Column: For L.A. County Supervisor Barger, the right to rebuild in Altadena is nonnegotiable
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On Tuesday evening, three weeks after the start of an unprecedented firestorm, Alphonso Browne circled the Pasadena City College gymnasium before a gathering of hundreds who lost their homes, holding a sign intended as a warning to any land speculators hoping to capitalize on Altadena’s misery.
“Altadena Not For Sale.”
Altadena Town Council President Victoria Knapp, who lost her home, stepped to the podium and urged: “I want everyone here to please take a deep breath and honor those who lost their lives to this devastating fire.”
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
A woman standing next to me said that she, like many others in western Altadena, got no evacuation warning and barely made it out alive.
She said her name is Rose Robinson. Baseball great Jackie Robinson was her uncle, and her father, Mack Robinson — a Pasadena City College student-athlete — was a track and field silver medalist in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
“We lost the suitcase he took to the Olympics,” she said of the fire that destroyed her home and everything in it.
The gathering at PCC, organized by a nonprofit called Change Reaction, was intended as a show of support for those impacted by the fires, with relief checks of up to $5,000 distributed to attendees.
“We will rise from the ashes stronger than ever,” said Bishop Charles Dorsey of the Lifeline Fellowship Christian Center.
L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who terms out in 2028, told the crowd that the board had just unanimously approved a motion she co-authored that calls for a streamlined and robust recovery and rebuilding effort. She also said President Trump, who visited the Palisades last week — but not Altadena — has “committed resources to make sure the community is brought back.”
With Barger as the lone Republican on the Board of Supervisors, in a state that at times has been at war with Trump and vice versa, I think it was smart of her to invite Trump to see the damage in L.A. County first-hand. Better to have him involved in the discussion than turning from it.
But I’m a lot more skeptical than Barger about any promise of resources from the White House, just as Trump appears intent on taking a hatchet to federal spending.
After the meeting on Tuesday, I talked to Barger about Trump, and a few other things, including her call for an investigation into why evacuation warnings for residents of western Altadena were late, and the risks and merits of swiftly rebuilding in what will continue to be a high-risk fire zone.
On Trump:
Barger said that when candidate Trump spoke of hard-working people who have trouble paying the rent or the mortgage and feel as though they’re falling behind, he was speaking of people such as those who live in Altadena. And they need his help.
“As the president of the United States, he has the ability to help cut some of the red tape,” Barger said. “We need the federal government, and I think it takes an adult to stand up and say, ‘I respect this president, and I’m going to work with him.’”
Moving swiftly is one thing. Moving recklessly is another. Barger, who represents the unincorporated Altadena area, needs to find the right balance when it comes to removal of toxic debris and determining when it’s safe to move back in. Anguished residents — understandably — want a speedy process, but there could be a price for moving too quickly.
On breakdowns in the evacuation warning system:
“People don’t want to hear that the firefighters did the best they could. They want to know why they were not told to get out,” said Barger, who authored a motion calling for an outside, independent investigation of what went wrong.
As The Times has reported, residents of western Altadena, home of an historic Black neighborhood, received electronic evacuation notifications much later than residents of more affluent neighborhoods to the east. All of the deaths in the Eaton fire occurred in western Altadena.
No one, Barger said, could have anticipated a fire that began in Eaton Canyon, a couple miles to the east, and then headed south, would kick to the west so suddenly and ferociously, with embers riding winds of 60 miles an hour and faster.
But that still doesn’t explain why neighborhoods to the east were alerted electronically at 7:26 p.m. on Jan. 7, and residents on the west side didn’t get alerts until 3:25 a.m. the next morning. (Nor does it excuse the fact that, in a state that has had more than a few learning opportunities when it comes to deadly, raging wildfires, there was panic in parts of L.A. that received erroneous evacuation alerts due to a software glitch.)
Barger also has concerns about the limitations of cellphones as a key part of the warning system, because some people don’t have them, forget to charge them, don’t hear them, or don’t keep them close by when they sleep. In Altadena, some residents were alerted by deputies, but for many, it was too late to save anything.
The county needs to explore other options, Barger said, and I asked if an old-fashioned air-raid type system could work.
“I’ve thought about this,” she replied. “Up in La Crescenta, you’ve got the canyon and they’ve complained about the fact that there’s bad cell service, and if there’s a fire, how would they be notified? And they want to put, at the top of the canyon, a siren, so that they know when to evacuate.”
It’ll take some work to determine feasibility, Barger said, but “sometimes getting back to basics is not a bad thing.”
On rebuilding in high-risk fire areas like Altadena, known for its tree canopies and proximity to wildlands:
“The people that live there have a right to rebuild,” Barger said, adding that she believes the issue is nonnegotiable.
“I talked to a probation officer whose home had been in the family forever, and I’m not going to look her in the eye and say, ‘You can’t build. Sorry. Climate change,’” Barger said. “But what I will say is we will provide you with all the resources that we can so that when you rebuild, you do it in a way that recognizes that you are in a high fire zone.”
Barger was talking about standard fire-hardening techniques, such as proper vent covers, fire-resistant materials and brush clearance.
“I don’t understand why it costs so much to harden a home,” Barger said, “but we need to provide either tax incentives or financial incentives for people to do that.”
I mentioned that The Times just ran a story about a Santa Rosa neighborhood that was rebuilt after being decimated by fires, and by design, there are no trees.
Barger said trees that were damaged in Altadena will have to come down, but “one of the commitments we’ve made to the community is that we will save any tree we can. My mom used to say…trees do make a community. If you go to some of these newer developments where they didn’t put trees in, it seems sterile.”
Sure, we all love trees. But California isn’t done burning.
And if sterile is safer, maybe that’s the price of survival.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
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