In the charred remnants of Altadena, a slow and painful search for victims

ALTADENA, Calif. - The air has cleared, embers have gone cold, and the slow work of recovering the dead from the Eaton Fire has entered its third day.

Search-and-rescue teams are arrayed across the charred remnants of Altadena, a Los Angeles suburb devastated by last week’s fire, going block to block, house to house.

The town is hushed and somber, residents kept out by a cordon of National Guard troops. The searchers have worked through about a quarter of the town. About 7,000 structures have burned, and authorities expect that the search will continue for at least four more days.

At least 16 bodies have been found, making the Eaton Fire the fifth-deadliest blaze in state history, according to Cal Fire data. An additional eight people have been confirmed dead in the Palisades Fire, which swept through Pacific Palisades.

Authorities expect they will not be the last.

“Unfortunately, it’s probably going to be a lot more,” said Reserve Deputy Sheriff Dan Paige, a search-and-rescue operations leader at the Altadena station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

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Searching for the dead in the ruins of Altadena is slow, methodical work. It can be difficult to identify human remains amid the ash and wreckage of a burned-out home, much of it coated in a uniform gray.

“Drywall looks almost identical to bone fragments,” Paige said. “It can be very deceiving.”

The search in Altadena is being conducted by at least 100 people led by California Regional Urban Search and Rescue teams, made up of firefighters and others from throughout the state, plus FEMA officials; medical doctors; structural specialists to inspect buildings, roads and bridges; and anthropologists to help identify human remains.

They begin their day with a morning briefing and end it with a decontamination wash. Some are veterans of other disasters, such as the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, but even so, they are astonished by the scope of destruction here.

When they arrived, one said, “It felt a tad bit overwhelming how much we were going to need to search.”

The teams wear hard hats and respirators. They carry shovels, picks and hoes. At each destroyed home or business, they first determine whether the structure is safe, and look for hazards such as gas leaks. Then they step gingerly through the wreckage, examining it closely, sifting through metal and ash, tamping down spots, kneeling for a closer look.

“As soon as we identify something that looks like human, we immediately stop and call in an anthropologist and our coroner’s office, our homicide bureau,” Paige said. “Everything just slows down. And they treat this whole thing like a big crime scene.”

Some of the personnel focused on search-and-rescue are based at the Altadena station, handling new search missions as they come up; others are out in the neighborhoods, doing a house-to-house grid search. One group working with the Humane Society is rescuing animals. Sheriff’s deputies have collected chickens, goats, cats and other animals, to try to reunite them with owners or feed those left behind.

Before this fire, the search-and-rescue needs of Altadena primarily related to hikers in the San Gabriel Mountains. The trails through the hills attract thousands of residents and tourists, and the sheriff’s station here gets regular calls about people missing in that environment.

They have never encountered anything like this. They must look in many places: houses and cars, shops and sheds, churches and schools. The devastation goes on for block after block.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna told reporters Monday that every day of searching yields more human remains.

“That is not easy work - it’s very sad to report. And I believe that work is not only going to continue, but I believe we’ll continue to find remains,” he said.

Some residents have been frustrated by the inability to return to their homes within the security perimeters set up in Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Luna acknowledged that and asked for patience from the community.

“People are saying, ‘I just want to go look at my house, and I want to see what’s left,’” Luna said. “We know that, but we have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors. Please be patient with us. There’s a lot of hazards in the area.”

There are fallen trees and downed power lines across the roads. Burned-out bridges. Utility trucks blocking roads while doing repairs.

But as the recovery effort continued Monday, the prospect of strong winds focused attention on the possible spread of new fires. A red-flag warning is in place for parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, with wind gusts of up to 70 mph forecast between 4 a.m. Tuesday and noon Wednesday - strong enough to potentially cause “explosive fire growth,” according to the National Weather Service.

The Weather Service on Monday widened the area facing a “particularly dangerous situation” red-flag warning, which the agency reserves for “the extreme of the extreme fire weather scenarios.”

The forecast prompted Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to urge residents to heed any new evacuation orders.

“My top priority, and that of everyone involved, is to protect lives as these winds approach our city,” Bass said during a news conference.

Paige, who has lived in Altadena for 25 years, responded to the Eaton Fire shortly after it was reported around 6:15 p.m. Jan. 7. He said he had been driving across Los Angeles toward the Palisades Fire when the dispatcher reported another small blaze in Eaton Canyon, next to Altadena. He heard it had covered about 10 acres, moving quickly through heavy fuel, fanned by roaring winds. Paige was near Universal Studios in Hollywood when he sighed and told one of his partners he had to turn around.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This sounds like this could be bad.”

All through the evening and into the next day, Paige and his colleagues from the Altadena station raced around trying to get people to evacuate, amid flames and falling trees, downed power lines and almost impenetrable smoke. Thirty to 40 ambulances, he estimated, were also driving through Altadena trying to help get residents to safety.

Even though he’d been a patrol officer in Altadena for a decade and knew every street, he got lost several times, as did many of the residents he came across, people fleeing for their lives in the wrong direction.

“So many other people were lost, too,” he said. “Imagine shaking a hornet’s nest. People were going in every direction.”

In between rescue missions, he evacuated his 60-pound tortoise, Speedy. His own home survived, but his brother’s house burned down.

On the streets, he encountered residents in broken-down cars. People on foot frantically waving down police. Animals roaming around.

Police vehicles were broadcasting announcements urging people to evacuate. As the situation deteriorated, Paige recalled urging people to leave in the most extreme way he could.

“I was screaming at them, ‘You’re going to die if you don’t leave right now,’” he recalled.

He feared for his own life several times. And the realization that many people did not make it out has been devastating for him and the rest of his colleagues in Altadena. Eating and sleeping have been difficult, he said, but there is so much work left to do.

“That’s the hardest part,” he said. “Just knowing that we left people behind.”