In Lake Avenue, in the heart of Altadena, two things stood out while the neighborhood wandered the other day.
There were still some unclear debris in the commercial strip, such as frozen images of a persistent nightmare, but there was also music, a new construction symphony.
Altadena is cycatricated and afflicted.
A cross remains above the carbonized ruins of the Church of the Community of Altadena, destroyed in the Eaton fire six months ago.
Altadena is healing and rebuilding.
I parked outside Church of the Community of Altadenawhich still seems to be beaten by a bomb, and saw the tractors push the earth in the nearby Bunny museumwho has hatched a plan to return to service as what the founders have called the Place with the further Earth.
Steve López
Steve López is a native of California who has been columnist of Los Angeles Times since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is four times Pulitzer.
And I called Victoria Knapp, president of the City of Altadena, to tell her how much I enjoyed her essay at the Colorado boulevard newspaper.
A sign that indicates: “Denna has 9 lives”, is based on a hedge, along with an inflatable black cat, in the fire zone along E. Mendoza street in Altadena.
“We lost houses, stories, older trees than any of us, and a sense of security that can never return the same,” Knapp wrote. But Altadena's spirit will be her salvation, on her own: “We have lost a lot. We never missed. That's how I know we will achieve it.”
There is nothing terribly significant in the six -month brand since the Eaton and Palisades shoot, or any other history book disaster. But it is an opportunity to visit and remember again.
Sixteen thousand buildings destroyed.
Thirty lost lives.
Innumerable livelihoods rent.
The Church of the Altadena community, destroyed in the Eaton fire 6 months ago, still needs the rubble to be eliminated from the site.
Knapp, who lost his home and plans to rebuild, did not minimize the years of recovery ahead, but while we talked, he dropped some sugar cubes in that bitter cup of coffee. Construction permits are being issuedHe said, foundations are being poured and 98% of all properties have been cleared, despite the remaining atypical values in Lake Avenue.
All of that is promising, and I want to believe that Altadena and the nearby communities damaged by the Eaton fire look at least to what they were. The same for Pacific Palisades and Malibu, where I saw the same juxtaposition of destruction and rebirth on a visit a few days ago.
I saw an army of trucks and hard hats, grinder and growl on the blank canvas of a ruins. On the edge of the Palisades commercial corridor, I saw the shattered column of a fallen staircase, lying sideways like a length of broken vertebrae. Here and there, where lots have been cleared, the backdrop was an open sea.
Is too soon to know How will these distinctive communities see in four or five years. Insurance disputesThe demands and the definitive causes of the fires of Eaton and Palisades may take years to unravel. There is still a heated debate about the lack of preparation and the failure of warning systems. Investors loom as vultures. Some fire victims are determined to rebuild, others may not afford luxury and others are still weighing their options.
What we do know is that Fire and wind will returnAs they always do, keeping the forever on the cusp of the catastrophe. Not only in Altadena already along the western edge of the county, but everywhere. It is built for drama, with the same geological forces that give birth to beauty and risk, The San Andreas Falla It is located on the other side of the San Gabriels and helped create those peaks.
A worker looks at business, along Mariposa street in Lake Avenue in Altadena, which were destroyed in the Eaton fire.
While I registered with the evacuees that I have come to know, I took note of its implacable waves of pain, hope, anger, fear, disorientation.
“I can't understand how this could happen,” he said Alice Lynn, A therapist who called his Highlands neighborhood and the broader Palisades community “altered forever.” She is in temporary homes during liquidation and cleaning operations.
“How one, like me, in the mid -80s, returns home and I feel some sense of normality when I surround me, I will see this devastation and loss?” Lynn asked.
Your friends Joe and Arline Halper, 95 and 89, they will no longer be a few steps away. The property they owned has been scraped, and a sign of “for sale” is where its door used to. Before the fire, neither of them saw a future in a community of older people, but that is where they are, in Playa Vista.
The swings still hang in the carbonized playground in the Church of the Altadena community, which was destroyed in the Fire Eaton six months ago.
“The loss of our home, neighborhood and community is tragic for us, but this is a very soft landing,” said Joe. They have made new friends, including several other evacuated from Palisades, and Joe broke when he told me that his beloved youth girlfriend has assumed the pickleball.
In Altadena, where a sign expresses a desire and a promise: “beautiful altadena … the rose will bloom again” – companies are reopening, including Full circle savings. I pushed through the door and Alma Ayala, the manager, told me that people have donated clothes, household items and other items to store the store.
Ayala believes that part of that came from those who maintained the stored rescued articles. And as people who lost everything return to Altadena, suspect that the items in their store will find new houses and second lives.
“This is the third time I opened this store,” said Ayala.
When it opened for businesses in 2016. When it emerged from Covid's Death Grip.
And now.
The west altadenans Steve Hofvendahl and his wife, Lili Knight, both actors, are Sifting your options. As they approach the 70s, they know they can replace the house they lost in West Palm, where almost all their block was incinerated. But they cannot bring back their lives the mini organ that kept them occupied and produced the products for the evenings of the porch market that gathered their neighborhood.
I was wondering if those who have committed to reconstruction will tremble or have flashbacks, when the first close forest fire sends smoke floating through Altadena.
“I think they will be the winds,” said Hofvendahl.
Your neighbor, Jonni Miller, She is already working with a builder along with her husband, Anthony Ruffin, who lived in West Palm when she was a child when black families moved there because they were not welcome in much of Los Angeles
A hopeful message is left at the doors of a property in the Eaton fire zone.
Miller and Ruffin, social workers whose work is hosting the homeless people, remain in temporary rooms in Glendale, but return to their property from time to time. In a recent night visit, Miller was shaken by the call of the Coyotes. The howl was longer and stronger than he remembers, and “scary in a way that has not scared me before.”
She said that “the lack of lover of the sound of missing houses” was a factor, and added: “I will be much more careful to let our animals go out at night once we are at home again.”
When I registered with Verne and Diane Williams, 90 and 86, they said they are still committed to rebuilding in Braeburn Road in Altadena, where they lived for half a century. But they know it's going to take time.
“The concern is that we will not be alive,” Diane said.
He handed the phone to Verne, who was anxious to share an update. The architect of his new home had a connection at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, Verne told me. They took their plans there and a study employee used some projection teams to organize a moment of magic.
“They were able to take the architecture plan and project it … in this gigantic floor, where I could walk along the walk of what will be our new home,” said Verne. “It was the most stimulating event from what happened six months ago.”
One thing I noticed about the properties clear and graduated in Altadena, in the vast and disturbing cemetery of Lost Houses:
There are approximately so many signs that say “Altadena not for sale”, since there are signs that say “for sale.”
I understand both feelings.
The day after the fire, I met Mark Turner and his wife, Claire Wavell, in an evacuation center in Pasadena. Turner showed his 13 -year -old daughter May, photos of his house, who had survived mainly intact in a street that was almost erased.
The family has moved more than a dozen times since then, settling for now on a rental property they have in Arizona. May is enrolled in school there, and given the uncertainties about when or if Altadena will be Altadena again, they are seriously considering the sale of the house they loved a lot, and even more when they learned that he had survived the fire.
A sign that offers “hugs and kisses” Altadena rests in the front courtyard of a house that was destroyed in Eaton's fire.
“It's very mixed. It's heartbreaking, honestly,” said Wavell, who began processing out loud, once again, the desires of the heart, the reflections of the mind and the complexities of staying, of going, of not knowing.
Wavell has been writing poems to clean his mind of all noise. Among them, “Return of the Wind”, “Week of one thousand years” and “6 months. “
6 months today
Our lives changed forever …
6 months today
That night, burned in the mind
marked in the heart
