LOS ANGELES — Marcus Betts and his family lived in Altadena for generations, so the 52-year-old was no stranger to the blazes that plague the Golden State. But as the Eaton fire broke out on the evening of Jan. 7, it was whipped up by staggeringly powerful Santa Ana winds.
A friend of Betts’ mother first texted them that the fire was just a few miles away.
“I went upstairs to my mom’s room and looked out her east-facing window, and I could see a red glow. And that’s when I knew that this is different,” said Betts, who works as an analyst in the baking industry.
That began a scramble to check on friends and elderly relatives, warning them they might need to evacuate, and helping some pack bags. By around 9:30 p.m., they still hadn’t gotten an evacuation order from the city. But Betts and his household — which includes his wife, his two teenage daughters, his brother and his mother, decided to pack up some of their belongings anyway. When the power went out, they officially made their exit.
After giving a family friend a ride to safety, Betts, along with some other friends and relatives who lived in the area, gathered at an uncle’s house near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena for refuge. He estimated that about 16 people and five dogs were there.
But it was a sleepless night for many of them. Around 3:30 a.m., Betts, two uncles and a cousin jumped into action. They drove back toward the flames, as hurricane-level winds pushed against them, and hosed down at least six homes.
“There was times that we were hosing down the houses, and the water literally was coming directly back at us, like, literally we were soaked from the strength of the winds. The water was coming straight back into our faces. But we persisted,” Betts said. “Once we felt we put as much water as we could without us then freezing as well, we decided to head out.”
Despite their best efforts, hours later, Betts discovered that all but one of the houses they hosed down had burned to the ground when he returned to the scene that morning. The house that remains standing belongs to Betts’ uncle. As he and other family members drove through the area to assess the damage, he snapped photos along the way of houses belonging to people he knew. He knew they’d want to see proof of the incinerated remains of their homes.
“Fortunately, we all made it out, and we all got what we could,” he said. “But other than that, everything is gone.”
Roughly three months after the Eaton fire started, which burned 14,021 acres, destroyed over 9,400 structures and killed at least 18 people, many Altadena residents like the Betts family are still without a permanent home, starting over as the national news has largely slowed its coverage of the calamity.
Now, with scorched ruins across much of Altadena, Betts and others are voicing concerns about rebuilding. As the Betts family’s hectic evacuation night of helping friends and relatives shows, the unincorporated Los Angeles County community is a tight-knit one, with a history and appeal that would be hard to reproduce. Excluded from other neighborhoods for decades because of racist practices, Black families like Betts’ achieved home ownership in West Altadena — and often passed those homes down to their children. As Southern California property values skyrocketed, the area, nicknamed “Beautiful Altadena” and considered an “architectural mecca,” remained relatively affordable.
As wealthy developers set their sights on the area and as the chaos of President Donald Trump’s second administration brings new economic uncertainty, staying true to the heart of Altadena and its history presents a daunting challenge, particularly for families who are just starting to navigate insurance claims, debris removal and restarting their lives from scratch.
“I don’t think there’s anybody who was in Altadena that night that could see that it was going to be this,” Betts said. “I do find it hard to receive, hard to accept that we lost so many houses, so many structures, and we lost life.”
Though wildfires have always been part of the ecosystem in Southern California, an unusually dry fall and winter primed the region to be a tinderbox. Then came the windstorm, knocking down trees and power lines. Sparks became conflagrations, most notably the Palisades fire, which burned 23,707 acres in the coast and canyons between Santa Monica and Malibu concurrent with the Eaton fire on the other side of LA County.
Before entire neighborhoods were decimated, displacing thousands of people, Altadena’s population was nearly 42,000, about 18% of whom were Black, according to 2024 census data. Altadena also had a large Hispanic population, at around 27%. By comparison, around 42% of the population was white, 5% was Asian and 7% was of mixed ethnicity, according to The Associated Press.
Remarkably, though, more than 80% of the region’s Black residents were homeowners, nearly double the rate of Black homeownership nationwide, according to AP. That’s due in part to redlining.
Between the 1930s and 1960s, the east side of North Lake Avenue in Altadena was reserved for white residents, while the western side of the street was where nonwhite residents had to live. Though those restrictions were officially lifted with the Fair Housing Act in 1968, many Black residents stayed in their homes or passed them down to younger generations for decades, creating a community rooted in family and neighborly ties. That is, until the Eaton fire disrupted it.
Residents in western Altadena, where 17 of the 18 Eaton fire deaths occurred, did not receive an evacuation order until eight hours after the residents in eastern Altadena. Those east of North Lake Avenue received one just an hour into the fire popping up.
The western Altadena alert came around 3:30 a.m., around the same time that Betts said he and some family members were hosing down their houses.
But, some residents said that they didn’t receive an alert at all. Betts told HuffPost that he doesn’t recall ever receiving an evacuation order.
The Los Angeles Times reported on March 12 that county fire or sheriff’s officials were responsible for failing to send the evacuation order to western Altadena residents in a timely manner, citing two unnamed county officials. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called for an outside investigation into the evacuations and emergency notification systems, with a progress report due at the end of April.
The Los Angeles County Coordinated Joint Information Center declined HuffPost’s request for comment. Likewise, Los Angeles County, the LA County Fire Department and the LA County Sheriff’s Department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
Adam Frankel, who lost the home he rented with his husband in western Altadena in the fire, told HuffPost the disparity in the evacuation orders is disturbing.
“I can’t get out of my mind that the wealthier white section of Altadena was immediately evacuated before the fire was even in proximity to a lot of those neighborhoods, but the historically Black and Latine neighborhoods of working-class people were not told to evacuate until it was, frankly, too late, and dozens of people died as a result of those decisions,” he said.
Like other residents of Altadena, Frankel said that wealthier fire-impacted areas have received more support and attention than his community.
“Systemic racism pervades every realm of our society, including disaster relief efforts, and the kind of support and resources that middle and working-class people of color receive in a situation like this versus wealthy white people is profoundly immoral and unacceptable,” Frankel said.
After an Altadena Town Council meeting in January that left many residents’ questions unanswered, Frankel and Martinez sent an email to Chair Victoria Knapp, Vice Chair Nic Arnzen and LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger demanding relief for the unique needs of the community’s renters, low-income residents and marginalized groups.
“It was extremely disappointing to realize that neither of you, at any point during your planned remarks today, would so much as even mention Altadena’s rich and unique history as a historically Black, ethnically diverse, majority working and middle-class community — nor of the disproportionately severe harms that this so-called “natural disaster” has already and will inevitably continue to cause low-income residents and BIPOC residents in particular,” their email said. “This unfortunate reality is made even more acute by our dangerous political climate and the daily barrage of vitriolic attacks on the rights and human dignity of migrants, trans and queer people, poor people, people with disabilities, and Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color communities.”
The council never responded to Frankel and Martinez. Knapp, Arnzen and Barger also did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
“I didn’t have a very high opinion of my elected officials before this, but it really just obliterated any sense in my mind that government — not even talking about the federal administration — but that even local and state government in Los Angeles, California, is here to help the public in an emergency,” Frankel told HuffPost. “That just went out the window for me, because they utterly, epically failed, and it was completely within their control to have not handled it that way.”
Months later, Frankel, who concentrates primarily on hazardous waste issues as an environmental justice attorney, continues to be embroiled in the fallout of the fires both in his personal life and through his work.
“It’s really painful and really challenging, both in the sense of, you know, it’s basically impossible for me to avoid coming in contact with or thinking about [the impact of the fires], whether it’s through my work or through how it’s impacting me personally,” he said.
The night that the fire broke out, Frankel and his husband, Erich Martinez, and their two dogs, Frida and Phoebe, had already checked into a hotel in Hollywood because of the dangerous winds. They’d brought two nights’ worth of items with them, thinking they’d soon return to the back house they’d rented for a couple of years.
“I couldn’t have fathomed the scale of what was about to happen,” Frankel said. “We lost all of our belongings and a lot of sentimental belongings. It was very upsetting and traumatic.”
The day after the fire started, unsure of how bad the damage was, Frankel and Martinez decided to go check on their home themselves. The scene was chaotic, he said, with traffic backed up at police checkpoints seemingly without any coordinated response. They spent 45 minutes “zigzagging around the horrific destruction” because Martinez had left his wallet at the house, and they feared not having his ID would complicate getting through a checkpoint.
“Because my partner is Indigenous and has himself experienced police abuse, we were really concerned about interacting with [the police],” Frankel added.
Finally, they made it to their street. What they found reminded Frankel, who is from New York, of ground zero after Sept. 11.
“Our entire block and everything surrounding it was completely razed and still smoldering,” Frankel said, adding that there was one exception. Somehow the house next door, just about eight feet from where theirs had been, was still standing.
“It just was surreal, the feeling of being in that space in that moment, and seeing, of course, our home,” Frankel said.
But, he added, “Our deepest pain and sadness in the immediate aftermath was for all the people who had lived there for generations and had such deep ties to the land and the community and everything that it represented because we were relative newcomers.”
While national news coverage of the fires has largely slowed, the residents of Altadena have been left with the difficult task of moving forward. Like many Altadena residents, Frankel and Martinez and the Betts family have set up fundraisers on GoFundMe to cover everything from day-to-day essentials — like furniture, technology and pantry items — to finding a place to live.
Betts described the “grueling” process of trying to provide an itemized list of belongings per room for insurance purposes.
“All that’s doing is really driving us crazy,” Betts said, calling for insurance companies to simply pay fire victims the highest amount possible without itemization. “I think it would be so helpful for everyone, every victim of the fire, to not have to do that because it’s really tortuous with regards to having to replay that. And the longer you owned the home, the older you are, the more agonizing and torturous it’s going to be.”
Outside of insurance issues, people recovering from natural disasters face more inescapable challenges on a day-to-day basis, Frankel said.
“Every day continues to be a struggle. There’s not really any avoiding confronting the impacts and the magnitude of the situation. You know, whether it’s seeking medical care or dealing with something as basic as getting your mail, and the many things that are required to go through the mail when you’re a victim of a natural disaster,” Frankel said.
Frankel, Martinez and their dogs are staying in an Airbnb in Los Angeles as they get back on their feet. And the two won’t be so quick to move back to Altadena, as they hope to save space for the residents who have more established ties to the community, Frankel told HuffPost.
“Many of the members of the historic Black community in Altadena and of immigrant communities in Altadena are wanting to stay and often don’t have a choice, frankly, to go elsewhere, particularly if they owned their multi-generational home, or they had access to somewhat affordable housing,” he said.
Meanwhile, Betts and his household — which includes his wife, Tawana Carter; their two teenage daughters, Addisyn and Rebekayh; his mother, Bunny Betts; and his brother, Todd Betts — are living in a rental property in the Lakeview Terrace area, about 18 miles away from Altadena. He said he’s eager to rebuild, but he hasn’t seen the progress he has expected.
One issue has been the “right of entry” form. The form, when approved, allows for the Army Corps of Engineers to clean up the often toxic debris left from the fire. But Betts said the form for his home, filed on Jan. 30, has yet to be accepted. Army Corps of Engineers data shows work has begun at more than 7,900 properties affected by the Eaton fire, but more than 13,500 are eligible for debris clearing. The process will be lengthy: Clearing debris took seven months to complete after the Maui fires and a year after Northern California’s Camp fire, according to an Urban Institute report.
Now, the Trump administration’s policies and associated economic uncertainty could further complicate the rebuilding process. Trump has said recent executive orders related to the lumber industry will increase domestic production, but tariffs threaten to raise construction costs, as local outlet Fox 11 reported. Correspondingly, lumber prices, which make up about 15% of a typical home’s construction costs, hit a 2 1/2-year high in early March, the outlet said.
Faced with the lengthy, costly and stressful rebuilding process, some homeowners will inevitably feel their best option is to sell their burned-out lots and start over elsewhere. NBC News reported in late March that at least 14 properties in Altadena have been sold so far, and at least half were purchased by developers or investors.
But many locals fear that developers will gentrify the area, lowball marginalized residents and fail to retain Altadena’s charm. Surrounded by the Arroyo Seco, the Angeles National Forest and Eaton Canyon, architects came to the community for more than a century to build their own homes, leading to a distinctive, non-cookie-cutter landscape, the Pasadena Star News reported in 2017. Now residents have propped up signs proclaiming “Altadena is not for sale” all over town and held demonstrations.
There is at least one alternative, though: selling to a nonprofit known as Greenline Housing Foundation, LAist reported. Greenline seeks to combat racial housing discrimination. It has already bought at least one property for $520,000 earlier in March, promising the home that is rebuilt there will be sold below market value to a first-time buyer.
Even as he hopes the rebuilding process is simplified, Betts noted that it’s just as necessary for officials to find long-term solutions to climate change.
“It just needs to be more done, and it needs to be long-term resolutions and solutions to avoid from happening in the future,” Betts said. He then warned: “If you keep just closing your eye and looking the other way, is only going to get worse and worse, and it’s going to destroy your home eventually.”
Betts, the son of a carpenter, said he’s willing to do whatever it takes to restore Altadena to its original beauty.
“I haven’t swung a hammer for real in a long time since, probably, I was in my 20s or something with my dad, but I’ll do whatever I can to help the community come back,” Betts said.
“I really want to see Altadena maintain its legacy, and maintain its uniqueness in its design,” Betts continued. “My fear is that there’s going to be these large corporations, these large developers that buy blocks at a time and change the landscape of Altadena to make it look like it’s in all other cities. And Altadena is totally different from any other city I’ve ever lived in or have visited, and I would hate to see that end up being Altadena’s future, because that’s most important to me, is the legacy and the character.”
