With Pacific Palisades in spotlight, Altadena fights for attention, post-fire justice
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The Los Angeles firestorm of January 2025 was a double disaster, burning thousands of homes and taking dozens of lives across Pacific Palisades and Altadena.But over the last year, much of the national conversation has drifted toward Pacific Palisades and away from Altadena — despite glaring shortcomings in both fires that deserve scrutiny and accountability.
Concern and anger about issues from the Palisades fire have been amplified by celebrity victims and well-connected critics of Los Angeles City Hall, their plight swept up in the nation’s highly polarized politics.In the fall, Republican members of Congress launched an investigation into the L.A.
fires, but the probe has so far only focused on the Palisades fire.More recently, as the Trump administration pushed for expedited rebuilding, officials met only with victims from the Palisades.Many in west Altadena have been left with a frustrating — but familiar — feeling: like they are being overlooked.“If you just dropped in from another planet and you didn’t know and you started looking at L.A.
wildfires … you would think the only area that was hit was Pacific Palisades,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable.“West Altadena has gotten lost in the shuffle.”The historically Black community, made up primarily of working-class families, didn’t receive evacuation alerts until the fire had already descended on their neighborhoods.
More affluent areas received prompt warnings and orders.Times investigations uncovered the alert failure in January of last year, and later found that almost no fire trucks were in that side of the community as the inferno raged through.
Nearly all of the 19 people who died in the Eaton fire — all found within two square miles of one another — lived in this western section of town.It also experienced some of the most widespread fire da...