When Michael Olson saw what would become the Eaton fire, the flames at the base of an electrical tower looked small, seemingly manageable.
Then the winds that night on Jan. 7 blew a shower of sparks across the mountainside above his Pasadena home.
“In 10 minutes, the entire vista was blazing,” Olson, 70, told The Times. “It was just a mountain of flame.”
Only a dry riverbed separated his backyard from the blaze. Fire engines rushed into his neighborhood as Olson and his wife drove away.
“We left home thinking we’d never see it again,” he said.
Instead, Olson and his neighbors returned to find their homes untouched by a fire that devastated swaths of Altadena to the south and west, killing at least 16 people. Some returned to find trees in their backyard singed and decks damaged — signs the fire came dangerously close. The gutters of one home were left sagging, as if they had begun to melt.
Yet dozens of properties near what authorities suspect was the ignition point emerged unscathed. Some residents have already returned to the neighborhood despite being surrounded by ash and rubble. With the evacuation zone guarded by armed troops and police officers who don’t allow anyone in or out, they are struggling to access food and other basic supplies.
Those who remain are now trying to make sense of why their homes, at the epicenter of such a devastating fire, survived when so many others burned to the ground.
“An act of God?” Olson asked. “Good karma? I told people I used up a lot of good karma that day.”
Winds whipped up an inferno — yet spared some homes
Wedged up against the mountain, residents of Canyon Close Road have an unbroken line of sight from their backyards to the electrical towers where Olson and other residents say they saw flames break out around 6:15 p.m. on Jan. 7.
There are several theories to explain why not a single home caught ablaze as the Eaton fire burned a horseshoe around Olson’s street and surrounding neighborhood.
“It could be winds, brush clearance, luck,” said Scott Brown, a fireman assigned to Los Angeles County Fire Station 66 about a mile east in Kinneloa Canyon. His best guess: “All three.”
To understand how the fire spread — and the decisions that led to some homes being saved — The Times spoke to fire officials, first responders, residents and experts, and reviewed hours of radio traffic by emergency personnel from the night the Eaton fire began.
Fire crews were stationed in the streets east, west and south of the fire. They sprayed water on the burning hillside, but 70-mph winds sent embers over their heads, sparking new fires up to two miles behind them.
“This is something that I’ve never experienced in my 20 years,” said Battalion Chief Danny Nausha of the Pasadena Fire Department, the initial incident commander of the fire. “We put apparatus closest of the fire’s edge to prevent them from going into structures, but many of the embers would fly out into the neighborhoods.”
Olson and his neighbors believe their homes survived for two reasons. For one, the Pasadena and Los Angeles County fire departments were able to flood their street — the first place crews went in response to the Eaton fire — before blazes in other neighborhoods forced them to divide their resources.
Like Nausha, Olson also credited the winds. The same gusts that whipped the fire into an inferno and sent bits of burning wood raining down like cluster munitions on streets to the west and south may have saved their own homes, Olson said.
“It just washed over us,” he said.
At 6:26 p.m. on Jan. 7, about 15 minutes after the Eaton fire was first reported, firefighters near Canyon Close Drive reported the blaze had grown to 10 acres and was burning “underneath high tension power lines,” according to radio transmissions. A minute later, a crew on nearby Canyon View Lane radioed that embers were blowing toward homes.
At 6:33 p.m., a firefighter on Canyon Close Drive reported “huge ember casts” and asked for help, eventually requesting five more engines, according to the transmissions. More than a mile away, Pasadena Fire Chief Chad Augustin said, embers were already lighting trees and structures on fire.
With other departments in the area already stretched thin that night, no immediate backup was available.
Brendan Thorn, 28, who guarded his home on Canyon Close Road with a garden hose, saw embers arcing overhead, “just giant balls of flames.”
Most sailed over the house that his great-grandparents built 70 years ago.
“We’re very, very thankful,” Thorn said, “but my mother especially, she feels very guilty, which sounds weird to say.”
A single ember fell in the backyard of Thorn’s next-door neighbor, Laurie Bilotta — so hot it melted a metal ladder in her backyard, she said. Some bushes also caught fire, but Bilotta’s home of 39 years survived.
Bilotta, 72, pointed Wednesday to the trees in her backyard.
“Not a hair on their head, not a leaf on their branch, touched,” she said. “It’s a miracle.”
A fireman’s vow: ‘I will defend my castle’
About a mile east of Bilotta’s house, Brown defended his family’s home in Kinneloa Canyon.
Brown, 44, was off-duty the night of Jan. 7 and had just sat down for dinner at Villa Catrina’s in Arcadia when he got an alert about Eaton Canyon.
Brown returned to his station, grabbed his gear and went home. He loaded up his car with personal belongings, then used the techniques he’d learned as a fireman to protect his family home.
“I’ve been planning this day for 31 years,” said Brown, who was in the eighth grade when the 1993 Kinneola fire threatened the house. “I will defend my castle.”
Brown dragged flammable furniture away from the house, doused the roof and walls with water and turned on the sprinklers before doing the same to his neighbors’ homes.
With the help of a fire engine, Brown extinguished spot fires in his neighborhood until 1:30 a.m., when the winds died down for a few hours, allowing fire crews to get a handle on the flames in Kinneloa Canyon.
Brown said he made a grilled cheese sandwich before going door to door for the next seven hours, making sure there were no breaks in water lines that would sap the supply to fire crews.
Nausha’s crews with the Pasadena Fire Department were jumping from one house fire to another, trying to keep up with each new blaze sparked by the swirling embers.
“As the fire moves through, you put it out in one area, and you’re quickly moving on to the next,” he said. “They continuously moved from fire to fire. “
Life in the evacuation zone: ‘Like the Berlin Wall’
By Wednesday, some residents had returned to Canyon Close Road, which remained under an evacuation order. Some weren’t planning to leave the area so long as it remained guarded by National Guard troops, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers, fearful they wouldn’t be let back in.
Residents described a siege-like state. Their homes had electricity and limited cellphone service but no gas. Some were living off emergency food supplies — powdered peanut butter and apple sauce, said BJ Thorn, whose son defended their home with a garden hose.
A retired elementary school teacher, BJ Thorn said her sister was turned away at a National Guard checkpoint with a load of groceries from Ralph’s. BJ Thorn asked if her sister could hand the food over the line. The troops said no.
“It’s a little bit like the Berlin Wall,” she said.
BJ Thorn and her son remain indoors most of the day. She worries if they are caught outdoors after a 6 p.m. curfew, National Guard troops will “escort” them out of the evacuation zone, she said.
“The Sheriff’s Department is also very, very eager to find someone looting,” she said.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
