deep inside the evacuation zone. Another friend is about to move in with his cat. His family home and its entire neighborhood burned to the ground on Tuesday.

Tuesday, January 7

Just another day. The winds had already begun the night before. Our biggest fear was our neighbors’ huge pine and oak trees that hang over our house. In 2011, one of them came crashing down on our side, obliterating our front gate and two cars. We planned to have the kids sleep downstairs because of the forecast of 60-80 mph winds expected. I still planned on going to see a friend’s band, El Haru Kuroi, that night with some friends. In a brilliant move, I swept up pine needles and oak leaves from the back yard. It’s now buried under a foot of debris.

At some point early in the afternoon, I saw that a fire had broken out in Pacific Palisades. The hurricane-force winds were driving it towards residences and businesses at an alarming rate. Almost immediately, all tv channels were on scene covering the rapidly spreading fire. People fleeing the flames got stuck in gridlock traffic on their streets and had to abandon their cars and run. This left the roads completely blocked and prevented fire trucks from getting through. I could already imagine the world mocking LA traffic as a source of tragedy.

A couple hours later came the news that a fire had broken out in Eaton Canyon, which is just a few miles from us in Pasadena. Normally, that means the fire would naturally push north up the foothills and mountains, but with 50-80 mph winds blowing south towards Altadena and Pasadena, there was some concern. We have brush fires in the foothills often, but they rarely threaten the towns below.

Evacuations were ordered for the area near Eaton Canyon, but as we looked out our window and saw the palm trees bent at 90-degree angles southward, we started to worry. We were still a good distance from the fire, but we started to get a sick feeling. The news said the wind would actually get worse at 10pm and last until 1 or 2 am. By 5pm life became centered on watching the news, the clock, and the expanding fire maps. We tried to calculate the spread of fire with the time left, and suddenly, things didn’t look good.

Our phones blared that awful alert sound we hear when there’s an Amber alert, and we were being alerted to pack bags and be ready to evacuate. There was a steady stream of cars already coming south down our street. We are one block east of Lake Ave, the main street in the area, and we knew it had to be gridlocked. We could smell smoke.

We ate dinner and started to talk about a plan of evacuation. In that moment, we were just trying to be objective. What is replaceable? What is invaluable? We have 3 cars and an old Porshe we inherited from Geri’s dad. But we were still calculating the distance from the fire and the dreaded 10-2 window of even fiercer winds.

Sometime later at around 8 we got a phone call and a text that we had to evacuate. It was confusing though because the Cal Fire and Watch Duty apps had maps that showed our neighborhood to be about a mile below the evacuation line. At 10, right on schedule, the winds got worse, shaking the whole house when the gusts hit. We started loading the cars.

It was at this point, we started to accept that we could actually lose our house. The news was showing streets we knew well on fire, and they weren’t very far away. I noticed in the footage that embers were being blown across the ground igniting bushes and plants around the houses, so I went out and started hosing down the front and back yards. The wind was bending the jet stream from the nozzle at a 90 degree angle, but I soaked the ground and shrubs as much as I could. My nextdoor neighbor was out doing the same.

But it all felt so pointless. These winds which made it impossible to just stand up in were going to win. The night sky north of us was aglow casting an ominous orange northern lights effect. Ashes were raining down in between wind gusts, and the house smelled like the inside of a fire pit.

We made it to 1am. My parents were telling us to get out and go to their house, but we still had power and they did not.

Something I wouldn’t wish on anyone was the looking through our house deciding what stays and what goes. I packed up my studio gear, leaving behind the cables and plugs. All my guitars and basses. Microphones. We all picked enough clothes for a week or so. We were calm but we all knew the shock would come later. We had the luxury of time to load the cars and wait. When the cars were packed full, we went inside and watched the news.

At around 2am, the Pasadena police were driving up and down the street blaring their damn sirens, telling everyone to evacuate. I should note that as we were frantically loading our cars, we didn’t see any other neighbors doing the same. There was a steady stream of cars heading south down our street, but our neighbors as far as we could see were sitting tight.

At around 3am the smoke was getting worse and we weren’t going to be able to sleep with the police noise, so Geri made the call. We were evacuating. We grabbed a few more things and each drove a car to Arcadia only to pull into my parents’ driveway to see the San Gabriel mountains above them in flames. They were technically in a “safe” area, but goddamn did it not look safe. At least back in Pasadena we couldn’t see actual flames. It was pitch dark and cold in my parents’ house, but we set up beds in the guest room and tried to go to sleep

.

Geri suddenly asked if anyone had locked the house when we left. No one could remember, so I got up. We were all still dressed in case we had to evacuate from Arcadia, so I just got out of bed and drove back to the house. It was comforting to see the neighborhood still quiet, although it was engulfed in smoke. The door was, indeed, locked. I went in and walked through the silent, empty house and wondered if this was the last time I would see it.

Back in 2015 we had remodeled the kitchen. Geri survived breast cancer and came home to a brand new kitchen after her final surgery. So many memories in the spaces that I was now imagining being nothing but ashes.

I did note that the winds seemed to have subsided a bit at 4am. That gave me hope. I returned to Arcadia and flopped onto a couch with a blanket and slept fitfully until about 9.

And that’s when we started seeing on social media the news of people losing their homes. Over the next 24 hours we saw 1, 3, 7 dear friends and countless others mourning the loss of their homes. And our neighborhood wasn’t out of the woods. The wind was still blowing, and the fire was creeping down Lake Ave. So many familiar restaurants and bars were completely gone. Within 18 hours we went from being worried about trees falling in the wind to total fire devastation of our community. I would guess that 2 more hours of the wind blowing at 50-80mph early Wed morning and our neighborhood would have been leveled by fire. Maybe less than 2 hours.

And this was just the Eaton Fire. As far as acreage and number of structures, the Palisades Fire was worse. The wind did not die down. The area of spread into residences and businesses was greater. But I don’t know how one puts a value on these things. So many lives upended.

We stayed the next night in Arcadia glued to the news and watching more and more of Altadena and Pasadena burn. Last night, Thursday, we returned home. So far we’ve visited with our friends, the Berrys, who lost everything, and we are housing a couple of Audrey’s friends and a cat.

I started re-assembling my studio this morning, and I noticed that my audio interface, which was in the trunk of Audrey’s car, is covered in ashes. It was only exposed inside the open trunk for a few minutes as I unloaded everything. As I sat at my desk checking all the connections I just started crying. I have a desk. So many friends have nothing. In the rest of the house I touch the counters, open the drawers, and turn on the stove, marveling that we still have them.

And still the world sucks outside of LA. Trump will take office and steer us to the brink, if not over the edge, of viability. Politics is still broken, but I gotta say, no one should be blaming politicians for all of this. Turn on every fire hydrant in your city for 12 hours and see how well the water pressure holds up. Endure a fire during a 70mph wind storm and see how well your neighborhoods fare. Don’t get me wrong, politicians screw up all the time in California. But this was mostly a cataclysmic event. You can blame god if you believe in him.

These are just my thoughts to try and make some sense of everything that has happened in the last 3 days.

At least I’m not dragging any deconstruction White guys this time.