‘No one has a home’: What fire took from one California neighborhood

Maral Nazarian has been waking at night thinking about what she could have saved.

Family passports. Important files. The toddler art of her two grown daughters. The 59-year-old travel agent evacuated her home in sweatpants and a T-shirt on the night of the fire - not in a panic, but because she had every intention to return.

She loved it here in Altadena, below the dry hills on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and was savvy about fire. It had always stayed far enough away. Now its handiwork lay before her - the family home, and all it saw, blackened, twisted and gone.

“My husband’s brother lost his house. We lost our house. My husband’s partner lost his house,” she said Thursday. “No one has a home.”

The mind-bending scale of residential ruin from the multiple Los Angeles fires is slowly coming into focus. Officials said Friday that about 7,000 structures had been damaged or destroyed in the Altadena area, a community of 42,000 people.

“I will tell you it looks like a war zone. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kathryn Barger, a Los Angeles County supervisor, said at a Friday news conference.

On text chains and social media neighborhood groups, Altadena residents have been commiserating about their losses - the historic homes and family businesses, parks and shops, churches and mosques that have been taken from them.

Fox’s restaurant, which had stood for decades. The stage for the summer concert series at Farnsworth Park. The McNally House, home of the co-founder of the Rand McNally map company. The Bunny Museum, known as the “hoppiest place in the world.” Altadena Hardware, where residents shopped for more than 80 years.

“I drove by it that night and saw it on fire, and I couldn’t believe it,” said Jim Orlandini, who owns the store on Mariposa Street.

The Eaton Fire is one of five active blazes across Los Angeles that have consumed more than 35,000 acres and displaced more than 100,000 people from their homes.

The vice chair of the Altadena town council, Nic Arnzen, estimated that more than half of the community’s businesses were lost in the fire. He said Altadena has become such a popular location for filming television shows and movies - the series “Shrinking” is a recent example - that it will be hard to avoid the constant reminders of what’s disappeared.

“Over and over,” he said, “myself and other Altadenans are going to feel the pain of that loss.”

Arnzen’s own home was destroyed, along with those of other members of the town council.

“We’re all going through the same tragedy,” he said.

Residents passed checkpoints and police tape Thursday to reach where their homes once stood. On block after block, they poured buckets of water on the embers of their belongings, scrambled to deal with gas leaks and salvaged what they could.

Assessing the wreckage, many felt shocked and bewildered that the blaze, known as the Eaton Fire, could penetrate so deeply into the suburbs.

They questioned whether authorities did enough to defend the area, as hydrants failed and firefighters triaged another erupting blaze in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades.

Orlandini spent Wednesday dousing flames with hoses at the nearby homes of both of his sons. Their houses survived, while neighbors all around burned. Orlandini was frustrated by the firefighters he saw who were left to just watch the destruction.

“There were times we were at a house, and the houses are burning, and there’s a fire truck and a crew sitting there and we’re like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ They’re like: ‘We can’t do anything. We don’t have any water.’”

Firefighters were still battling blazes Thursday but without hydrants, relying on the 500 gallons in their fire engines and the water tankers driving around doing resupply. But the winds were calmer, allowing firefighters to patrol for hot spots and douse blazes that flared. When a building at the Altadena Golf Course erupted around midday Thursday, at least six fire trucks and more than 20 personnel showed up.

“We’re going to do what we can right now while it’s calm and try to go and prevent other stuff like this,” said Battalion Chief Scott Crosby, a strike team leader from Los Angeles County Fire Department, as he monitored the flames.

When the winds are as strong as they were Tuesday, he said, it makes firefighting nearly impossible.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “You just have to follow the wind. Let the wind do its thing, and you just have to control it from behind and get as much as you can.”

“But you saw what the damage was,” he added.

John Greg Haines, 75, a retired computer design engineer, lost his home in the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm. He moved to Altadena, not realizing the fire risk. Over the 30 years he’s lived here, he can recall three or four brush fires in the canyon that left ash scars but little damage to the community.

He photographed this fire, which started behind his house at 6:15 p.m. in the hills of Eaton Canyon, when it was still small. That didn’t last long.

“This time because the winds were so intense, it just spread like crazy,” he said.

Eleven people are known to have died in the Los Angeles fires, officials said, six in the Altadena area.

One of them was Anthony Mitchell, 67, a retired salesman and amputee who used a wheelchair and lived with his sons, according to his daughter, Hajime White.

“They didn’t make it out,” White, a doula in Warren, Arkansas, said Thursday. “It’s like a ton of bricks just fell on me.”

The Eaton Fire started in the hills among the popular hiking trails that attract people to Altadena, then raced down a rocky gulch and crossed a narrow stream before leaping into the neighborhood, according to residents who watched its advance.

The cause of the fire remains under investigation, Chief Deputy Jon F. O’Brien of the Los Angeles County Fire Department said.

The proximity to the hills, which proved so devastating, is a major draw for Altadena, an out-of-the-fray suburb where you might see a coyote or a black bear as easily as a TV writer or a movie star.

“People in Altadena love the mountains and wildlife,” said Cindi Ott, 67, a teaching assistant at Pasadena Christian School, standing outside the ruins of her 100-year-old home. “It’s a great community, very diverse. People are very caring. They look out for each other.”

The holiday season was a particular joy. Residents and tourists alike came to watch the twinkling lights on Christmas Tree Lane and see the Balian mansion, built by an ice cream fortune, in its winter finery.

Nazarian used to throw a party at her house on East Mendocino Street every Christmas for her daughters’ school friends. She’d make hot chocolate, put them in Santa hats with their names on them. The whole group would walk to Balian mansion and, as a joke, she’d make the kids sing.

“Everybody would take pictures of them and think they were a real choir. With hot chocolate in their hands,” she recalled. “It was a tradition. A lot of memories.”

While there are Mediterranean-style mansions and stately Tudor homes behind gates and trimmed hedges here, there are also more modest ranches and bungalows. Nazarian lived in a one-story, three-bedroom home with a pool - a “comfortable, cozy family home that my kids loved,” she said.

Two weeks ago, she started a remodel. As she stood outside the burned building, she was texting, trying to cancel orders she’d made for the renovation.

“We’re lost,” she said. “We actually don’t know what to do.”

It’s been overwhelming. One of her daughters, she said, has been crying and throwing up.

“We want to stay here, but we don’t know the path now.”

Nazarian’s father ran a shoe repair shop in Altadena for 33 years. She attended John Muir High School. Classmates have been reaching out to check on her since the fire.

Those enduring bonds are what make the neighborhood special, she said.

Her daughters, who both got married last year and moved out, sifted through the wreckage with their friends - some of the same kids she’d led down the street in Santa hats.

They had come to help.

Her home was gone. What Nazarian had left was Altadena.

- - -

Annie Gowen contributed to this report.

© 2025 , The Washington Post