‘You Got Fucking Lucky’: One Family’s Improbable L.A. Fire Story
M
y wife — as usual — understood the situation before I did. The night before, Monday, Jan. 6, we’d both been awoken by the wind. Hundred-year-old pine branches snapping off like matchsticks. Iron lawn furniture tumbling across the yard. Our dog, shaking, tried to crawl under our pillows. “This is not good,” my wife said.
We’d moved to Altadena a few weeks earlier. Our dream house, right at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains — three years of permits and renovations in the making. We had a view of Eaton Canyon from our back patio and waterfall hiking trails half a mile away. We’d planned to spend the morning cleaning and unpacking. Construction screws still littered the yard, and half our moving boxes hadn’t even been opened.
I dropped off our seven-year-old daughter at school, then got to work. But the gale-force Santa Anas rattling the windows made it hard to concentrate. Growing up in Texas, I’d lived through tornados and hurricanes; I wasn’t overly concerned. But my wife, a native Californian, sensed something more innately — some primal signal in her neurons screaming: Danger. Get out.
Around 10:30, the Palisades Fire erupted across town. I texted a friend who lived there, offering our house if he and his wife and kids needed a place to evacuate. (Little did I know.) When we texted again that evening, they’d just watched a home four doors down from theirs burn to the ground on the local news. The next morning, theirs was gone, too.
Our house is still standing — just to curtail any suspense.
At that point, we were mainly worried about a tree falling through a window. I went to buy some duct tape at Altadena Hardware, a family-owned place we’d come to adore during our renovations, one of those neighborhood treasures that somehow squeezes a Home Depot into a few thousand square feet. At the checkout, a manager I’d become friendly with was giving an interview to a local reporter about the winds and how busy they’d been. Disaster, it seemed, was good for business.
Eighteen hours later, the store was in ashes.
By 1 p.m., the winds began to feel legitimately unsafe. We decided my wife would take our daughter and the dog to a hotel for the night, and I’d stay behind to keep an eye on things. As she was packing her suitcase, the power went out. I started packing a go-bag, just in case.
“The city burning,” Joan Didion wrote, “is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” Still — naively, stupidly — I wasn’t too worried. Altadena is green and lush by L.A. standards, with an annual rainfall about 40 percent higher than the rest of the city. And while our street was close enough to the national forest that bears and bobcats were not uncommon sights, it was also separated from it by a dry arroyo and five blocks of houses in between. Five blocks! Practically miles in fire topography.
But that’s urban fire — not wildfire.
Around 6, I went to pick up dinner. The neighborhood was pitch black: All the stoplights and streetlights were out. A gust of wind ripped the cover off my truck bed and whipped the crossbar onto the roof so hard it dented the steel. As I was paying, I got a text from a neighbor — four words I’ll remember forever: Fire in Eaton, FYI.
I jumped back in the truck and hurried home. A mile out, I started filming on my phone — self-consciously acting out my own version of the disaster videos we’ve all seen a thousand times. As I turned onto Allen Avenue, the main artery that leads up toward the mountains and our house, the sky to the northeast glowed a sickening orange.
“Jesus Christ,” I heard myself say.
Our house is on a street called Midwick Drive. According to the Cal Fire incident report, the Eaton fire started near the corner of Midwick and Altadena Drive — about four blocks away. I know this now. But as I turned onto our street, all I knew was that it looked like our backyard was on fire.
It was now about 6:40. I ran inside and started frantically filling bags. My afternoon packing had been practical and clear-eyed: passports, medicine, contact lenses. But this was emotional, almost feral. Our daughter’s art. My wife’s wedding dress. A pair of cowboy boots from my grandfather. And then just insane things. A set of dominoes. Our dead dog’s old collar. An entire duffel bag full of stuffed animals. As I careened through the house, I found myself stopping every once in a while, just staring at the fire.
By the time I left around 8 p.m., the roads were clogged with cars trying to get out. I zigzagged on side streets to reach the hotel, driving onto strangers’ yards to bypass uprooted trees blocking the roads. When I finally arrived, the scene was pure chaos — a line of cars 60 deep jockeying to get into the parking lot. Inside, the lobby was like a refugee camp. Kids in pajamas clutching pillows and crying. Everyone on their phones.
When I made it to our room around 9 p.m., our daughter had just fallen asleep. My wife and I whispered for a while about what to do. We decided that in the morning, she’d take the kid and the dog to stay at her dad’s house in San Francisco. But we both agreed that the house had burned down. For now, it was best to operate as if the house had burned down.
Eventually, my wife fell asleep, too. As the two of them lay in bed beside me, I drank whiskey from a plastic hotel cup with an AirPod in one ear and listened to the L.A. County fire scanner, waiting for them to call out our address. I wanted to know what time our house went up.
This was not an academic point. Throughout our renovations, our house had been insured as “unoccupied,” but when we moved in, the company canceled our policy. (“Fire risk.” Fair enough.) My wife spent hours over the next few weeks calling around to get new coverage; three times, we were rejected. Finally, we got coverage from the California FAIR Plan, the state’s “insurer of last resort.” But in a darkly comic twist of timing, our policy was not scheduled to start until exactly midnight on Jan. 8. For the first six hours of the fire, we were uninsured.
Cal Fire incident command designated our area “Division Zulu.” I listened intently as they called in strike teams and water tenders, their cool professionalism somewhat reassuring. But with winds gusting 100 miles an hour and all tankers and helos grounded, there was only so much they could do. As more and more reports of structure fires poured in, their stress grew audible. When a dispatcher called out the same address for a third or fourth time, one firefighter snapped, “Yeah man, we’re here. Everything is on fire.”
I started noting times and addresses on my phone, mapping the fire as it inched closer to our house. 9:33 p.m., 1800 Braeburn — four blocks away. 10:50 p.m., Midwick and Glen Canyon — two blocks. And finally, 11:31 p.m., Midwick and Midlothian — half a block away. Game over.
I listened for two more hours, then fell asleep.
THE NEXT MORNING WAS brown and sickly. White ash fell from the sky like snowflakes. (My wife, who was in Lower Manhattan on 9/11, flashed back viscerally.) Breakfast at the hotel was almost unbearable. At the table next to us, two mothers and their kids were holding one another and crying. Both of their houses had burned down overnight. “Everything?” one kid kept screaming through tears. “Everything?”
By now, the devastation was becoming clear. Texts began trickling in from friends who’d lost it all: first one, then three, then half a dozen. I lost count around 10.
My wife left for San Francisco. On the drive up, she passed within a few hundred yards of yet another fire, the Hurst, then devouring the mountains near Santa Clarita. She gritted her teeth as she passed under the plume. In the backseat, our daughter — oblivious — played Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” on the iPad while my wife quietly sobbed.
After they left, I drove back to check on the house. There were fires smoldering everywhere, but the firefighters and sheriff’s officers were too overwhelmed to care who came and went. The Air Quality Index was in the 400s — literally off the charts. Fortunately, I’d just bought two new boxes of N95s — not for the fires, but because I’d been worried about bird flu. The Venn diagram overlap of 21st-century catastrophes.
I strapped one on and held my breath as I turned onto our block. When I saw the house, I broke down. Somehow, impossibly, we were OK.
I went inside to survey the damage. Soot had blown through every door, window and vent; the whole place smelled like an ashtray. As fire trucks screamed past outside, I packed everything I could fit into the truck: enough clothes for us for two weeks, plus art, photos, jewelry, paperwork, mementos — anything irreplaceable. Everything our friends had lost.
I drove out through the worst of it. Sheer, unmitigated ruin. Broken gas lines shooting out flames like refineries. Entire blocks with nothing left but chimneys — tombstones for the houses that had stood there. And surreal things, too. Pools of liquified metal that had melted and reconstituted like the bad guy from Terminator 2, shimmering silver in ash-covered driveways. On one destroyed lot, nothing but a single orange tree — the fruit still ripe. A California survivor.
I JOINED THE FAMILY in San Francisco. My first morning there, an earthquake hit. “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I said out loud to myself. Thankfully, it was only a 3.7.
We were all on edge. The night before, four more houses on our street had burned down. Spot fires were burning everywhere, and the winds were still raging. We were not yet out of the woods. But as it turned out, after those first 24 hours, the fire perimeter largely held. Looking at the damage on a map, there’s one upside-down-horseshoe-shaped area that emerged unscathed. That was us. It made no sense: We were less than a mile from the fire’s suspected epicenter, yet five times as far away, entire neighborhoods were gone. My only working theory was echoed by a firefighter I spoke to later. “Dude, those winds were gusting triple digits,” he said. “You guys were so close, the embers just jumped right over. You got fucking lucky.”
The next few days passed in a blur. I maxed out the tabs on my phone, refreshing Watch Duty and reading news reports. I got very good at finding our house on a map very quickly. At night, I read GoFundMes and cried. One morning, I took our daughter to the zoo.
“No phones at the zoo, Dada,” she said as we stood in front of the meerkats. “The animals don’t like it.” I apologized and put it back in my pocket. Ten seconds later, I was staring at it again.
Down in Altadena, the National Guard sealed off our neighborhood. No one in or out — not even residents. (At least we didn’t have to worry about looters.) In the information vacuum, a few group chats sprang up — people sharing whatever crumbs of news they could find. Sometimes it got awkward. On one text thread, two families had lost everything, while the rest of us were basically OK. One day someone shared a YouTube video of a community meeting, and someone else asked if it was worth watching. One of the women who’d lost her home chimed in: “It’s especially informative if your house is still standing.”
The chat got a little quiet after that.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, it was almost as if nothing had happened. Inane snippets of conversation left me irrationally fuming. One day at a playground, I watched a woman with a newborn walk up and greet some friends. “We made it out of the house! It’s a miracle!” she said. Indeed. A miracle.
In my mind, a private hierarchy of trauma began to develop. At the top were the 29 people who’d died. Then the thousands who’d lost their homes. And then, somewhere far below that — way down near the bottom — was us. People who’d been inconvenienced, but would ultimately be OK.
But then came the people below that, whom the smallest part of me started to hate. Those who’d barely been impacted, but talked like tragic refugees. One night my wife showed me an Instagram post from a friend whose house was miles from the nearest evacuation zone. The fires had been “very scary,” she wrote, but not to worry — they were safe at a luxury hotel in Palm Springs.
“Fuck you,” we both said.
We could feel the PTSD creeping in. On a walk with my wife one afternoon, the wind picked up suddenly, and we both flinched. Our daughter had nightmares and wet the bed for the first time in years. A lifelong outdoors lover, I started to see the natural world purely in terms of risk. One day my brother-in-law took me on a hike in the East Bay, in an effort to take my mind off things. Near the top of the mountain, we paused to take in a stunning vista — rolling green hills of pine and live oak, stretching all the way to San Francisco Bay.
“Pretty cool,” he said. But all I saw was fuel.
ON THE SEVENTH DAY, I took the dog and drove back home. I slept in a friend’s guest room and started working on next steps. I got estimates from remediators. Bought a generator and a chainsaw. And I started trying to figure out where we’d spend the next few… weeks? Months? No one knew.
When would it be safe to go back? That was the big question. Soot and ash would be blowing down off the mountains for months. Not to mention the toxic stew of asbestos, lead, lithium, and who knows what else that had burned and settled in the air and soil. I pored over obscure environmental studies, trying to decipher how long our town would be a chemical waste pit.
On day 11, the sheriff lifted our evacuation order. A 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew was in effect,
but at least we could access our homes. I drove up the next morning. At a checkpoint a few blocks away, a National Guardsman with a Humvee and an automatic rifle checked my ID and waved me through. The block was eerily quiet. We still had no power, no water, no gas. I slipped on a mask and Tyvek booties and wandered aimlessly through the house, taking photos and videos but not sure what else to do. In my daughter’s bedroom, my eyes landed on a sticker she’d gotten recently that said “Living the Alta-Dream-A,” and I burst into tears.
What should we do? Several families we knew had already decided they wouldn’t return. My instinct was to stay, to dig in and help rebuild. But I also wasn’t sure how much ownership of the community we could claim. We’d only just moved there. People had lost their homes, churches, businesses, schools; we’d lost our pizza place and the hiking trail where I took our dog every morning. It felt self-indulgent to grieve too much. At the same time, we were grieving the loss of what should have been — the future in Altadena we’d imagined.
The institutional recriminations will surely come. Why didn’t the city stage more fire engines? Why did So Cal Edison cut power to the distribution lines in the neighborhoods, but not to the much higher-powered transmission lines up in the canyon, where a fire was exponentially more likely to start? And why the fuck did the residents of West Altadena — where all 17 Eaton fire fatalities occurred — not get evacuation orders until 3:30 a.m., when embers were already raining down on their houses?
But I also wonder about our responsibility. A decade ago, I wrote about a devastating Arizona wildfire that killed 19 veteran firefighters. I know about wildfire’s terrifying unpredictability, and our utter impotence when one sets its sights on us. I also understand the new cycle of climate change, at least in Southern California. It isn’t that complicated. The wet years get wetter; the brush proliferates. The dry years get dryer; the brush ignites.
And yet, I chose to live in Altadena, where the Angeles National Forest is a thousand-square-mile pile of kindling a short walk from our back door. Should we really be there? Should anyone?
A few days ago, one final indignity. My wife and daughter were driving back from San Francisco when Google Maps flashed an alert: “Route may be affected by Hughes fire.” Yet another wildfire had exploded an hour north of L.A., threatening their freeway home. “WHAT THE FUCK JOSH,” my wife texted.
I hurried to look into it. The northbound I-5 northbound was already shut, but the south side was still open. It would be dicey, but they could make it.
But in the time it took me to call her back, the southbound lanes closed, too. The fire was 6,000 acres and running unchecked. They’d have to find another way home.
