Altadena reopening reveals devastation — but community still standing

As she surveyed the charred remains of her old Altadena neighborhood, Jocelyn Boyd stared in silent disbelief.

Loma Alta Park, where the public swimming pool once served as a summertime sanctuary for her and other Black residents, had been ravaged by the Eaton fire.

Standing outside a nearby community garden whose plants were mostly untouched, she got out her phone to record a video of the seemingly random destruction.

On Tuesday, Boyd returned to her childhood home, with authorities opening the burned areas to the public for the first time since a mass evacuation on Jan. 7. On her drive up Lincoln Avenue, she had stopped and pulled over just before a security checkpoint where a phalanx of rifle-toting National Guard troops were checking the IDs of passing motorists.

Boyd, 57, who was displaced from her current residence in Pasadena along with her pets, spent several angst-filled days wondering whether her home would be there when she returned. It was.

She felt a pang of survivor’s guilt whenever her Altadena friends called to ask how she was doing, searching for the right words to convey the relief she felt to those who had lost everything.

“It will never be the same again because a lot of people are not going to be able to rebuild,” she said.

Boyd, who is retired after owning a mobile dog grooming business, described how redlining and other discriminatory housing policies pushed many Black Altadenians into homes west of Lake Avenue, which acted like a Mason-Dixon line separating West Altadena from the historically mostly white east side of the city.

For her and others who looked like her, the Loma Alta pool served as a refuge from both the lingering racism and the sweltering summers of the small town in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills.

Eaton fire victim Kara Marsh is overwhelmed with emotion as she searches for valuables and keepsakes amid the home she and her husband shared on W. Marigold Street. The Marsh family plans on rebuilding their home and are staying with friends in the meantime.

In the 1980s and ’90s, gentrification priced Black residents out of the area, and many moved farther inland. Many of those who could afford to remain lived in large family homes passed down through generations, some of which were leveled in the Eaton fire.

Some of Boyd’s friends were living out of campers on their burned-out properties, concerned about reports of “land-grabbers” sniffing around the area. Several had already received business cards from strangers who asked whether they were interested in selling their property, some offering “pennies on the dollar” for their homes, she said.

Her message to those friends: “Stay strong. And don’t sell.”

Records reviewed by The Times suggest residents west of Lake did not receive evacuation alerts until many hours after the Eaton fire started. Fanned by high winds, the fast-moving blaze burned large swaths of West Altadena, eventually destroying 7,000 structures and resulting in the deaths of at least 17 people. All of the victims lived west of Lake, records show.

Although officials reopened roads throughout the community, it still resembled a grim checkerboard of destroyed homes next to others that were largely spared from the flames.

But amid the destruction, there were signs that recovery efforts were underway.

Utility crews were out all day, working to restore power. Meanwhile, neighbors and officials in FEMA jackets streamed in and out of a nearby Stumptown coffee shop, which was offering free cups of hot coffee through Friday.

Next door, volunteers distributed free meals to people who waited in a long line that snaked around an empty lot.

Eaton fire victim Jose Velazquez, left, hands a woman donated home goods supplies in front of his burned down garage.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

On the night the fire began, Randolph Ware, 39, was in his bedroom in his grandmother’s house on Glenrose Avenue when it began filling with choking smoke. After driving his grandma to safety, he and his uncle began watering the home’s yard and fence with a hose, while chasing embers the size of golf balls that rained down on their block.

When authorities switched off the water at some point during the night, he and his uncle ditched the hose in favor of shovels, heaping dirt to put out the flames.

Ware said he refused to leave, even as Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department patrols drove past and ordered people to evacuate using loudspeakers.

“I wasn’t going to let it burn down,” he said. “I’m not trying to say I’m Superman, but through God’s will I did it.”

Other residents who evacuated began filtering back into the area in recent days. Among them was Jose Velazquez, 30, who was tending to the pop-up aid station outside his mother-in-law’s house at the corner of Woodbury Road and Glenrose Avenue.

The station sprouted up last week, and in the days since volunteers had worked to sort the donations of clothes, disposable wipes, toys, diapers, canned goods and fresh produce that have flooded in from as far away as San Francisco.

Ruiz Linares, of the volunteer group Guardianes Del Muro U.S.A., stands in the median waving a homemade sign he wrote with charcoal. A large donation and feeding center has popped up for Eaton fire victims returning to their homes in Altadena.

“Some lady drove a U-Haul full of supplies and dropped them off over here,” he said, adding that many of the donated goods were for people still living without gas or electricity in their homes. “Everybody’s honestly on instant noodles right now.”

Velazquez said he felt compelled to help after his family’s home was largely spared, while other houses, including his next-door neighbor’s, were a complete loss. He was also looking for a way of repaying the same neighbors who had for years been loyal customers at the churro stand that his family ran from the home’s driveway. Nearly 40 of his regulars had lost their homes, he said.

Velazquez’s uncle, Jose Medina, 64, was at home the night the fire broke out. He remembers hearing a loud boom, which he later realized were wind gusts ripping a section of the roof off the house.

“I thought the space shuttle was crashing into the Earth,” he said.

He ran outside to find an ominous red glow in the distance, on the hillside in Eaton Canyon. Less than 20 minutes later, he said, the fire was across the street from the house that he and his sister had lived in for 40 years.

Eaton fire victims Liz Oh and Ray Ahn sift through rubble on W. Marigold Street in Altadena. They’re staying in a hotel with their child while they waiting to hear about insurance from California’s FAIR Plan.

As the flames drew closer and closer, Medina said he climbed up onto the roof and started to hose down his yard and his neighbor’s, trying to keep the flames at bay. He watched helplessly as the heavy gusts carried embers across Woodbury Road, igniting a row of palm trees in his neighbor’s backyard.

Miraculously, his sister’s house was spared, but the flames consumed the garage where Medina slept and the tools he used for his job as an independent contractor. For days afterward, Medina sifted through the burned-out garage for his angle saws and stepladders, but they had all been destroyed. He managed to salvage a few shovels and drill bits from the ash heap.

On Tuesday, he was working at the aid station along with volunteers like Yolanda Barra, 30, part of a congregation from South-Central L.A. called Minesterio Cordero, which drove up to hand out prepackaged meals to residents. Crediting the church with offering her a lifeline as she overcome her own struggles with substance abuse, Barra said she saw this as a chance for her to give back.

“Everyone struggles, you know, but this is the time that we need to unite and help one another,” she said.

Times staff photographer Allen J. Schaben contributed to this report.