Why Were Black Altadena Residents Not Warned to Evacuate in Time?

Steve Hudson sifts through what remains of his home on Jan. 21, 2025, after it was destroyed in the Eaton Fire in Altadena, California.

A faint glow flickered behind the canyon ridges, and at first, it felt like a threat no different from fires past. Inside one home, Erliene Kelley, an 83-year-old grandmother, believed, as it had always gone over her 57 years in Altadena, that it would never roll down the hill toward homes. 

This time, however, the air was drier, and the winds were harsher, made even worse by a year of punishing droughts after months of record-breaking downpours last spring. Within hours, flames tore downhill, devouring tidy lawns and cherished front porches, leaving behind only the warped shells of cars and remnants of decades-old memories. 

An evacuation order never reached Kelley; she wasn’t alone in that reality. Local officials rushed to evacuate parts of Pasadena and Altadena mere minutes after the fire, now known as the Eaton Fire, erupted. Yet in her neighborhood just west of Lake Avenue, those orders didn’t arrive for hours — long after flames had already engulfed several homes. That delay has proven fatal in one of the only largely Black neighborhoods in that entire corner of Los Angeles. Seventeen residents, including Kelley, many of them older or with mobility challenges, died in an inferno they never knew was closing in.

Text messages to Kelley went unanswered, anxious calls rang hollow, and at sunrise, her family was told no home stood at the address anymore. The lethal combination of a climate-changed canyon and failing infrastructure — poorly maintained power lines and an outdated emergency alert system — proved too much to overcome. 


Read More: Generational Black Homes in LA Reduced to Ash Amid Growing Wildfires


The tragedies in this historic Black neighborhood underscore the deadly consequences that Capital B has previously reported on: a poor emergency alert system and a system unprepared to offer vulnerable residents a path to evacuation in high-risk areas. As structural failings devastate vulnerable communities when climate-driven wildfires strike, families have filed lawsuits claiming their loved ones were left to die.

Kelley’s family has joined with dozens of others in a preliminary inquiry into why the county’s alert system failed their community. They are represented by attorney Ben Crump, who has represented people in high-profile civil rights and police killing cases. Crump is also leading at least three lawsuits, including the Kelley’s, against Southern California Edison, the local utility company. The suits allege that the power company’s aging electrical equipment and its decision not to de-energize power lines during high winds was the cause of the fire and resulting deaths. The NAACP has also brought a lawsuit on behalf of victims against the company, which has shown a “repeated prioritization of profits over public safety,” Crump alleged. 

“Altadena — a community deeply rooted in Black history and homeownership — deserves justice,” said NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson. “It is our hope that the evidence is followed and just relief is provided to those impacted by the negligence of private corporations.”

Edison has publicly acknowledged the lawsuits brought against them, but the company’s preliminary review suggested that its equipment was not responsible for the fires. They are still investigating.

The family of Erliene Kelley, who died in the home that she purchased with her husband in the 1960s, has come out questioning how communication failures left residents unprepared for the fire’s swift approach. (Courtesy of the Kelley family)

An extensive investigation into the cause of the fire is currently underway by several parties, including the county government. Still, regardless of the cause, the fire shed light on America’s attempts to prepare for disasters and its inability to adapt to climate change equitably, residents and advocates have said. The rules governing safety have shifted with the wind.

“There is a lot of propaganda right now to shift blame, to make a single person or group take the blame for these fires, but the truth is, there is a lot of blame out there,” said Silas Harris, whose family lost their home and cars to the flames. Harris’ family, like Kelley, did not receive an evacuation order, but was able to evacuate at 3 a.m., roughly five hours before their home burned down, because Harris saw posts on TikTok and other social media platforms signaling the strength of the fire.

“No one was prepared,” he said. 

As a result, whole swaths of Altadena remained unaware that a fire line had breached the ridge. Multiple people who lost homes told Capital B that they spent the night, as the fire erupted, in their living rooms watching TV like everything was normal. 

Interestingly, days after the fires began, the county inadvertently sent a false mass evacuation alert message to people more than 40 miles away from the fires.

“There must be a thorough examination of the lifesaving emergency notification actions that took place the terrible evening the Eaton fire started,” Kathryn Barger, the county supervisor for the area, said in a statement on Tuesday.

America’s emergency alert system feels like a relic of simpler times. It is built on the assumption that disasters were rare and slow burning, and that a single tone on television or radio would summon everyone to instant attention. But in this new era of relentless climate threats, emergencies come too fast and too often, overwhelming patchwork infrastructures not designed for daily catastrophe. Text alerts arrive late, if at all, and are sometimes silenced by smartphone settings or overshadowed by the barrage of everyday notifications. 

Federal and state governments simply have to “do a better job of understanding how people are consuming information,” J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program, explained to Capital B.

And under the swirling panic of these storms lies another quiet crisis: Not everyone can afford to be perpetually tethered to a smartphone’s glow. Rural communities still rely on patchy wireless services, while the elderly and low-income households frequently grapple with data limits or outdated handsets. Roughly 10% of Californians might not have working mobile phones, and on average, 15% do not have broadband internet access. Wildfires don’t pause while counties figure out which towers to ping, nor wait for bandwidth to free. In that space between seconds, when a person should already be dashing to shelter, it’s too easy for a vital warning to vanish into the digital ether.

“No one was evacuating the night before. It felt like there was no reason to,” said Lydia Abraham-Traylor, who lost her rented home in the fire. “I only left because my family just kept calling me and just insisting. They just didn’t have a good feeling about it.” 

A recurring mistake 

This isn’t the first time that California’s worsening wildfire crisis has put its power lines and emergency alert system under scrutiny. 

In high-risk areas, power lines are often turned off during windstorms to prevent sparks from damaged equipment that could ignite wildfires. However, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power lacks a program for preemptive power shut-offs. Experts warn this failure may have made the destruction worse for the Palisades Fire, the other fire that swept through Los Angeles.

According to recent LADWP statements, the day after the wildfires began, they started to place power lines near fire-affected areas on “fire hold,” meaning they would not be reenergized until deemed safe by Unified Command, to prioritize public safety and prevent potential ignition risks from damaged lines.

In eastern Los Angeles, videos across social media have shown the fire that engulfed Altadena, starting at the base of a transformer operated by Southern California Edison. The Harris family said they saw at least one transformer “explode” as they evacuated their home in the early morning hours.

The remnants of a family home in Altadena. (Courtesy of Silas Harris)

Former LADWP officials have stated that the current electrical grid wasn’t designed for a changing climate. Despite Southern California being home to some of the most destructive fires in U.S. history, the agency has no proactive measures to cut power during dangerous weather conditions.


Read More: Why Upgrading the Nation’s Electric Grid Is a Racial Issue


Typically, preemptive power shut-offs greatly reduce the risk of stray sparks landing in tinder-dry brush, a common ignition source in windy conditions. Yet, flipping the switch isn’t a simple decision. Shutting off electricity means lost revenue for utilities, potential backlash from customers left in the dark, and political pressure from stakeholders. In a profit-driven landscape, these factors often override the need for preventive measures — until disaster strikes. Evidence clearly links electrical equipment to catastrophic fires, such as the 2018 Camp Fire and the 2023 Maui disaster.

The fallout from these decisions is especially severe in Black neighborhoods, where historical underinvestment in infrastructure often leaves power lines and communication systems outdated and vulnerable.

One reason Abraham-Traylor was hesitant to originally evacuate, for example, was because the frequency of blackouts in her neighborhood made it seem like the whipping winds weren’t that big of a deal. “I didn’t really think much of it because every few years we have really bad winds where the power is shut off, so, I just figured it was just going to be one of those situations,” she said.   

Who was lost 

As of Jan. 23, the raging fires have claimed at least 28 lives, with more than two-thirds coming from the close-knit Altadena neighborhood where generations of Black families had lived and passed down their homes. Among the victims were Anthony and Justin Mitchell, a father and son who had called for evacuation help but received none. Justin, who had cerebral palsy, and his father’s deaths have left their family questioning systemic failures. “I felt the system let them down,” Anthony Mitchell Jr. told the media after his brother and father’s deaths.

Anthony Mitchell Sr. with his grandchildren. (Courtesy of the Mitchell family)

Victor Shaw, another victim, perished while trying to defend his lifelong home with a garden hose. His house, meticulously maintained like the rest of his neighborhood, had been in his family for 55 years. Neighbors remembered his hardworking spirit and his commitment to keeping the community beautiful.

Rodney Nickerson, an 82-year-old retired aerospace engineer, also decided not to leave his home, confident the fire would bypass his property. He came from a long-standing and influential Black California family. His grandfather, William Nickerson Jr., founded Golden State Mutual Life, an insurance company that was once the largest Black-owned business west of the Mississippi River.

Families and neighbors now grieve the loss of lives intertwined with their community’s history, questioning what more could have been done to prevent this devastating outcome.

“It should matter how the fire started and how we were let down by so many things,” Harris said. “I lost my home.”

The post Why Were Black Altadena Residents Not Warned to Evacuate in Time? appeared first on Capital B News.

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