Our recent brush with the Eaton fire has me, I’ll be honest, a little rattled. On so many levels and for so many reasons the fires in Southern California are truly unprecedented and there are so so many who have lost so much that it is mind boggling. Our home is safe, and we are unharmed, but the experience has been entirely unsettling. We know people who have lost their homes and everything in them. Friends who’s childhood homes were laid waste. We know people who’s homes were spared while every neighbor on their street’s were brought down by the inferno. Several friends’ synagogue burned only to reveal an old and forgotten mosaic, you can read an article about it here. Restaurants we enjoyed, Ryan’s Favorite hardware shop, fun and eclectic local boutiques, all gone. There is a lot to grieve, and a lot to be grateful for. As I am writing this, the area of Altadena is still closed off by the National Guard, yet another surreal experience to drive past streets barricaded and guarded.
I hope you will indulge me as I share the timeline for that day and the day or two following, and take a moment to think about your own emergency preparedness. In part this is to provide the perspective of someone who was completely unprepared for something like this, and on the other part to allow me process a bit of what we experienced here. I promise not to dramatize it. But i do hope you will set aside some time with your household and with your loved ones to check in and have a plan. Everywhere has some risk of impending “doom” so please don’t discount this if you live outside of California fire regions.
A Brief timeline…
Tuesday January 7th:
4:00am – I am woken up by loud banging sounds outside, assuming this is just a box or something being blown around I ignore it and try to go back to sleep. The wind is loud. A few moments later i hear a loud bang and open my curtains to see that one of our sun shade tents has blown over. This is the first moment I’m thinking about the wind advisory, which I had ignored, that briefly popped up on my phone the day prior. We rush outside to take down the tent and discover that another of our tents has made its way into the neighbors yard…strong winds then. We button things up and head back inside to try and get a little sleep before the day begins.
Mid Day – I put together a little learning lesson with straws and cottons balls for Wesley to talk about wind and distract us for the increasingly loud gusts we hear outside. We stay inside and haven’t yet turned on the news.
4:30pm (ish) – I turn on the news to check in about the traffic conditions for my husbands commute home and then see the footage of the Palisades fire. I decide to download the Citizens app, and make sure I’m signed up for the Pasadena emergency alert system. At this point there are no signs of any fires in our area. I decide to call my aunt and ask what I should be packing up incase something were to happen, but I don’t start on this task. (she had some really good recommendations though)
5:30pm – I check my citizens app and notice that there are several reports of power lines down in the neighborhoods north of me (these did not start the Eaton fire) and call My husband to see when he will be home. Not wanting to worry him I calmly mention that there are some lines down and the winds are getting stronger, he says he will be home at 7:30, he has not checked the news. The winds are quite loud at this point, which is putting my nerves (and my almost 3 year olds’ nerves) on edge a bit.
6:00 pm – I check my App again and I see that there is a brush fire reported in Eaton canyon, but it says it’s just a few square feet. I decide to start packing up a few things but I’m a little frazzled by the wind, and have no checklist or clear plan for what to do. I gather my passport, a few documents like our mortgage statement and insurance proof, then proceeded to pack the weirdest overnight bag consisting of 1 pair of pjs, toothbrush, toothpaste, 2 shirts, no underwear, 2 pairs of socks, no shoes but the ones i’m wearing, 6 cans of bubbly water, and 4 power bars, our travel crib, plus 5 shirts for Wesley,1 pair of pants, and all of his shoes but no socks. Then I thought I should pack my husband as well and effectively produced an equally spotty assortment for him.
6:26 pm – The Evacuation Warning comes through on my phone we are in just the yellow warning zone but there is a block of red 3 blocks away. The news has announced the Eaton fire but there are no news crews there yet so we have very little information about what is happening except for a few home videos from the Citizen app. This is what I was seeing out my back window at 6:44pm (left) and 6:46pm (right) based on the time stamps on my phone:
7:30 pm – my husband is home and is trying to calmly help us pack up additional things we might need, while I’m poorly masking my anxiety and telling him that “we need to go now!!!”. Not my finest moment, but in all fairness I’d just watched the fire go from nothing to orange skies concerningly quickly, and at this point the winds were reaching 100 mph.
8:02pm – We are loaded into the car to leave and decide to drive one block towards the fire to see if we can discern how close it is getting, there are no firefighting or news aircraft in the air to give a sense of where it was or which way it was moving. We took the following photo and immediately turned and headed through the neighborhoods towards La Canada to stay with family. (My husband tried to stay off the main roads to help avoid congestion, but it meant we were dodging and weaving as branches came down) Our wonderful family receives us and helps us settle in for the night.
Some time in the early hours of the morning the evacuation Order and Warning are extended and we get an alert on our phone but can’t open the link as we have no internet or cell service where we are.
We did not sleep at all that night. The winds were so loud it was as if a freight train was just outside the window. Family we were staying with had no power so we didn’t have any updates all night about what was happening, we were so very grateful for the safe haven though. It was odd to lay there listening to the winds thinking to myself about all the things I had left behind and wondering if our house would be spared, if looters would make off with any of our things, or if our neighbor who is bed bound was able to get out. It turns out, luckily, the fire never got as far south as our house, but just 3 blocks away they were under mandatory evacuation orders, and just half of a mile away there were homes burning. This website does a really good job of showing the actual homes and structures that were impacted.
For a more complete timeline of the fires (Eaton and Palisades) you can read this New York Times article. The first areal photo we saw of Altadena the next day was this satellite image:
In the following day and a half the air was thick with smoke at hazardous levels, and we received notices that our water was undrinkable ( like don’t even try to boil it “nothing will make it safe to drink”- Pasadena Water).
We decided as a family that I would take our son up to my moms until the water was deemed safe to drink and that my husband would “hold down the fort” as it were, which was fine because he could spend extra time at work, refill water bottles there, and keep our one tiny air filter next to his face while he slept. Yet another day full of decisions I wasn’t really ready to make, what to take, how long might we be gone, what if the fires flare up again? I felt overwhelmed, in truth I still do a bit.
(below Left: Screenshot from my phone of the air quality just before we left, and Right: a photo of the smoke plume hanging over the house.)
What is interesting to me is reflecting on how I reacted through all this. The panic and fog that set in without a plan or knowing how much time we had and what we should bring, or where we should go. I grabbed those 6 cans of bubbly water but forgot my moms wedding ring, and it didn’t even occur to me to bring scrap books, paintings, or any of the vintage clothing I have collected. I was so unprepared it is almost laughable now. And it all happened so fast From the time it occurred to me to actually be worried to the time we left was maybe 2.5 to 3 hours.
Proper Preparation:
The next day my neighbor sent me a list that I want to share with you. It is interesting how it is broken up by time to evacuate. Even then I’m not sure I would have had everything on the list together in the 15min category, because I was just so unprepared. I can blame a lot of things, the move, having a toddler, but ultimately I just didn’t think it would actually happen so I didn’t ever prioritize it. The thing is, our evacuation warning (not the full order) didn’t come with any time line, it just said be ready… we chose to leave early….I panicked.
In addition to going through this list, we are making all of our emergency plans and getting our emergency kit in order and ready to go, things like batteries, flashlights, canned food, Meeting points, etc. All the things we probably should have done when we decided to move into a fire zone. This website has some really good tips on what to prepare for your kit. Depending on where you are you may want to take into consideration additional weather factors as well! (thinking back to our 8 day power loss in Michigan in 2018 in the middle of February!)
Here are some Tips:
- Print your prioritized “Bug Out” list
- All the items you would want to take in priority order! Tape it to the inside of a cabinet, or somewhere you will know to find it quickly
- Decide in advance what to take based on time available (15 min, 30 min, 1 hour). Include sentimental items, valuables, and things you’ll need immediately.
- Have a Family Communication Plan & escape Routes
- Establish a meeting point if you’re separated and designate an out-of-area contact to relay updates. Make sure everyone knows the plan!
- Keep a Digital Backup
- Save important documents and photos digitally (on a cloud or USB drive) so you can access them even if physical copies are lost. There are lots of secure places to store more sensitive information. I felt much less panicked about grabbing photo albums because almost all of my photos are online. I did grab both of my external hard drives when we left though, as that’s where I store older photos.
- Secure Your Home
- Before leaving, if time allows shut off utilities like gas and electricity. Close windows, doors, and vents to slow fire or storm damage.
- Know Your Neighbors
- So many of our neighbors texted us to check in as things were starting to get bad, it was so helpful to know how others were reading the situation, and to be able to communicate, especially when we didn’t have very much information. My husband set up a neighborhood WhatsApp group and everyone was sharing helpful info as they found it.
- Stay Informed
How you can help:
This is just the beginning for Thousands and thousands of people as they grieve their loses, make their insurance claims, and try to decide if they will rebuild or move on. The long term impacts of this are staggering. If you are moved to donate or contribute to groups that are trying to help people displaced and impacted by the fires these are some of the groups I would like to recommend:
- All Hands All Hearts: They have an amazing rating on Charity Watch and have one of the lowest overhead costs, which means significantly more of your money goes to the cause than to overhead. Donations to AHAH will help all of the LA communities affected by the fires and they have committed to provide support for at least 1 full year.
- The Rhythm relief fund. If you know me you know that in addition to my many creative endeavors, i am also a swing dancer. I am deeply connected with my community of dancers here in Southern California and all over the world, several good friends have lost their homes from these fires. The Rhythm Relief Fund was started by dancers in our community to help our dance family in need. Some of my friends in this community are also dance historians and I believe have sadly lost many historically Significant photos, music, and video footage of our dance when their home burned.
- Project Camp: Is an organization that creates pop up camps for children displaced from natural disasters who are out of school. “The days immediately following an evacuation or a disaster are highly uncertain…We help parents find normalcy for their family by providing day camps for their kids that are fun, immersive, and safe. While kids have a blast at camp, parents have the time and space to get back on their feet.”
- Altadena Girls: Helps Teen Girls displaced by the fires by providing clothes specifically for Teens.
Thank you for reading this, and I truly hope that you are already more prepared for an emergency than I was. I also genuinely hope that you will never have to test your preparations! I, for one, will sleep better now that we have a good plan and are a bit more organized, even though there is still more we can do. Be safe and take care out there!
I too was in a prepare to go designation. I having lived 87 years in So Cal and seen many fires mostly in our foothills and scrub lands. I NEVER had a thought it would come so close, into cities. I NEVER considered preparing. Had never thought of a “go bag” . No plan. When my Independent Living Community said, “If you have a place to go, please go there right now.” On the phone with my daughter up north, she advised what to take, and my daughter-in in law was on her way to pick me up. What did I take? My dog and her food, underwear, a nightie, a tooth brush, my CPap and no papers of any kind. I did think to take all the cash at hand and a credit card in my purse. It was unthinkable that I wouldn’t be back at home tomorrow, “back to normal”. So hard to think in the crisis moment.
Still hard to take in how devastating it was, how much loss. Altadena, the community so nearly gone. Families who lost homes, jobs, cars— everything.
Your message is timeless, so important and helpful! Thank you