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 damage.
Yet officials responsible for the fire response have still failed to provide a detailed explanation about what led to the failures, much less take responsibility.
This month, however, appears to mark a major shift in public discourse and accountability demands for Altadena since the fires. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced this month that his office had opened a civil rights investigation into how L.A. County prepared for and responded to the Eaton fire, particularly looking at the disparities experienced in historically Black west Altadena because of the delayed evacuation alerts.
It’s a win that west Altadena celebrated — though it came only after months of increased activism and strategic pressure from a group of residents who pushed to ensure their community and the tragedies it experienced would not be ignored.
“Historically marginalized communities have always had to fight to have their issues be seen and recognized,” said Shimica Gaskins, an Eaton fire survivor and member of Altadena for Accountability. The grassroots group had specifically called for such an investigation from Bonta.
L.A. County officials have said it will fully cooperate with the attorney general’s investigation, but emphasized that no reviews up to this point “have found any discriminatory or structural bias in the county’s response.”
“We believe the Attorney General will find that emergency responders did the best they could under unprecedented and extreme conditions,” county officials said in a joint statement.
In the Palisades, residents have made blunders related to the fire a potent issue in L.A. politics, helping lead to the dismissal of the Los Angeles fire chief and now an uncertain future for Mayor Karen Bass. Times investigations found breakdowns in how the Los Angeles Fire Department deployed resources to the blaze and how crews failed to monitor the remnants of a previous fire that would reignite to burn through the neighborhood. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who lost his home and has become a loud critic of the city’s handling of the fire, is now running against Bass.
The atmosphere in Altadena has in some ways been less politically charged, but local activists say that was by design.
The community has been similarly frustrated with elected leaders and emergency officials — there have been some calls for L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone to step down — but the Altadena activists wanted to keep their message cohesive and focused, in the hope that it would be more impactful.
“We really wanted a systemic approach,” said Gina Clayton-Johnson, a leader of the Altadena for Accountability group and a victim of the Eaton fire. “That requires maybe not a knee-jerk blame game but something different.”
Altadena’s status as an unincorporated towncan make it more challenging to focus blame across a more dispersed county government, but the group said it also wanted to make sure any political ramifications were warranted.
“It’s not an absence of anger,” said Sylvie Andrews, a member of Altadena for Accountability and an Eaton fire survivor. “It’s a laser-focused channeling of the anger.”
The community is governed by the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, with Kathryn Barger’s district including Altadena. The Los Angeles County Fire Department oversaw the response of the Eaton fire, and it has come under intense scrutiny over the botched alerts and limited firefighting resources on the west side of town.
The county commissioned a review of its evacuation system during the fire, but it was roundly criticized for not exposing what or who was responsible for the failures. Officials later criticized the report, admitting it didn’t answer key questions.
In the wake of the fire and repeated county blunders, many Altadena residents have pushed for more discussion about the community’s unincorporated status, some calling for cityhood and more autonomy over its services and resources. But this remains a divisive issue. Many have historically liked the freedom of its unincorporated governance and, in the past, have fought the idea of being swallowed up by a surrounding city like Pasadena.
For now though, the issue of incorporation has remained on the back burner given all that the community is already facing: a herculean task of rebuilding and recovery and in its fight for justice in the failures from the fire.
The coalition of community leaders and concerned residents calling for accountability settled on a specific goal: an independent investigation by the state attorney general. They hoped that ask would not only allow for an in-depth probe with the strength of subpoena power — key to finally providing answers and accountability in the fire’s failures — but it would also avoid ulterior motives from partisan politics on the national stage and could provide a road map for other communities of color after disaster, Clayton-Johnson said.
They realized the odds were stacked against them, similar to many Black and brown communities demanding justice in the aftermath of disaster, from the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
But Clayton-Johnson also said her community has a history and a spirit that is “uniquely powerful,” with members including descendants of civil rights leaders, families who began unprecedented cycles of Black generational wealth and neighbors leading important nonprofits.
West Altadena is made up of people “who want to dedicate their lives and their professions to justice, to equality, to well-being, to health, to environment,” Clayton-Johnson said.
Their efforts eventually led to a meeting with Bonta last month, where their group presented a legal brief, lengthy evidence and personal testimonies, which appeared to move the attorney general.
Bonta specifically referenced the advocacy and dedication of the “community members of west Altadena” in his announcement of the probe, saying the group “had a major impact on me.”
Although he said his office had been working on this issue for months, his announcement of the investigation came more than a year after calls for such an independent inquiry.
“We had to do a lot to get the attention on this issue,” Gaskins said. “We didn’t want to have to do that, but we did because we know that’s what’s important for our community and for going forward.”
Shawna Dawson Beer, an Altadena for Accountability member and fire survivor, agreed that the attorney general’s acknowledgment took too long. But she also pointed out that the investigation is just one piece of accountability residents want to see. They are still fighting for just insurance compensation, for admissions of wrongdoing from Southern California Edison — whose equipment may have started the Eaton fire — and for a thorough, environmentally sound cleanup, to name a few.
“From Day 1 … the Palisades fire kind of sucked the oxygen out of the room, and this became the secondary fire,” Dawson Beer said.
But some activists point out that this is not a competition: There should be room for victims of both fires to see their concerns addressed and achieve accountability.
“It’s not a zero sum game,” Andrews said. “I think that if we get answers or attention brought to issues in either community, it will ultimately benefit the other community and benefit all of L.A. County.”
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