‘Stuck on an Island,’ Some Residents Insist on Staying in the Fire Zone

Standing beside a bicycle, Juan Carranza told neighbors how National Guard troops had just stopped his niece from handing him a delivery of hot Mexican food at the edge of the Altadena evacuation zone.

Nearby, next to some avocado trees, Kristopher Carbone’s generator let out a final distressed sputter.

Up the road, Paul Harter pulled his 7-year-old son, Gavin, in a small wagon, both urgently looking for one of the portable toilets brought in by emergency workers.

There was no electricity, no safe running water, no natural gas. Yet these remaining residents in Altadena considered themselves the lucky ones because their homes had survived.

It has been more than a week since powerful winds pushed the Eaton fire down a mountain range and into this town of 43,000 residents, killing at least 16 people and leveling thousands of homes. Since then, the authorities have closed off the town and kept out those who live here.

Officials believe that no one should be living in the evacuation zone, regardless of their wherewithal or their supplies. Utility crews continue to clear downed power lines, while workers with chain saws remove fallen trees and debris. Burned homes have left a swirl of toxic materials, and ash lingers in the air.

But dozens of people have insisted on staying in their own homes, surviving on what they have in their cabinets and on the generosity of volunteers. Many never left and miraculously survived the inferno that stormed through Eaton Canyon and headed toward their suburban streets.

As the fire incinerated businesses, a church and homes in the early morning hours of Jan. 8, Shane Jordan raced around his slice of the neighborhood. He turned on hoses, placed a sprinkler head on one neighbor’s roof and battled through embers the size of rocks.

Mr. Jordan said that firefighters were nowhere to be seen, and he figured that they were most likely confronting the wildfire up in the mountains. Somehow, the Eaton fire scarred much of Altadena but stopped just short of his neighborhood on the southern edge of the blaze’s perimeter.

“It’s just these little three square blocks that made it,” Mr. Jordan said. Seeing the devastation elsewhere, he said, made him feel as if “we’re the last little street.”

Mr. Jordan, a father of two who plays bass guitar and owns a party band company, now falls asleep shortly after dark on his couch and keeps a shotgun nearby with a few shells in his pocket in case he needs to scare off looters.

He wakes up at sunrise, boils water for coffee over a small propane-powered fire pit on his back patio and takes a walk around the neighborhood, clearing fallen branches from his neighbors’ yards. He eats apples and pistachios and, sometimes, a baloney sandwich handed out by volunteers. Every few days, he takes a bath in his Jacuzzi, which is still filled with hot-tub water from before the fire.

“I’m just trying to conserve everything, because I don’t know how long it’s going to be,” he said.

Los Angeles County officials said on Thursday that it could be another week — at least — until people are allowed into the zone to survey their homes or what is left of them.

“We don’t want people going back to an area and getting injured,” Anthony C. Marrone, fire chief of Los Angeles County, said.

Those who are sticking it out in Altadena either never left the neighborhood or scrambled back in before the National Guard arrived days after the fires began. Since then, the Guard members have set up a hard perimeter around the town and mostly limited access to emergency workers, utility employees and journalists. The Guard has also, in many instances, stopped people from dropping supplies off for their loved ones, residents said.

Mr. Jordan was prevented from handing a portable power station to someone he had hoped would recharge it outside the evacuation zone. Other residents have reported being unable to receive food supplies, medicine or toiletries at the edge of their neighborhoods.

“I told them, this is criminal,” said Mr. Carranza, 67, a mason who has lived in the neighborhood almost half his life and stayed through the fire. “We can’t receive anything.”

Many here believe that the authorities are deliberately blocking resupplies in order to force more people out of the evacuation zone.

“They’re squeezing us out, basically,” said Mr. Carbone, 54, who works for a school district in Los Angeles County.

Deputy Raquel Utley, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, urged residents to leave because of ongoing dangers including air quality and a lack of utilities. She said that deputies would not be forcing people out of the neighborhood, but that once residents leave, they would not be let back in.

She said that, for a while, the guards were allowing people to receive drop-offs from friends and relatives. “But again,” she said, “it’s just best that if they need that stuff, it’s best for them to leave.”

Even so, some people said that they had stayed because they wanted to be there to protect their homes in case strong winds were to fuel another blaze. Others are so tied to their houses that they cannot imagine going anywhere else — even without clean tap water and electricity.

“We’ve been here 56 years, and I wasn’t going to go nowhere,” said James Triplett, 63, who has spent much of the past week sitting on a chair in his driveway and chatting with everyone who passes by.

Without gas, the cold, dark nights have been the hardest part, many of the residents said. The temperature has dipped to 40 degrees at times, and many people have been sleeping in warm clothes and bundling up, their homes becoming the equivalent of unfurnished cabins.

There is also the difficulty of getting around one’s house in the dark.

Mr. Triplett has a set of small solar-powered yard lights that he recharges in the sun every day. At night, he collects them to guide him through the house.

Elsewhere in Altadena, farther up the hill near where the Eaton fire started, flames jumped several lines of homes and left most of them intact in a pattern of brutal and random destruction.

“We are stuck on an island,” said Tori Kinard, 37, a tennis pro who is holed up in a house alongside her brother and parents; they are subsisting in part on cans of Campbell Soup.

Nearby, David and Jane Pierce are getting by on boxes of dehydrated meals. Avid backpackers (he has reached the summit of Mount Whitney five times and she two times), they are eating dehydrated dinners of beef Bolognese and pasta primavera that they have from REI, the outdoors store.

A few streets over, a retired firefighter, Ross Torstenbo stayed behind to hose down his house during the inferno. Outside on the patio, he had laid a solar camping shower that consisted of a plastic bag full of water that was being warmed by the sun.

To get his medication, he said that he had asked his daughter, who lives outside the burn zone, to pick up his pills at the pharmacy, meet him at the checkpoint and “throw it over the line.”

In the wasteland that Altadena has become, any sign of normal life is welcome.

Residents were shocked and elated when garbage trucks rolled through on Wednesday, the neighborhood’s usual trash day. Mr. Jordan raced to put trash into his neighbors’ bins and put them out on the cul-de-sac. Others scrambled to fill up bins with toppled palm fronds and tree limbs.

Joyce deVicariis, 75, fled the first night of the fire to a friend’s house in Sierra Madre, a nearby city. But flames threatened that house as well. She decided to just return to her own home in 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 blocked from returning to his wife until he found a sympathetic guard.

When a garbage man showed up this week, Ms. deVicariis was overjoyed after days of cleaning up vegetation.

“Here he comes,” she said. “My wonderful man. I’ve never been so happy to see the trash man in my life.”

Some lone holdouts are staying in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, too, where a different blaze decimated thousands of homes and is believed to have killed at least nine people.

When the firestorm roared through 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 past 32 years and worked as the property manager.

Mr. Ridgway, 67, hurled bucketfuls of pool water at burning eucalyptus trees in the front yard. The building survived, and Mr. Ridgway has endured there ever since, cleaning rancid food from his residents’ refrigerators, watering plants and trying to sweep up the powdered char swirling everywhere.

A few of his friends in Los Angeles — who are prohibited from entering the evacuation zone — have persuaded the police to shuttle care packages containing tangerines and dog treats up the hill to him.

“I’m camping out, basically,” he said. “When it gets dark, I go to bed.”

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