Eaton Fire aftermath: Black residents of Altadena, California search the past for a path forward to recovery and rebuilding

ALTADENA, Calif. (KABC) — Time stopped on Jan. 7, 2025, in the town of Altadena, California.

That evening, hurricane-force winds propelled the Eaton Fire through the 42,000-person town in Los Angeles County, leaving little but rubble in its wake. A thick gray smoke lingered in the air for days. And for many residents, it never really left.

When you drive through Altadena now, you’ll see holiday string lights still wrapped around the town’s famous cedars on Christmas Tree Lane. Where houses once stood, you’ll find lone chimneys and an occasional, half-melted lawn sign declaring support for candidates from last year’s presidential election.

Thursday, April 17 marked 100 days since the Eaton Fire, the second-most destructive wildfire in California history. Nearly 6,000 homes were destroyed in Altadena, along with 80-plus commercial buildings and dozens of schools. The death toll stands at 18 people, and at least five people are still missing.

Part I is available in the video player above. You can watch Part II on ABC7 Eyewitness News at 5 p.m. or streaming here on Thursday and Part III on Friday.

The Altadena that residents once knew is unrecognizable. Locals rely on street signs to orient themselves on the roads they’ve driven for decades. And, if they can, they avoid passing through the worst of the damage to save themselves the grief.

But they’ll tell you that this is still their home and they’re not going anywhere.

That statement carries special meaning for Black Altadenans. African Americans have found refuge and community here for more than a century, flourishing despite housing discrimination laws and other forms of racism. At its peak in 1980, the town’s Black population reached 43%, compared to 17% in the city of Los Angeles.

A look at the Black population in Altadena through the decades
Tap the blue circle to cycle through the graphics

In recent decades, Altadena’s Black residents have struggled to keep the homes their families have owned for generations due to soaring housing costs and gentrification. The fire has threatened to accelerate the community’s decline.

It’s left to the residents, thousands of whom are still displaced, to decide what the future of Altadena looks like.

Ten days after the blaze ignited, clergy leaders held a rally at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pasadena, just south of the burn scar, to pronounce their support for rebuilding, however arduous the process might be.

Speakers warned that “vultures are circling” and vowed not to sell their properties off to the highest bidder – a decision that could, lot by lot, alter the fabric of the Altadena they know and love. The audience, overflowing from the pews into the aisles, cheered raucously.

“This isn’t just scripture,” Pastor Kerwin Manning declared from the lectern. “This is a promise. We are standing on the promise that He will exchange beauty for ashes.”

“And out of these ashes, beauty will rise.”

Part I: The dividing line

Each cinderblock and wooden beam protruding from the debris has a story.

As Veronica Jones drove through Altadena’s west side, she pointed out the Black-owned pharmacy where Mr. Walker, the owner, used to fetch medicine in the middle of the night for her son.

Nearby was The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, a neighborhood staple since its purchase by a devoted mother of 12 in 1972, where the lunch line routinely stretched through the front doors. It was the oldest Black-owned business in Altadena. That was, of course, before it burned.

Jones also made sure to mention the corner store nearby, where Black residents could procure the odds and ends they needed for daily living.

“Blacks had some sort of a support system here so that they didn’t necessarily have to depend on others to get what they needed,” said Jones, president of the Altadena Historical Society. “The business owners lived in the community, so they knew the community.”

We joined Jones on the same driving tour she gave to Senate Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the weeks following the Eaton Fire. As we traveled through West Altadena, Jones stepped out of the car to show us a plaque honoring Lt. Oliver Goodall, a Black Tuskegee Airman from World War II.

“As African Americans, it’s important for us to know that we had a stake in building Altadena,” she said. “We didn’t just show up here and all of a sudden we’re here, but there were people before us that were here that helped pave the way.”

One early Black figure in Altadena, a formerly enslaved man named Robert Owens, literally helped clear the path for others in the 1950s. He carried lumber into town from the San Gabriel Mountains, sold it to the U.S. military and became one of the richest men in Los Angeles. The trail’s onlookers nicknamed him “El Prieto,” Spanish for “the dark one.”

Jones pointed through the car window in the direction of El Prieto Trail. It’s temporarily closed due to fire damage.

African American life here dates to the Great Migration in the late 1800s and is often told through the tales of people like Owens and Goodall – adventurers, airmen, artists, activists and entrepreneurs.

But Altadena’s Black history isn’t confined to the archives and plaques in town. It’s alive in the everyday experiences of Jones, her family members, her neighbors and her community. And what Jones will tell you is that life on the West side, which she calls home, is not the same as it is on the East side of town.

“You’ll notice right away the difference,” Jones said as we crossed into East Altadena.

On the East side, the homes are bigger, the population is less diverse by many measures and the towering deodar trees provide much-needed summer shade. West of Lake Avenue, the town’s unofficial dividing line, the public park is 30 years overdue for redevelopment, some sidewalks have yet to be paved and unsightly power lines hang low, blocking the mountain views from inside the neighborhood’s aging homes.

These community divisions began during the Great Depression, when the federal government and lending companies reevaluated the risks of home loans in order to prevent foreclosures.

Black families were already moving into West Altadena. Officials warned of a “threat of subversive racial infiltration” if something wasn’t done to halt more migration. They gave the West side “declining” and “hazardous” grades and marked the region in yellow and red on public maps. In practice, the redlining process blocked many Black households across the country from obtaining and sustaining mortgages.

In 1941, the Altadena Property Owners’ League started charging $5 per homeowner for racial covenants that would prevent a lot’s sale to non-white households. Within one year, 80% of the town’s residential properties had deed restrictions.

Race-based housing discrimination was outlawed in the U.S. in the 1960s. In the coming decade, a new generation of African Americans flocked to West Altadena, seeking community with the Black residents who came before them. That’s when Jones, then a 5th-grader, settled in the area with her family.

“What happens is you build up this community on the West side of Lake that are people of color, and the outcome of that is it’s still that way today,” Jones said.

In the 1970s, Jones was bused from the Eliot School in West Altadena to Pasadena Junior High after a court ordered integration in the Pasadena Unified School District. Many white families responded by taking their children out of public schools and moving away from the urban corridors. The West side became even more densely packed with people of color as a result.

Jones drove us past the Eliot School. It burned in the fire, too.

“There’s so much more to tell you,” she assured us as she took us back to our starting point. “When I go home, I’ll think of it all. But when I’m out, it’s just like my mind, my brain kind of gets full of smoke again, and it just doesn’t function the same way.”

The Altadena Historical Society has 17 volunteers. More than half lost their homes in the Eaton Fire. Jones wasn’t one of them.

Though she’s technically retired, Jones is busier than she’s ever been. She volunteers on rebuilding committees, holds fundraisers for the historical society and gathers oral histories from fire survivors. Most people we spoke to knew who she was, even if they hadn’t worked with her directly before.

Jones has a vision for Altadena’s future – one that so many residents on the West side share.

“I hope that we are able to really become one Altadena,” Jones told us. “Not the West Altadena and the East Altadena, but one Altadena.”

Part II: Geronimo

At first, the fire felt familiar.

Donny Kincey had witnessed several wildfires pass through the mountains north of his childhood home before. He used to stare up at the San Gabriels with his father, nicknaming the foothills that approached their East Altadena house. They called the closest ridge Geronimo.

Kincey moved across town when he returned from college, but he liked to look after his parents’ home while they traveled. So as the winds billowed and the first flames materialized on Jan. 7, he drove over and followed the precautions his dad once taught him: hose down the trees, yard and roof, and wait for the fire to subside.

But the blaze barreled forward, chewing up all the vegetation in sight. By 10 p.m., the smoke in the air was thick, and Kincey could smell his hair burning.

The fire line crested over the last hilltop.

Geronimo.

“I was like, ‘Get everything and go,'” Kincey recalled.

The beloved 2nd-grade teacher darted through the hallways, ripping his father’s priceless paintings from the walls and throwing them in his truck. He frantically drove back to his current address on the West side.

Four generations of Kincey’s family have made memories in this West Altadena house. As a child, Kincey came over to eat fruit from his great aunt’s orchard and watch horses and wild peacocks stroll past.

Tonight, the whole street was an inferno.

The colors in the sky were other-worldly. Embers the size of boulders flew overhead. The hillsides in the distance looked like molten lava, and despite the power shutoff, houses glowed bright as they were engulfed in flames.

Kincey didn’t want to desert another place he loved. He stood outside, hosing down the grass for hours, until the sun rose and water ran dry.

The house to his left ignited and then the one to his right. A car exploded next door. He considered trying to rescue his niece’s Christmas gifts, but he feared the gas meters in his path might blow up.

Then, a shingle from a neighboring house smashed into his head, knocking him back into reality. He knew it was over. He fell to his knees and prayed.

In that moment, all Kincey had left was anger.

“Nobody came to help,” he said while standing on the remnants of his home. “The things that you think you pay taxes for, the things that you vote for, you know, it’s just like no help at all.”

“I felt abandoned.”

Kincey’s experience that night at two Altadena properties – a mile-and-a-half apart on either side of Lake Avenue – confirms the hours-long delay in evacuation orders for West side residents.

The fire started just east of town in Eaton Canyon at 6:18 p.m. Kincey and others on the East side received emergency phone alerts around 6:48 p.m. Almost nine hours later, at roughly 3:25 a.m., the alerts arrived for people located on the West side, Kincey included.

L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, whose district covers Altadena, commissioned an independent investigation into the emergency alert system when the discrepancies came to light. The inquiry is ongoing.

“The rapid speed at which this fire was going was unprecedented,” Barger cautioned us. “Unprecedented.”

By all accounts of first responders that evening, she’s right. The raging winds carried embers miles away in unpredictable patterns. The wildfire quickly morphed into an urban conflagration, with hundreds – if not thousands – of properties burning simultaneously.

Even so, people on the West side can’t help but feel neglected. An analysis of Cal Fire damage inspection data shows more than 4,600 homes were destroyed West of Lake Avenue, compared to 1,300 on the Eastern half of town. The West side is also where all but one of the 18 fire deaths occurred. (The last death was just across the border.)

A study released by University of California, Los Angeles found that Black households in Altadena were 1.3 times more likely to experience major damage to their homes than others were. A higher density of homes in African American neighborhoods is one of the explanations.

Study co-author Paul Ong, UCLA’s director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, says one factor is the path of fire.

“The path went down the western part of Altadena,” he said, “That’s the area where African-Americans have been concentrated. It may have to do with complex weather patterns.”

There are nearly 10,000 houses in the burn zone. Roughly 3,000 are still standing in their entirety, but smoke damage leaves many of them uninhabitable.

The magnitude of the destruction is hard to comprehend. Altadena resident Randy Clement and his friend Noel McCarthy printed a billboard-sized map from the county’s website showing the status of each property in the burn zone. A red icon signified a total loss.

We stood in the parking lot of Clement’s store, West Altadena Wine + Spirits, staring at it all.

“I was like, damn, that’s a whole lot of red,” he remarked.

“I see a lot of really scared people on the night of Jan. 7. I see a lot of extremely uncertain-about-the-future people now, looking at it,” he said. “I see a lot of pain and really, really irreversible damage to the past.”

Kincey’s family lost four homes in the fire – not an uncommon experience for a town where mothers live blocks from their daughters, sisters and grandsons. The first of Kincey’s family to settle in Altadena were his great aunt and maternal grandmother, survivors of the Tulsa race massacre and fires.

“Altadena is not just a place where I live, but I feel like it’s something that I’ve inherited,” Kincey said. “The history of my family is in this town and what they’ve sacrificed just in order for me to exist, and what my parents have sacrificed just to keep us here.”

The fire took Kincey’s homes, the schools he attended and nearly all his belongings. He still wears the beaded bracelet a student gifted him for Christmas. It’s one of the few personal items he has left. Kincey finds strength from the children, who he calls his “little lifesavers.”

His priority that night was to save what he knew was irreplaceable: his father’s artwork.

Among the treasures Kincey rescued is his dad’s painting of the Black Panthers and another of praying hands. His father’s talents inspired him to take up art himself, producing his works under the brand Ostracized Genius.

Kincey held the cherished canvases.

“Feeling helpless has been hard for me, but saving this has been one of the best things that I’ve ever done,” he said.

It’s been three months since the 50-hour nightmare that changed Kincey’s life forever.

We visited his house two days before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared the rubble. As we walked over broken glass and melted trash cans, Donny smiled. He loved being here, even now.

“It feels good. It always felt good coming home.”

“I can’t wait to get back.”

Part III: Scatter Good

Once the town stopped smouldering, Joe Ford returned home with a shovel, searching the debris for keepsakes. Underneath the collapsed ceiling, he found his prized possession: the sword his great-great-grandfather wielded in the Civil War after escaping slavery.

“That’s about as far back as we can trace our family,” Ford said. “For us, this was the genesis for our spirit of service and serving.”

“It was already damaged,” he said as he clasped the rusted weapon. “Now it’s got more stories.”

Nearby, Ford found a still-intact wooden sign that he and his wife Lerna had displayed in their backyard. It read: “Don’t tell God how big your storm is. Tell your storm how big your God is.”

The night of the fire, the couple drove over to Sycamores, the group home where Ford works, to evacuate the children. Their own house was gone by the time they returned to it.

Neither of the Fords missed work. Within two days of the destruction, Lerna was handing out goods at New Revelation Church to other affected families.

“That kind of helps you when you’re going through something,” Joe Ford said. “You can still help other people.”

The town is brimming with stories of African Americans who’ve made the spirit of charity their life’s purpose. In the 1940s, Mae Reese Johnson founded the Scattergood Club in nearby Pasadena to educate and nurture African American children. Johnson’s ashes lie in Altadena’s Mountain View Mortuary & Cemetery.

In the same cemetery rests abolitionist Ellen Garrison Clark, the daughter of a formerly enslaved man, and celebrated Black speculative fiction author Octavia Butler. To the staff’s relief, the Eaton Fire stopped at the mortuary’s hedges. Groundskeepers are still sweeping up branches felled in the high winds.

Recovery feels daunting on a good day. In addition to rent, the Fords still pay a mortgage on their house, or what’s left of it. Their insurance company doesn’t cover that cost, and their adjuster quibbles with them about car mileage and dinners out at restaurants.

Though they hesitate to accept help of any kind, the Fords relented. Greenline Housing Foundation, a Pasadena nonprofit Joe Ford learned about at church, is helping pay for the couple’s living expenses.

Jasmin Shupper founded Greenline in 2020 with a mission to help Black and brown families purchase their first home and close the area’s racial wealth gap. She and her family are still displaced from their own home due to smoke damage.

“People can’t even think about whether or not they want to rebuild if they’re moving from place to place to place,” Shupper said. “We just awarded a grant to someone who, in the past 90 days, has moved 15 times.”

Greenline plans to cover up to $250,000 in rebuilding costs per needy family. This would be critical help for couples like the Fords, who are facing a large difference between what insurance will pay and what home construction will cost.

African American homeowners are more likely to have mortgages, aging houses and insurance gaps than their white counterparts. In Altadena, 57% of Black homeowners are 65 or older, as opposed to 38% of the overall population, according to the UCLA study. All these factors make it harder – financially, emotionally and physically – to rebuild.

“People are really having to make painstaking decisions about homes that have been in the family, for some people, for generations,” Shupper said.

Signs speckled around town offer solidarity for those wavering, proclaiming “Black homes matter” and “Altadena is not for sale.”

The truth, however, is that properties have already sold.

By Shupper’s last count, 61 lots have already transferred ownership, and another 27 are on the market. The running list Shupper showed us included several out-of-country investors, as well as developers outside of the Los Angeles region.

What really troubled her about the list was what she couldn’t see on it.

“We’re not sure to what degree they have sought community in terms of how they plan to rebuild,” Shupper said.

Shupper is working on an alternative. She brought us to a plot of land, still covered in rubble, that is now owned by Greenline. Her land banking initiative offers homeowners the option to sell to a local nonprofit with the community’s interests in mind.

Once the lot is cleared, Shupper hopes to sell it below a market-rate price to someone from the area.

“Really it feels like a beacon of hope,” Shupper said, “but it also feels like a race against the clock.”

Greenline is one of dozens of organizations helping with disaster recovery. My Tribe Rise is Altadena’s Black-led mutual aid group. Day One offers free legal counseling and contracting help for affected families. Civic Soul hosts emotional and economic support sessions.

The Altadena Recovery and Rebuild Commission hopes to help residents navigate the many resources available. The committee was formed by Supervisor Barger, a small-government conservative whose latest effort is expediting the permit process for home rebuilding. The county has only issued one rebuild permit so far.

Ten people make up the “community coalition” arm of Barger’s new commission. In early April, they sat around a table in the Altadena Community Center, hashing out their mission and goals. There were representatives from the town council, the historical society, the Chamber of Commerce and the NAACP Pasadena Branch.

“One of the things I’m hearing is we need to speak in one voice,” Barger told them.

“I’m not saying that you alone have an answer, but your organizations represent the diversity of the community,” she said. “And I want to channel those recommendations so that our recovery will actually reflect the community.”

The conversation was expansive. To start, workers had found human remains while clearing debris the day prior, and the official count of fire victims rose again. Committee members proposed deploying Sheriff’s deputies to the last known addresses of the people who are still missing.

There are the town’s trees (arborists will have to ensure their integrity somehow), the sewage (it may be time to take the last 70 homes off septic), the water (should the area’s three water districts consolidate), the mail deliveries (the postal service has not reopened its Altadena branch) and the air quality (residents are still concerned about toxins released from burning homes).

It’s city planning, from the ground up, all at once.

Attendees shared concerns that African American residents would be priced out of their homes in the rebuild process. Land banking and the production of cheap, modular homes were mentioned as possible countermeasures.

Whether anything good could come after so much was lost is an open question. The committee members had their moments of optimism. Maybe they could help improve the town’s walkability or encourage more business near the freeway. Maybe an “Altadena 2.0” is coming.

Hoping out loud gave them renewed energy.

Outside, the town hummed with life. Construction crews were undergrounding power lines, operating cranes and steering trucks full of concrete up and down the streets. The Grocery Outlet had reopened, and the burger joint was bustling.

“My mom taught us, don’t let nothing or nobody steal your joy,” Joe Ford said. “So we have our challenging moments, but we lean on each other and we lean on God, and that’s how we stay positive.”

Joe and Lerna showed us their empty lot after the Army Corps cleaned it up. Their neighbor drove by and waved.

“This is our new open-air concept,” Ford told him with a smile and laugh.

Lerna visits here often, carrying in water for the few succulents out front.

“We love this land,” Joe Ford said. “Yep, it’s ours. It is our piece of dirt.”

Next for the property comes soil testing, and then, hopefully, reconstruction.

“We don’t have 40 years to get back everything that we’ve built,” Ford said. “It doesn’t have to have as many rooms, but if somebody needs something and needs a place to stay, I want to be able to help other people.”

“And I want my kids and my grandkids to be able to do that, to continue that legacy.”