Category: eaton fire

Eaton Fire #2: Lists Listing Lists

Mike Rothschild

I’m an independent journalist and author with an uncertain road ahead. To support my work, please subscribe to my Patreon page, or Venmo me directly, @rothschildmd. Only if you can afford it, of course.

When you think that you’ve lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I’m just going down the road feeling bad
Tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door

The first thing you do when you find out your house burned down is to start making lists of all the things you’ll need to do next.

Ok, no. That’s nonsense. The first thing you do is suppress the urge to find a hole to get sick in. Based on the stories I’m hearing from folks who also lost their houses in the Eaton Fire, some are more successful than others. Hey, no judgement.

So then, the second thing you do when you find out your house burned down, after the vomiting, is start making lists of all the things you’ll need to do next.

For those who lost their homes in the wildfire plague of California, lists will become the currency of the realm. Notepads and piles of receipts become more valuable than gold. You will make lists on your phone, in your head, on scraps of paper, and in disjoined texts to yourself at three in the morning.

There are things you have to do for the remains of your last house so you stop paying for things you won’t need for a long time. You have to cancel DirecTV, your Stitch Fix subscription, your Amazon subscribe and save. You don’t want to get charged for your air filters and Flonase getting delivered to a burned out husk, after all. You have to call your mortgage company and explain very patiently that no, you don’t have a check from your insurance company to repair the damage to your house because your house doesn’t exist anymore.

Speaking of insurance, you have to start that ball rolling – assuming you’re lucky enough to not have gotten kicked off your homeowners policy. You have to make calls, start files, download pictures, and save everything electronically. They’ll want you to document everything you spend while out of your house, while also documenting everything you had in your house when it burned down so it can be replaced, or at least some version of it can be bought again. Assuming it can. The lists are granular and demand an absurd level of detail so as to make sure you don’t squeeze a few extra pennies.

Salad plates, white, ceramic, x12. Hundred year old brass Shabbat candlesticks, x2. Pushpins, clear, container, x1. Never opened.

You make lists of where you’ve stayed while on the road. Lists of things you’ll need to get at Target to be able to have something resembling clean clothes and some food, assuming they have anything left. Lists of people to thank for their generosity and kindness. Lists of donations. Lists of people to contact who you may or may not get around to. To-do lists for the next day, most of which you won’t get to because you’re strung out and wrung out and bone tired. Lists of lists.

Eventually, we’ll get to lists of things to do for the next house. But that’s so far down the line it’s not even possible to conceptualize it. So we stay in the realm of the immediate, the thing that has to get done today. That’s all any of us can handle.

Of course, there are other lists. I’ve seen multiple lists of businesses burned out of Pasadena and Altadena. Restaurants and shops and bars and people’s life’s work that are gone and might not ever come back. The coffee place where we grabbed horchata con espresso right after the elementary school holiday show. The dry cleaners where I took the suit I had made for my mom’s funeral – a suit that’s now gone. The bar in walking distance where I celebrated my 40th birthday, and where the bartender had seen me on CNN once.

And that’s to say nothing of the businesses burned out from the other fires, which I can’t even wrap my mind around yet. There are the lists of your friends who lost their homes, though in truth it would take less time to list those who hadn’t. There are the lists of the things they lost and the things they took with them. Some are heartwarming – the friends who were out of town but managed to get in touch with a neighbor who saved their cats and Social Security cards before the flames crept in. Others are ludicrous – the good friends who managed to save their house, while packing, among other things, a strapless bra meant for an evening gown. Hey, one day, right?

The lists come at you from every direction. Lists of historic structures, built from materials that aren’t made anymore. A century of American architecture decimated and just waiting to be turned into a vast field of glass and concrete shit boxes. Lists of places you can pick up free food and water, because the water in Altadena has been declared “do not use.” And there are the lists of GoFundMe pages from your friends, your neighbors, your community. You want to give to them all. But you can’t, because you need as much as you can get for yourself at the moment. A bottomless pit of need and despair.

The lists become documentation, not just for insurance purposes, but for remembrance. I’m finding in these first few days that witnessing and remembering is just as important as FEMA applications and itemizing Target receipts. Connecting with friends and going over what they saved, what they need, where they’ve been. Their lists. The list of our collective loss. This is how we even start to come to grips with what’s happened. We do it through writing it down, taking pictures, shooting videos, and leaving as many concrete reminders as we can.

So we make lists. We take notes. We scribble nonsense and send ourselves incomprehensible texts. It’s how we get through these days and do the things we need to do, but it’s also how we pay tribute to what we had and what we lost. Because there is just so goddamn much of it.

This piece will go up Monday, 1/13. We have a list of things to do for the day. Maybe we’ll even get to some of them.

Altadena Will Rebuild.

Eaton Fire #1: The Valiant Smoke Detector

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water.
With the heat rising in my eyes

What do you take when you’re trying to pack your house into your car and have no idea if you’ll be back again? Passports and tax files and the signed photo frame from your wedding, yes. The six bags of avocadoes you picked from the giant tree branch that was torn off int the windstorm earlier that day? Ah, no. The foul ball you caught at the Dodger game? The new LL Bean sweatshirt that you literally just got for Christmas and really liked? The artwork your kids made when they were 4 that were you probably were going to take a picture of and recycle? Hopefully – but probably not.

I saw the glow of the Eaton fire from my porch at 6:30 PM on Tuesday. It was distant, eerie, but not threatening. We had power. The wind was brutal, but our house was 100 years old and sturdy. A few hours later, we decided to be cautious and pack some things. We didn’t think too hard about it, because we weren’t even under an evacuation watch. We were being alarmist.

At 3:25 AM, our phones told us otherwise. We had to go. Now.

Of course, we had no power at that point and the house was freezing. The kids were freaking out. We were freaking out. I got dressed, but spent an inordinate amount of time looking for the right t-shirt, as if I were heading out for a night at the bar. We grabbed flashlights, filled water bottles, and grabbed a few more things. We left far more behind. We headed out into the howling wind, our streetlights dead to the world, and smoke filling our lungs like a bad day on the Western Front. We drove south, my radio still tuned to the SoCal Sound, a relic of another life a few hours ago.

Twelve hours and another evacuation later, we knew house was gone. We had an inkling – a neighbor sent us a screengrab of a KTLA report of their house on fire, with ours in the distance, also burning. Maybe it was just the avocado tree, right? Firefighters were there, so we may have gotten lucky. Around the same time, our smoke detector started sending us alerts, valiantly doing its job to the last, as it probably melted. We told ourselves that the air was a horror show, and just because the alarm was going off didn’t mean our house was necessarily on fire.

It was. Now it’s gone We haven’t seen what’s left of it yet, but neighbors and friends who have snuck back into the area told us, and a few took pictures. We recognized the porch, the coral tree in the front yard, the pavers. Whatever’s left won’t be useful, likely. Today, we started the process of filing an insurance claim, putting our mortgage on pause, and, oddly, cancelling the coffee subscription that sustained us on seemingly endless mornings getting our kids out the door.

We’re safe and far from the fires now. The air is cool and slightly acrid, but nothing close to Altadena, which is still something of a war zone. We’re heading north tomorrow, reduced to refugees in a parade of plug-in hybrids. You always think of people fleeing catastrophe as slow-moving lines of families pushing carts with their meagre belongings, and women wearing babushkas, heading west to avoid rampaging hordes. That’s us now. Except our babushkas burned alongside our avocados, the foul ball from the Dodger game, and the LL Bean sweater.

We aren’t alone in our journey. So many families and friends lost homes that it would be easier to list those who didn’t. Altadena is a tight-knit and quirky community where people come because they want to escape the packed-in constant closeness of LA. It’s affordable, or at least it used to be. Because of the Pasadena area’s long history of segregation, Altadena is where many Black families were able to buy property, and the city is a working-class mix of races and cultures and incomes, all living together in 100 year old cottages and Craftsman bungalows.

Over the last decade, what was once a bit of a wilderness had become a place where younger people and working class families wanted to move, because of the vibe and the green open spaces and the quirky feeling of a place that wasn’t urban, wasn’t suburban, and wasn’t rural. You were five minutes from hiking trails that took you to a waterfall, and a half hour from Dodger Stadium. Nothing like this existed anymore in LA. This wasn’t influencer country or glass and steel box McMansion hell. Celebrities moved into town and nobody knew who they were. Little league teams overran pizza places after games, and the local park drew huge crowds on Sundays for organized soccer games where nobody spoke English. People in Altadena look out for each other, families let their kids walk around the block the way kids used to, we protect the look and historical nature of our houses, and you always run into someone you know when you go out for tacos. It’s a community. A village.

I have no idea if that’s gone for good, but it’s gone for now. It vanished with the fire that I watched grow from a distant glow to a looming inferno to a destroyer of stability. And it’s still going, one of many fires turning Los Angeles into something unrecognizable, driven by a vicious wind that people who lived here for half a century said they’d never experienced. Victims of a planet that increasingly seems to not want anything to do with the fossil fuel and cheap plastic obsessed humans who control it.

Because it’s 2025, there’s been some negativity, conspiracist fearmongering, and brain-rotted lunacy. I’ll get to some of that eventually on this blog. But it’s been vastly outweighed by generosity, mutual aid, good wishes, offers of lodging and financial help, and people reaching out to give whatever they can. The spirit of everyone being in this together that we had in the early days of the last generational trauma we suffered through, the pandemic, is being felt even by people who are not actually in this. It’s incredibly heartening, and I’ll carry it with me right alongside the memories of the stuff we lost, the panicked run from our house, and the confusion and anguish of the next day. It’s bad, but it’s not all bad.

Thank you for going down this road with me as I attempt to document life as a climate change refugee. I can’t commit to any kind of regular schedule, pretense of editing, or coherence. I’ve had eight hours of sleep in two days, so I’m not sure if I’m actually typing words at this point. But I hope to write down what I’m going through, so I remember and so other people can experience something that nobody should ever have to experience. I want to chronicle our adventure, Altadena’s rebirth, and Los Angeles’ future.

And for god’s sake, make sure all your important documents are in the same place.

More to come.

To support my work during this difficult and uncertain time, please subscribe to my Patreon, or you can donate directly to my Venmo, @RothschildMD. Please only give if you can afford to.

Altadena Will Rebuild