Escaping to Altadena Only to Flee Flames
January’s wildfires impact historic Black communities in Southern California.
Adam Mahoney
ALTADENA , CALIF. — A great-grandmother displaced by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and 2017’s Hurricane Harvey thought she would find refuge in the sunlit canyons of Los Angeles. With the Eaton fire, she discovered climate change knows no bounds.
January’s wildfires led to at least 28 deaths and the loss of thousands of homes in Los Angeles County, already in a homelessness crisis. “Becoming a statistic after all of this time and all of the papers and all of the books that I’ve read around climate change and environmental injustices, to then now be a part of it, is especially painful,” says Chris Schell, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “But we’re all in the thick of the climate crisis.” The Altadena native’s grandparents, mother, brother, uncle and aunt all lost their homes.
Altadena once promised safer streets and homeownership for those escaping the Jim Crow South. “My grandparents and my great-grandparents moved here and chose this land for a reason and [because of a] connection to this land that most Black people lost when migrating,” says Cienna Benn, a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, whose working-class family was displaced. “I’m afraid that we’re gonna lose that connection too now.”
As California reels, families who once found solace in nature face environmental and economic ruin. Meanwhile, some insurance companies are withdrawing coverage. The question remains not just how to rebuild, but how to reframe our approach to climate threats.
Adam Mahoney is the climate and environment reporter at Capital B who has reported from more than a dozen U.S. states, Palestine, Mexico, Uganda and Vietnam.
