Standing next to a bicycle, Juan Carranza told his neighbors how National Guard troops had just stopped his niece from delivering him a delivery of hot Mexican food, on the edge of the Altadena evacuation zone. .
Nearby, next to a few avocado trees, Kristopher Carbone’s generator let out a last crackle of distress.
At the end of the road, Paul Harter pulled his 7-year-old son Gavin in a small cart, both urgently searching for one of the portable toilets brought by emergency workers.
There was no electricity, no running water, no natural gas. Yet Altadena’s remaining residents considered themselves the lucky ones because their homes had survived.
It’s been more than a week since powerful winds pushed the Eaton Fire from the bottom of a mountain range to this town of 43,000, killing at least 16 people and destroying thousands of homes. Since then, authorities have sealed off the town and excluded everyone living there.
Officials say no one should live in the evacuation zone, regardless of their means or supplies. Utility crews continue to clear downed power lines, while workers with chain saws remove fallen trees and debris. The burned homes left a swirl of toxic materials and ash lingers in the air.
But dozens of people insisted on staying at home, surviving on what they have in their cupboards and the generosity of volunteers. Many never left and miraculously survived the inferno that ravaged Eaton Canyon and made their way back to their suburban streets.
As the fire incinerated businesses, a church and homes in the early morning hours of January 8, Shane Jordan ran around his neighborhood. He turned on hoses, placed a sprinkler head on a neighbor’s roof and fought against embers the size of rocks.
Mr Jordan said firefighters were nowhere to be found and he believed they were most likely dealing with a wildfire in the mountains. Somehow, the Eaton Fire scarred much of Altadena but stopped just short of its neighborhood, on the southern edge of the fire’s perimeter.
“It was just those three little square blocks that made it successful,” Mr. Jordan said. Seeing the devastation elsewhere, he said, made him feel like “we’re the last little street.”
Mr. Jordan, a father of two who plays bass and owns a party music company, now falls asleep shortly after dark on his couch and keeps a shotgun nearby with a few rounds in his pocket in case he needed to scare off the raiders.
He wakes up at sunrise, boils water for coffee over a small propane-fueled fire pit on his back deck and walks around the neighborhood, clearing fallen branches from his neighbors’ yards. He eats apples and pistachios and, sometimes, a bullshit sandwich handed out by volunteers. Every few days he takes a bath in his jacuzzi, still filled with water from the jacuzzi from before the fire.
“I’m just trying to preserve everything, because I don’t know how long this is going to last,” he said.
Los Angeles County officials said Thursday it could be another week — at least — until people are allowed into the area to inspect their homes or what’s left of them.
“We don’t want people to go back into an area and get hurt,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone.
Those holding on in Altadena either never left the neighborhood or ran back before the National Guard arrived days after the fires started. Since then, Guard members have established a strict perimeter around the city and limited access to emergency responders, utility workers and journalists. The Guard also, in many cases, blocked people from dropping off supplies for their loved ones, residents said.
Mr. Jordan was unable to hand over a portable power station to someone he hoped would charge it outside the evacuation zone. Other residents said they were unable to receive food, medicine or toiletries near their neighborhoods.
“I told them it was criminal,” said Mr. Carranza, 67, a mason who has lived in the neighborhood almost half his life and survived the fire. “We can’t receive anything.”
Many here believe authorities are deliberately blocking supplies in order to force more people to leave the evacuation zone.
“They’re basically crushing us,” said Mr. Carbone, 54, who works in a Los Angeles County school district.
Deputy Raquel Utley, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, urged residents to leave because of ongoing dangers, including poor air quality and lack of utilities. She said deputies would not force people to leave the neighborhood, but once residents left, they would not be allowed to return.
She explained that, for a time, guards allowed people to receive deposits from friends and relatives. “But again,” she said, “it’s better that if they need these things, it’s better that they leave.”
Despite this, some people said they stayed because they wanted to be there to protect their homes in case high winds fueled another fire. Others are so attached to their homes that they cannot imagine going anywhere else, even without clean water and electricity.
“We’ve been here 56 years and I wasn’t going anywhere,” said James Triplett, 63, who spent much of last week sitting in a chair in his driveway and chatting with everyone who passed by.
Without gas, the cold, dark nights were the hardest part, many residents said. The temperature has dropped as low as 40 degrees at times, and many people are sleeping in warm clothes and bundled up, their homes becoming the equivalent of unfurnished cabins.
There is also the difficulty of moving around your house in the dark.
Mr. Triplett has a set of small solar-powered garden lights that he charges in the sun every day. At night, he collects them to guide him around the house.
Elsewhere in Altadena, further up the hill, near where the Eaton Fire started, flames engulfed several rows of homes and left most of them intact in a pattern of brutal, random destruction.
“We’re stuck on an island,” said Tori Kinard, 37, a tennis professional cooped up in a house alongside her brother and parents. they survive in part on cans of Campbell’s soup.
Nearby, David and Jane Pierce make do with boxes of dehydrated meals. Avid backpackers (he has summited Mount Whitney five times and she twice), they eat dehydrated dinners of beef bolognese and pasta primavera that they get at REI, the outdoor store.
A few blocks away, retired firefighter Ross Torstenbo stayed behind to hose down his home during the inferno. Outside, on the terrace, he had installed a solar camping shower consisting of a plastic bag filled with water warmed by the sun.
To get his medication, he said he asked his daughter, who lives outside the burn zone, to pick up his medication from the pharmacy, meet him at the checkpoint and “throw it over the line.” .
In the desert that Altadena has become, any sign of normal life is welcome.
Residents were shocked and delighted when the garbage trucks arrived Wednesday, the neighborhood’s usual trash day. Mr Jordan rushed to throw the waste into his neighbors’ bins and dumped it in a dead end. Others rushed to fill trash cans with palm leaves and toppled tree branches.
Joyce deVicariis, 75, fled the first night of the fire to a friend’s house in Sierra Madre, a nearby town. But the flames also threatened this house. She decided to return home to Pasadena, just south of Altadena.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “And I’m glad I did, because you can’t get in here.”
Her husband, 92, went to a doctor’s appointment last week and was repeatedly prevented from returning to his wife until he found a sympathetic caretaker.
When a garbage collector showed up this week, Ms. deVicariis was thrilled after days of clearing vegetation.
“Here he comes,” she said. “My wonderful man. I have never been so happy to see the garbage man in my life.
Some lone resisters are also staying in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, where another fire has decimated thousands of homes and is believed to have killed at least nine people.
When the firestorm broke out last week, Jeff Ridgway’s friends and neighbors fled, but he stayed behind to protect the 18-unit apartment building where he had spent the last 32 years working as a property manager.
Mr Ridgway, 67, threw buckets full of swimming pool water at burning eucalyptus trees in the front yard. The building survived, and Mr. Ridgway has survived there ever since, cleaning out rancid foods from its residents’ refrigerators, watering the plants, and trying to sweep up the charcoal powder that swirled everywhere.
A few of his friends in Los Angeles – who are barred from entering the evacuation zone – persuaded police to carry him care packages of tangerines and dog treats up the hill.
“I basically camp outside,” he said. “When it gets dark, I go to bed.”
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting from Pasadena, California. Claire Moses also contributed to the reporting.
