Introducing: To Altadena, with Love

"To Altadena, With Love”- A Five-Part Series on Resilience, History, and Rebuilding, blends history, education, and personal stories to highlight Altadena’s legacy and the devastating impact of the Eaton Fire. Through firsthand accounts, we explore the fight to rebuild—not just homes, but a community that has survived against all odds. This series honors the people who built this community, the history they fought to preserve, and the future they refuse to let go of. “To Altadena, with Love” was created and produced by Black Information Network News Anchor Mimi Brown

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Got a call an alert about seven o'clock that night,
and my neighbor says, hey, Edgar, there's an alert. There's
a fast moving fire. We're leaving now. I'm like, what
you know? So I didn't believe that it would move
that fast within hours from Edon Canyon. It was all
the way down to them.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
And the smoke and the heat, and you can feel
you can smell it, you can taste it, and we're like,
what are we doing? Like our lives are on the
line right now.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Then the houses around me started to explode boom, and
I hear another boom. Embers started to fall.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
You can see him hitting the ground.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
And I looked at my house and I said, well,
it's no more, nothing more I can do. It's like
somebody took a bomb in Altadena and dropped it. All
the houses were cleared out.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
And everybody is on fire. It's not gonna make it.
The fire is there.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
People we were holding on. We were holding it on
for a fire truck to show up, something, a plane
or drop some water something. Then come the fire hydrants were.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
I saw some fire trucks, not as many as you
would think when your town is on fire. Maybe they
knew what we didn't know, which was that it was
going to be a rap anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
They just watched the house burner. You could check a
bucket of water and put some of these fires out.
The help wasn't there.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
We're the ones who made this community attractive. We're the
ones who sustained this space and maintain these properties. We created.
What is this Diana vibe. We're going to rebuild. That's that.
It is the plan.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
I'm Mimi Brown and in this series you'll hear stories
told firsthand.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
By the people who lived them.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
These are their voices, their memories, and their truth to
Alta Dina with love,