A Year After the LA Fires, a Journalist Looks Back on the Stories From His Neighborhood

My biggest concern on the morning of Jan. 7, 2025, was the wind.

Weather warnings said the Santa Anas would roll in hard with hurricane force velocity. Before sunset, mean wind gusts were already rattling windows and knocking over lawn furniture. Tree branches groaned and palm trees bowed toward the street.

We followed reports of a fire getting bigger out by the ocean, in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades. Then, around 6:30 p.m., word got out of a brush fire igniting in Eaton Canyon, a few miles from my neighborhood on the southern edge of Altadena.

By 7 p.m., people were voluntarily evacuating parts of east Altadena and north Pasadena, right below the canyon, as the wind-driven fire exploded and began its destructive western march, eventually tearing a six-mile path across the whole of Altadena.

I headed out into the windstorm on foot, around 8:30 p.m. After two decades as a reporter in Southern California, I’ve seen how the Santa Anas can turn a modest brush fire into a virtually unstoppable destructive force that will erase neighborhoods. But this one felt different. There was a fury in the wind that I’d never experienced. And this was my own community.

Not even knowing what I’d do with the material, I started walking east, recording and narrating what I saw.

Lake Avenue cuts through the middle of Altadena, cleaving it into two distinct halves. I could see a fiery glow to the northeast. Embers were starting to blow down like burning snowflakes. I picked up the unmistakable smell of burning structures.

I crept out a few more times, snapping pictures and shooting video, trying to stay upright. The wind only seemed to grow angrier.

Around 2:30 a.m., I went out once last time. The windstorm of embers was bigger, and hotter, the fire obviously closer. A small fire crew from the city of Alhambra was just around the corner at the intersection of El Molino Avenue and Highland Street.

Two firefighters had pulled out a manhole cover and were somehow drawing water from the sewer.

“Get the f–k out of here, now!” one of the firefighters yelled through the howling winds. Houses just two blocks southeast were fully engulfed.

I packed a few things and evacuated to the parking lot of a nearby grocery store, but returned on foot at sunrise. By then the winds had calmed, but the sky above West Altadena was black as ink, the sunrise extinguished.

The stay-behinds

One of the first people I interviewed after the fire was Justin Murphy.

He and his brother evacuated their 94-year-old mom, Jane, from her home in East Altadena. Then they raced back up to the house to meet the fire head-on as it tore through the neighborhood. They saved Jane’s house and one across the street. Every other house on the cul-de-sac was destroyed.

Murphy chose to stay behind after the fire, to mop up hot spots and protect the house from looters. Everyone else in the neighborhood was gone.

“You know, I lived through the fire, and I lived after the fire, and I lived kind of as an outcast really,” Murphy told me, still a bit rattled by his experience. “But in a weird way, it made me look at myself and do some self-review.”

Over the past year, I’ve kept walking Altadena, trying to make sense of what happened with as many people who would talk to me, including Eshele Williams. Her family has lived in the same West Altadena neighborhood for 60 years. They lost four houses, all within a block or two of each other. I asked Williams why she and her family have been so willing to tell their story and speak out at local town hall events.

“I’ve grown up in this community and the only thing that I can do is shine a really bright light on it, on us, and who we have always been and potentially talk about where we should go.”

Loss and resurrection

The Eaton Fire not only brought flames of destructive fury, it created a demographic earthquake that will shake-up Altadena’s racial and class complexion for the foreseeable future. But that’s something Williams saw coming long before the fire.

“Altadena has been in transition for a long time, when I grew up here all of my neighbors were Black,” Williams said. “And that has changed over the years, this gentrification of Altadena.”

Earlier this month, I invited my old friend and The California Report Magazine host Sasha Khokha to come down from Northern California and see Altadena in the slow process of recovery. I wanted to introduce her to some of the people that I’ve featured in my stories over the past year.

Khokha arrived on a bright Sunday morning, so naturally, I took her to church. Since the fire, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church has been worshipping in the nearby East LA neighborhood of Eagle Rock after its entire campus in the heart of Altadena burned down.  After the service, senior Pastor Carri Grindon told us that even though this temporary space is a 20-minute drive from Altadena, they haven’t lost any parishioners. In fact, they’ve gained new ones.

“People need the community more than they’ve ever needed it before. They need that sense of, we’ve lost so much, but we have each other and we’re not going anywhere,” she said.

“I would compare it to when you’ve had a death in your family. There’s grief, but also there’s tasks. And now people are, at least in my experience, sharing, expressing and processing their grief,”  Grindon continued.

I’ve talked a lot about grief and trauma over the past year with 94-year-old Jane Murphy. She’s been a mental health therapist for decades and still sees clients every week. Her expansive home, saved from the fire by her sons, is filled with light that floods in from large windows throughout the house.

“I love this house. I’ve lived here 64 years,” Murphy told us.

Murphy walked us through her later years with grace, irrepressible wonder and with absolute appreciation for whatever or whomever is in front of her.

She’s also very funny. Like her answer when I asked her how she’s doing.

“Well, I’ve been medium rare,” she said. Now, medium rare for me, is the comedy and the tragedy. Because I walk through all this tragedy every day,” she said.

That is literally true. An avid hiker for most of her life, Murphy still gets out and walks a couple of miles every day through her neighborhood, now peppered with vacant lots, reminders of lost homes and neighbors. And she says a blessing in her head as she passes each one.

“What I have done is I’ve blessed all these lots, blessed the people. I am deeply grateful more people did not die, but I’m very sad for the people in West Altadena who did die,” Murphy said.

All but one of the nineteen people who lost their lives in the fire lived in West Altadena. Murphy and I may not have known them personally, but we all shared space together in our community, drove the same streets, hiked the same foothill trails, bought groceries or had our cars repaired at the same places. The connection is undeniable.

Like me and many others, Murphy worries about what comes next for Altadena.

“I’m hopeful that Altadena will resurrect,” she said. “My fear is that some builders will come in and want to build condos on lots and change the character,” she says, echoing the sentiments of Williams.

As rebuilding slowly lurches to a start, outsiders are indeed swooping in and scooping up properties that belonged to Altadena families for decades. Real estate listing firms like Redfin find that roughly half of all vacant lots sold in Altadena since the fire were snapped up by corporate investors.

The fire dealt a huge blow not only to homeowners but to renters as well. Scores of Altadena renters, like Melissa Lopez, had to scramble to find new places outside Altadena and typically at inflated prices. Standing on the vacant lot where her home once stood on Lake Avenue, Lopez told Khokha and me that coming back to the property is like visiting a grave site.

“I know some people are like, ‘I can never go back to Altadena.’ And I always tell folks, I totally respect that, but you can’t avoid grief. It’ll find you, trust me,” she said.

“[But] I find a certain level of comfort when I come, because in many ways, there’s still some foundations, there’s still some rubble, empty lots. It’s the one place where the outsides match my insides.”

Living now about fifteen miles outside of Altadena, Melissa said renters like her have been largely left out of the re-building process.

“I feel like we need a survey of — who commits to renting to fire survivors? Who’s committing to rent at reasonable prices?”

“People were starting to really gentrify Altadena even before the fire,” she continued. “There are people saying, yeah, we want renters back. But I haven’t really seen that at all.”

The fire followers

Scores of other fire survivors are digging in and taking steps to rebuild. Fresh roots are sinking into the soil that’s come in after the soil that burned. Scorched trees are being rehabilitated, new saplings are being sunk into the earth. Freshly cut wood slats are sinking into freshly poured foundation.

But before anyone was drawing up blueprints for a rebuild, others, like Alma Cielo and her husband Paul, returned with trailers and RVs to homestead on their scorched lots.

They’re going to rebuild their place too, in West Altadena, but they’re not quite ready just yet.

“I just want to stand here and feel the land healing, and then we’ll be able to know where to go from there,” Alma Cielo said, standing near a cluster of blooming morning glories and next to a fig tree that’s leafing out again.

“I’m feeling very grateful, actually, and at peace,” she added. The fire took away a lot of the things that I had been carrying that were simply weight.”

Cielo lost about thirty years of journals that were destroyed in the fire, notes she thought would be the foundation of a memoir.

“And if I go through those books, you just see a lot of the same cycles of ignorance and trauma. And I really had wanted to burn them years ago, but I didn’t know how I could do that safely.”

Maybe that’s how she starts the new book, I suggested.

“Yes,” she continued, “about how it was time to write a whole new story without having to constantly reference the past.”

I told Cielo about feeling something similar, about how the fire drew me back to journalism after I’d felt burnt out from covering news for 25 years. The fire gave me a renewed purpose. Maybe I could help my community a little bit.

The fire also deepened my love and appreciation for a place I already held sacred, and helped me connect with my neighbors in a whole new way — by telling their stories.

“There’s so much possibility now, there’s so much beauty, there is so much growth,” Cielo said.

Cielo mentioned the concept of “fire followers,” — the trees and the plants that thrive after a fire, that need the smoke and ash in the soil to get that spark to grow.

She, too, is a fire follower.

“I’m going to be better after this fire than I ever was before,” she said.