A Very Brief Update on the California Fires

With great difficulty, I drove into northern Altadena this afternoon to help a friend who lost his house. If you don’t know Los Angeles, I was north of Pasadena, up against the foothills at the base of the Angeles National Forest and the San Gabriel Mountains, in an unincorporated county neighborhood. Whole neighborhoods are gone, and what was striking is that everything I saw that burned just burned to the foundations. Homes burned at least a mile from the hills, nowhere near the main body of fire. There are at least dozens of still-burning ruins, houses that are gone but with spot fires on what’s left of the properties. The fire department presence is remarkably light in the residential neighborhoods. My friend’s neighborhood, with a whole street of houses burned to the foundation, was just empty. A single fire engine drove past, briefly, over the course of maybe an hour, in a neighborhood with houses still burning. I turned on the garden hose on the side of the garage, the only part of the house left, and nothing came out.

No water, minimal fire department presence, every structure that burned entirely lost. There’s a larger fire department presence on Lake Avenue, the main street through Altadena and down into Pasadena, with fire extending far beyond the area near the hills. If you know the area and this means something, the ruins of the Bunny Museum are still burning. A long stretch of stores, churches, and schools is burning, well down Lake Avenue, straight through the middle of town.

Very, very, very little is being saved by intervention; luck is helping, and not much else. They seem to be several hundred firefighters short of a real fight, with not much water. There are whole streets that are just chimneys standing among burning piles of what used to be houses.

I’m hundreds of emails and comments behind, and won’t get to them tonight. We’ll be working to understand the full scope of these fires for a while.