The parts of Altadena that did not burn were saved by residents with their own hands: ‘I’ve worked all my life for this, and to lose it all in one night? I’m going to fight’

They are ordinary men. Blacksmiths, fathers, husbands, retirees, musicians. Regular guys who were at home when the wind started to blow and the embers began to fly like burning bullets through the streets of their neighborhoods. Paul Mendez, Shane Jordan and Gregory Dane do not know each other, and their stories are different, yet similar: due to different circumstances, they decided to stay put in Altadena, one of the places most badly affected by the Los Angeles fires, and try to save their homes, but also, as far as possible, those of their neighbors. They claim that they did not put their lives in danger, but that is not the case. They took a risk and, luckily, they won. Others were not so fortunate.

The one who lives closest to where the Eaton flames came from, on the edge of the Angeles National Forest, is Paul Mendez, a native of Mexico who has been in the U.S. since the late 1970s. A first-generation immigrant, like so many others in his city — Latinos make up more than 12,000 of Altadena’s 43,000 residents, accounting for 28%; there are also 7,000 Black and African-American residents and some 3,000 Asians — he looks back on his not-so-easy life sitting in the backyard of his one-story house. He bought it in the mid-1990s and has been refurbishing it using his manual skills as a master blacksmith: he has made a swimming pool, a pergola, furniture and is now preparing a small house for one of his two daughters and his son-in-law. After selling his workshop at a loss a few years ago, the work of a lifetime was there in the house, but so were the memories. “A tragedy happened in this house,” he says in a small voice. His youngest son died in 2021, at the age of 18, overnight, after suffering from severe stomach pain; the doctors never told them exactly what had happened. He simply collapsed as he walked out of the house, and Méndez has erected a statue in his honor at that exact spot. He was not going to let all that go away.

“I’ve worked all my life for this, and to lose it all in one night? I’m going to fight,” he remembers saying to himself on Tuesday January 7th, when the strong winds began and, in the afternoon, the flames. His daughters and son-in-law packed up and began to insist that he leave too. “I said: ‘Yes, let’s go,’ but then the houses started to catch fire over there, the fire was visible, and the cars were heading out. I told my wife: ‘Go with them, I’m going to stay a little longer and I’ll be with you soon. ’” Both he and his wife, Josefina, stayed up all night, “throwing water around the house, on the wood.” They never saw any firefighters.

“The sparks were coming like bullets, and I said to myself: ‘This is getting uglier,’” he recalls. He began to put fences around his house and the neighboring sheds, to control all the fires he could, his own and those nearby. He couldn’t keep up, he couldn’t see because of the smoke and the ashes. “I grabbed some of those little shot glasses and more or less put them in my eyes,” he recalls now, laughing. At seven in the morning, when the flames had calmed down somewhat, they both went to his in-laws’ house: “The house on the corner was still burning and we started to see everything, everything was horrible, horrible, I didn’t think it was so ugly.” After a shower and breakfast it was back to the house, rosary in hand, along the few roads that weren’t blocked, afraid they might have lost everything. The house was still standing.

They haven’t left the neighborhood since. The Méndezs have generators; the neighbors, eternally grateful, bring them water, gasoline, food (“I’m starting to get bored of cooking everything on the barbecue,” he laughs), and since they can’t go back, they encourage them to collect the eggs from their chickens. Paul (Josefina doesn’t show up during the conversation) doesn’t consider himself a hero, nor a brave man; he simply got to work. “You get so involved in the moment that you don’t think, you don’t measure the consequences,” he reflects. “If I had left, we wouldn’t have anything right now, all of this would have been consumed. I thank God because this was a miracle.” But its was his hands that worked the miracle.

Gregory Dane has also relied on divine forces to protect his home, placing four angels in the corners of his house, but the first person to save it was himself. At 67 years old and after 37 years living in the east of Altadena, this former location scout for commercials, who once had a company with six employees, has turned painting into his passion. In fact, his main inspiration is the Eaton Canyon, the natural enclave “a four-minute walk from home” where the fire that has devastated his neighborhood originated. He goes there to take photographs that he then captures in abstract form in his paintings. Just a month ago he had reached an agreement to sell them, with great enthusiasm. When the winds and the power cuts began, he ran out of water at home and decided to go to the gym to shower. When he returned, he saw his two-story white house glowing amidst the neighbors’ fire. He loaded the car with nine of his heavy paintings, but he has 40 of them. He couldn’t leave them there. He decided to stay.

“I live in a kind of forest, on three-quarters of an acre. It was dark and windy and embers were just hitting the house. I’ve been through two big fires, but nothing like this one,” he admits. “So I grabbed my 100-foot hose and just started wetting everything down, getting it wet. And the yard next to mine, with the tall grass, started burning, and embers were falling, so I watered that yard, too, and then my house again, the cement, the yard, the dirt, the house itself, for about an hour and a half.” Then he left: he had promised a friend he would get to safety and he kept his promise. Back at her house, a couple of towns away, tossing and turning, he decided to return to his neighborhood at seven in the morning. Everything was destroyed. He had a hard time getting in, he couldn’t see.

“It was sunny, but up here everything was dark,” except for his house, which remained white and in one piece, he recalls with emotion. Then he began to stop fires in the area, in up to three other houses, some by himself, other times by telling the firefighters where the danger was, or with help from a family, and without hoses, using a 20-liter can of water. “It all seems like something out of a movie,” he admits. Until now he had been unable to tell the whole story. “Tragedy and beauty have come from the same place. But nature is always rebuilding itself,” he says, hopeful. He has not left his home again, and gets by thanks to what volunteers from a nearby post provide him with.

Further south, Shane Jordan lives next to an area of tall pines popularly called Christmas Tree Lane, which is spectacularly decorated every Christmas. There are still lights lying on the ground. He was inside his home of 20 years when things got ugly; he sent away his wife and children, ages 16 and 18, and decided to stay behind and fight the flames. “But I called my wife on Wednesday and told her: the house is going away,” the musician now recalls. He joined a couple of other neighbors and decided to patrol and cool down all the houses with homemade hoses. If they saw bushes burning, they stopped the flames with the low water pressure they had available. He tells this to Rob, another neighbor who has come to check on his house: he didn’t know what he was going to find. He only has a burnt hedge. When Jordan and his colleagues saw it catch fire, they put it out immediately. The house is intact.

Like his two neighbors, Jordan has done everything with whatever he and the people on his block had at hand. In his case, he did see firefighters: “The patrols were very kind and grateful. They told us that the only houses that were saved were because of what the people did. Nobody wins here, but we were able to stop the fire from jumping from one house to the next, and the next, and the next,” he explains. These homeowners watered their houses and those of their neighbors, and did not leave despite the warnings sent to mobile phones or the anguished pleas of their families. Now, they do not want to leave their houses either. They all follow Paul Méndez’s line of reasoning: “Fight or die? Well, it is better to fight than to sit back and do nothing, right?”

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