Standing beside his bicycle, Juan Carranza told neighbors how National Guard soldiers had recently stopped his nephew from serving him hot Mexican food on the outskirts of Altadena.
Nearby, next to the avocado trees, Kristopher Carbone’s generator pumped out the last dismal lava.
Walking up the street, Paul Harter pulled his 7-year-old son, Gavin, in a stroller, both of them urgently looking for one of the portable toilets brought in by emergency workers.
There was no electricity, no safe running water, no natural gas. However, the remaining residents of Altadena considered themselves lucky because their homes had survived.
It’s been more than a week since strong winds pushed the Eaton fire down a mountain and into the city of 43,000, killing at least 16 people and destroying thousands of homes. Since then, the authorities have sealed off the town and locked out those who live here.
Officials believe that no one should be living in an evacuation zone, regardless of where they are or their belongings. Power crews continue to clear downed power lines, while crews with chain saws clear fallen trees and debris. Burned homes left a mass of toxic waste, and ash is still spreading in the air.
But many people have insisted on staying in their homes, living off what they have in their cupboards and the generosity of volunteers. Many never left and miraculously survived the inferno that tore through Eaton Canyon and headed for their suburban streets.
As the fire burns businesses, churches and homes in the morning of Jan. 8, Shane Jordan ran around his neighborhood piece. He opened the pipes, placed the sprinkler head on the roof of another neighbor and broke through the coals the size of stones.
Mr. Jordan said the firefighters were not visible, and he thought they might be dealing with a wildfire in the mountains. Somehow, the Eaton fire damaged much of Altadena but stopped just short of his neighborhood on the southern edge of the fire ring.
“It’s just these three square blocks that did it,” said Mr. Jordan. Seeing the damage elsewhere, he said, made him feel like “we’re the last little road.”
Mr. Jordan, a father of two who plays bass guitar and owns a party music company, now falls asleep after dark on the couch and keeps a gun and a few shells in his pocket in case he needs to scare off robbers.
He wakes up at sunrise, boils water for coffee over a small propane fire pit in his backyard and walks around the property, clearing fallen branches from his neighbors’ yards. He eats apples and pistachios and, sometimes, a balloon sandwich provided by volunteers. Every few days, he bathes in his Jacuzzi, still filled with hot tub water from the fire.
“I’m just trying to save everything, because I don’t know how long it will take,” she said.
Los Angeles County officials said Thursday that it could be another week — at least — until people are allowed in the area to check on their homes or what’s left of them.
“We don’t want people going back into the area and getting hurt,” said Anthony C. Marrone, Los Angeles County fire chief.
Those who took it out of Altadena may have never left the area or gone back before the National Guard arrived days after the fire started. Since then, members of the Guard have set up a heavy cordon around the city and most of them have limited access to emergency workers, utility workers and journalists. The guard also, in many cases, stopped people from leaving their loved ones, residents said.
Mr. Jordan was prevented from handing over a portable power station to someone he hoped would recharge it outside the exit. Some residents reported that they could not find food, medicine or toiletries on the outskirts of their neighborhoods.
“I told them, this is a crime,” said Mr. Carranza, 67, a matchmaker who has lived in the area for nearly half his life, was left behind in the fire. “We cannot accept anything.”
Many here believe that the authorities are deliberately blocking repatriation to force more people out of the evacuation zone.
“They are pressuring us,” said Mr. Carbone, 54, who works for the Los Angeles County school district.
Deputy Raquel Utley, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, urged residents to evacuate due to ongoing hazards including air quality and lack of utilities. He said the deputies will not force people out of the area, but once the residents leave they will not re-enter.
He said, for a long time, the security guards allowed people to be dropped off by friends and relatives. “But then again,” he said, “it’s just good that if they need that thing, it’s best for them to go.”
However, some people say they stay because they want to protect their homes if another fire breaks out. Some are so tied to their homes that they can’t imagine going anywhere else – even without clean running water and electricity.
“We’ve been here 56 years, and I wouldn’t go anywhere,” said James Triplett, 63, who spent much of last week sitting in a chair in the driveway and chatting with everyone who passed by.
Without gas, cold, and dark nights have been the most difficult part, said most of the residents. Temperatures dropped to 40 degrees at times, and many people slept in warm clothes and bundled up, their homes the size of unfurnished rooms.
There is also the difficulty of navigating one’s home in the dark.
Mr. Triplett has a set of solar powered yard lights that he recharges from the sun every day. At night, he gathers them to guide him in the house.
Elsewhere in Altadena, high up on a hill near where the Eaton fire started, flames crossed several rows of homes and left most of them intact in a brutal and random manner of destruction.
“We’re stuck on an island,” said Tori Kinard, 37, a tennis pro who is stuck at home with her brother and parents; they subsist in part on cans of Campbell’s Soup.
Nearby, David and Jane Pierce pass boxes of dehydrated food. Avid backpackers (he has summited Mount Whitney five times and she twice), they eat a dehydrated diet of beef Bolognese and pasta primavera that they find at REI, an outdoor store.
A few streets over, retired firefighter Ross Torstenbo stayed behind to hose off his house during the fire. Outside in the yard, he had set up a camping solar shower with plastic filled with water that was heated by the sun.
In order to get his medication, he said he had asked his daughter, who lives outside the burn area, to pick up her pills from the pharmacy, meet him at the checkpoint and “throw them in line.”
In the wasteland where Altadena has become, any sign of normal life is welcome.
Residents were shocked and delighted when the garbage trucks rolled over on Wednesday, the usual day for dumping garbage in the area. Mr. Jordan ran to put the trash in his neighbors’ bins and put them in a nearby place. Others scrambled to fill bins with fallen palm leaves and tree limbs.
Joyce deVicariis, 75, fled the first night of the fire to a friend’s house in Sierra Madre, a nearby town. But the flames threatened that house too. He decided to just go back to his hometown in Pasadena, south of Altadena.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “And I’m glad I got in, because you can’t get in here.”
Her husband, 92, went to the doctor last week and was repeatedly prevented from returning to his wife until he found a sympathetic security guard.
When the garbage man came this week, Ms. deVicariis was overjoyed after days of cleaning up the lawn.
“Here he comes,” he said. “My beautiful man. I have never been so happy to see a trash man in my life.”
Some isolated settlements remain in the Pacific Palisades area, where a separate fire has destroyed thousands of homes and is believed to have killed at least nine people.
When the fire broke out last week, Jeff Ridgway’s friends and neighbors fled, but he stayed behind to protect the 18-unit building where he has spent the past 32 years and works as a property manager.
Mr. Ridgway, 67, threw buckets of lake water at burning cypress trees in the front yard. The building survived, and Mr. Ridgway has endured there ever since, cleaning out sour food from his residents’ refrigerators, watering plants and trying to sweep up the pulverized coal that swirls around the area.
Several of his friends in Los Angeles – who were denied entry to the evacuation zone – persuaded the police to deliver care packages containing tangerines and dog treats up the mountain to him.
“I’m camping, actually,” he said. “When it gets dark, I’ll go to sleep.”
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting from Pasadena, Calif. Ken Bensinger again Ryan Mc contributed reporting from Altadena, Calif. Claire Moses and contribute to reporting.
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