In January, Southern California wildfires destroyed more than 16,000 structures and forced 100,000 people to evacuate. In the Pacific Palisades, fires on New Year’s Day broke out in what was originally deemed the Lachman Fire and allegedly ballooned into a massive blaze on January 7. Altadena — an unincorporated and predominantly Black working-class community at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains — endured the Eaton Canyon Fire, which ignited on January 7, burning for more than three weeks before containment. For the Altadena community, the devastation was especially severe.
Both the Palisades and Eaton Canyon fires caused massive damage, but race and proximity to power shaped how first responders and local government showed up.
Kaveh Naeeni, a community organizer with For the People Los Angeles and a resident of Pasadena at the time of the Eaton Fire, was in Altadena when the blaze began. He watched as the Palisades received an outpouring of government and institutional support that never reached Altadena.
“Altadena and the Pacific Palisades are two very different places,” said Naeeni. “The agencies turned around and went the opposite direction [of Altadena]. I have family members who lost homes in the Pacific Palisades. I was really sad for them to lose their homes, but I was not worried about them getting back up on their feet. Even when it comes to a fire, and you see two communities get burned down, you still see that the system works for one that needs the help the least.”
Heavenly Hughes — the Executive Director of the Altadena-based community organization My Tribe Rise — said that neglect was clear from the start, especially on Altadena’s West Side.
“There was no action being taken for West Side Altadena,” she told Knock LA. “We’re talking about people who are supposed to be experts, watching where the winds are going and where the fire was leading, but they had no plan, and they showed it.”
The lack of action from local government left residents to fend for themselves. On January 7, as the Eaton Fire grew stronger, Hughes saw her community ignored by first responders. To her, the response showed a clear anti-Black bias.
“Even now it’s hard for me to talk about because I get emotional,” Hughes said, “People would call me and say, ‘I’ve called 911. Nobody is coming. I’ve been waiting and no one is coming.’”
Hughes’ elderly and disabled mother lived in West Altadena. Neighbors, many of them seniors, were the only people who helped her evacuate. That night, a woman on the same street died when the fire engulfed her home.
As hurricane-force winds swept Southern California and encouraged the blazes, the calamity in Altadena reached new heights. Displaced residents entered into the support systems set up by local governments and NGO (non-governmental organization) partners. As folks fled the burn areas, the Red Cross opened up an evacuation hub in the Pasadena Convention Center.
What should have been a place of refuge for displaced people soon transformed into a nightmare for the evacuees. According to both Naeeni and Hughes, the facility quickly became uninhabitable and dangerous to residents’ health. Red Cross staff at the Convention Center started turning away volunteers who showed up to donate essential supplies like clothes, hygiene items, and water. In an egregious step beyond that, Naeeni and Hughes confirmed that staff kept all donations from outside communities in the center’s basement. None of it reached the evacuees upstairs.
All the while, certain community members decided they were not going to sit idle while the situation worsened at the Center. Longtime Pasadena resident and organizer Fahren James — who told Knock LA that she worried about the way Pasadena governance would impact Black Altadena residents — snuck inside the Convention Center on several occasions to document the conditions and make connections with the folks staying there. What she witnessed startled her.
“The whole bottom floor parking garage was packed with stuff,” she said, after seeing Red Cross volunteers handing out used, company-branded blankets for the evacuees while an entire section of the building was full of new, untouched blankets that community members had dropped off. “The City of Pasadena was in charge of that stuff. There were some city workers who lost their homes, but it felt like they took all the good stuff so that they could distribute it to their own people versus giving that to everyone who was displaced. There was a hierarchy for who could get good or new stuff and people in the Convention Center got the scraps.”
Despite getting sick a week into supporting families inside the center, James returned five days later to continue checking in on her community members. On her next visit to the Convention Center following her recovery, she found that the situation had deteriorated for evacuees.
“People still had on the same clothes, still in their pajamas. Some people still didn’t have shoes,” she said. “They made that Convention Center so uncomfortable, and I feel like it was by design. They made it unbearable that people wouldn’t stay.”
James witnessed firsthand as Red Cross staff and partner organizations mistreated the displaced folks and created a hostile environment. When a young woman approached a food distributor with a request for six plates to give to her family and her grandmother, the staff member scolded her, refused to serve her, and said that all family members — including the elderly grandma in her nineties — had to be present to get the food. The humiliation added to the trauma of being displaced was a cruel insult.
With the new supplies still stored away from the evacuees, James took matters into her own hands, getting clothing sizes and supply requests from folks. She would then smuggle the items into the Center from outside.
“I stopped signing in as a visitor. I wound up getting a wristband. That was how they identified people who were living there,” James said, “Once I got that, it was easy for me to flow in and out and sneak clothes and shoes in. I would put everything in a backpack or IKEA bag. I would have people meet me in the food area and sneak them the things they needed.”
As the fire continued to rage outside in the San Gabriel hills, the reality at Pasadena Convention Center took another turn for the worse when the city announced that the center would need to be vacated in order to make way for a scheduled filming of America’s Got Talent in February.
“I think the City didn’t want to lose out on that money,” James said, after confirming that the filming was the reason the ConventionCenter would be emptied of evacuees. “There was no conversation around a substitute location when this one closed.”
James and Hughes both alleged that Mayor Victor Gordo told them the people in the Convention Center were “Altadena people”, and that Pasadena was not responsible for overseeing their next steps in housing or relocation of disaster recovery.
Leading up to a City Council meeting on February 3 — in which many other community members took to public comment to express their disdain for the conditions within the Convention Center — James and Hughes blew the whistle about the conditions and behaviors that evacuees were enduring at the center, demanding Pasadena be accountable to the people that truly had nowhere else to go. As a result, the Convention Center’s date to vacate all the displaced residents was pushed back. The facility was kept open, even though the agreement had been to only make the space available for 30 days.
“What was the plan after 30 days?” James asked. “We exposed the fact that there was no plan.”
The Convention Center continued to unravel as Red Cross staff put fire survivors in one or two week hotel stays, then refused re-entry for people who tried to come back to the center when their temporary lodging arrangements expired. James witnessed Red Cross staff telling displaced residents that their hotel stays would be extended upon conclusion, but when those folks returned and tried to speak with the same Red Cross staff, they were turned away.
“People were leaving for a week, then coming back to the Convention Center because there was no extension, but they weren’t allowed to enter again,” James told Knock LA. “Red Cross would say to these returning people, ‘We closed your file.’ They iced these people out.”
The site did eventually shut down as a Red Cross hub on February 8, and evacuees were either bussed to a new location in Duarte or forced to find another place to stay according to Hughes and James.
Many folks had nowhere to go and wound up sleeping in their cars.
Even months after the fire was extinguished, many Altadena and Pasadena residents are still healing from the wounds inflicted not just from the flames, but also the lack of affordable or no-cost housing available to them. The supportive housing ecosystem was already strained when folks displaced by the Eaton Fire tried to access the limited resources available at the Los Angeles City and County level.
As of the end of 2024, 494,446 low-income renter households in the county did not have access to affordable housing. A study by the California Housing Partnership in 2023 showed that the County had 39,752 beds available for interim and permanent housing support, compared to the 75,312 unhoused people in LA County. Organizations like the Los Angeles Tenants Union have been calling for an eviction moratorium from the LA County Board of Supervisors since the onset of the fires, citing that no one should lose their homes in moments where a roof over your head determines whether you live or die. In Los Angeles, an average of six unhoused people die on the streets every day.
In a report for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, journalist Shane Phillips stated that LA County is in a poor position to secure new housing for residents displaced by the Eaton Canyon Fire.
“Rent and price growth, overcrowding, and related challenges will be exacerbated because LA area jurisdictions have systematically underbuilt housing for decades,” Phillips stated.
With tens of thousands of people either living on the street or in unstable housing situations, the consequences of potential future fires could be vast. Given the severe failings of institutions to adequately care for disaster survivors in the immediate response of the Eaton Fire, it is chilling to imagine what a blaze of larger magnitude could do to a vulnerable and systemically under-resourced community like Altadena.
Altadena did not wait for help to come in order to take care of their own.
While it is a common reflex to assume that governments and large disaster relief agencies will lead the way and compassionately protect vulnerable people from climate disasters, the Palisades and Eaton Fires showed Altadena and many Angelenos that faith in such entities is misplaced. Even in the face of the new crisis of discriminatory violence and kidnappings of immigrants in the months since the fire’s extinguishing, rather than despair, Los Angeles showed it is capable of something far greater — something that could transform the way Southern California communities build resilience and respond to crises. Something that has the potential to shift collective power and build a city whose residents make up powerful networks of care and support, beyond institutions.
As with other catastrophic natural disasters that exposed racial and social discrimination across recovery efforts, mutual aid proved again to be the answer as the gaps in care transformed into chasms after the Eaton Fire. Healing has been possible because of the commitment and heart of organizers and neighboring Angelenos who refused to turn their backs on those living in the burn scar. It was not those in power that rose to support Altadena; it was the people.
