A year after the Eaton fire, the loss of Altadena is still raw

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In college in Washington, D.C., I always told people I grew up outside of Los Angeles.Pressed further, I’d say near Pasadena.I rarely told people I was from a small town called Altadena.There was no easy way to describe my hometown.

It didn’t fit any of the expectations of Southern California.It wasn’t a tourist destination like Hollywood, or glamorous like Beverly Hills, or beachy like Malibu or Venice.

We didn’t have our own lingo and mall culture, like they did in the Valley.We didn’t have the Rose Bowl or a world-famous parade like Pasadena.

Even the meaning of Altadena’s name was tied to the history of the city it rested against.Then Altadena burned.The inferno took the lives of at least 19, jumping east to west and burning 9,000 homes, businesses and other structures to the ground.The town’s moment in the spotlight was its destruction.I wish I had told people before about my Altadena, a place I didn’t realize how much I loved until it was gone.The town I grew up in was in many ways quintessential California: one of the many harbors in the urban sprawl where people from all over the U.S.

and the world quietly settled and built a space with its own unique and complex personality.Altadena was where people raised chickens before it was trendy, where no one batted an eye at the neighbors with a pet dingo, or thought much about the so-called haunted road said to defy gravity.Some people lived off the grid up against the mountains and used their own generators for electricity.

Others were engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab and professors at Caltech and teachers and artists and plumbers and everyday commuters to downtown Los Angeles.California The Eaton and Palisades fires tragically exposed L.A.’s vulnerability.

The Times looks back at a devastating year, scrutinizes official response and makes the case for being better prepared next time.You could be whoev...