Altadena is a shabby, proudly unincorporated little town in a pretty part of LA. We moved here in 2015 because my wife sends things to other planets. Yes, Leah, some foxes really are aerospace engineers.
Last October we were on the Cape watching the LARGEST SPACECRAFT EVER launch for Jupiter on a Falcon Heavy. On it, four instruments my wife oversaw. It was a glorious culmination of a five-year slog.
Last Tuesday, warm in a Colorado condo with our two dogs enjoying apres ski, we received word of a serious wind event and a small fire in Eaton Canyon. Concerning, but not unusual for Altadena—we’ve made it through others. [EATON, not “Easton,” Matt “sugar walls” Welch].
That afternoon, a friend collected a few essentials from our house, evacuated his own home later that evening amid a rain of cinders, and we sat there as it snowed trying to piece together info from Facebook pages and feckless local news reporters.
24 hours later, we received a single photo from one of our neighbors [below], taken by theior daughter, a friend.
I hated that fucking chimney and had been scheming to remove it in a future, imagined remodel.
We drove back from Colorado and arrived yesterday. Now we’re safe in a dreary corporate suite in Monrovia where we’ve started negotiating endless man-made road blocks designed over decades to prevent anyone from recovering from this (largely) man-made natural disaster.
I went to our town last night to see what I could. It’s encircled by National Guard and LA’s finest stationed at all inbound streets, taped off on at least two sides like a crime scene investigation. Big, ugly military transports are stationed on most of the street entrances. I really don’t think my Land Cruiser would be any match for some of the 50 caliber machine guns I saw.
But because I know where I’m going, I (genuinely) accidentally transgressed the cordon sanitaire. Inside, there is no power and the streets are lined with ash-covered cars. I probably could have gone wherever I’d wanted merely by driving and acting confidently. The smatterings of law enforcement, national guard, and utility workers within seemed like nice folks. I spoke to several as I tried to find my way back out. One deputy seemed unsure about which street she was on and gestured vaguely toward Long Beach. I was reminded of cub scouts, standing around, den-motherless, none of them sure when the pinewood derby would start.
The air is rancid. It’s not great in Monrovia, but in Altadena and far south, it is unfit for human consumption, probably known to the State of California to cause cancer. I’m sure someone is printing the warning labels right now.
California could and should be paradise. I grew up here (Nor Cal) in the 70s and 80s and remember the endless, self-righteous battles by adults to stop—the dam, the hydroelectric facility, the reservoir, the nuclear plant, the bridge, the subdivision, the road, the street, the highway, the bypass, the development, the shopping center, the sports facility. As a kid, I loved visiting my grandparents in Paradise, which was reduced to cinders in 2018.
Yes, we plan to rebuild. But there are rules. In almost the same time my wife and thousands of her colleagues around the world, designed, built, assembled, tested, and launched an enormous ice-mapping, solar-powered space robot, the County of LA has been unable to approve our plans to build a simple detached garage on our land in our town.