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There was too much for Donny Kincey to save. Flames were barreling into Altadena, where Kincey’s relatives had lived for four generations, toward the homes his family had purchased after they escaped the Tulsa race massacre.
The 46-year-old second-grade teacher and artist had stayed behind even as he saw fire raging across the hillside last Tuesday night. He was determined to protect his parents’ home and his own. But hours on, embers began to set Poppyfields Drive aflame and a powerful gust, the same winds bringing destruction into his beloved neighborhood, knocked him to the ground.
There was nothing he could do but pray. Pray for the things and places he loved. Pray for Altadena and everything its thriving Black community meant to him and so many others.
The embers and flames kept coming. Hurricane-force winds, with gusts of up to 100mph (161 km/h), had created raging conflagrations across Los Angeles from Altadena to the Pacific Palisades that would become among the worst wildfires in California history. Within days, the fires would lay waste to 60 sq miles (97 sq km), kill at least 27 people, and destroy more than 12,000 homes.
The sense of loss in Altadena is overwhelming. These were not just homes, but history – and a way for many families to maintain a foothold, and a future, in a city that has grown increasingly unaffordable. Longtime residents like Kincey are still trying to come to terms with everything that has been lost and what happens next.
“There’s nowhere like my hometown,” Kincey said. “I know how special our city is. Jackie Robinson’s from here. So many athletes and entertainers and singers. It’s an untapped resource for the history of our people in California.”
To Kincey, Altadena was like a country town in the city. The community had the charms of rural living, with chickens and the horses he would routinely see walking down the street, but was barely 15 miles north-east of downtown Los Angeles.
His grandmother was one of nine children who came to California from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where their home was lost to fire in a violent attack by white supremacists who killed scores of Black residents and burned down homes, businesses and churches. The family eventually settled in Altadena, buying three properties in the Los Angeles suburb – part of a largely middle-class wave of Black people who moved to the area in the mid-century.
The community of 12,000 people has remained diverse, and about 18% of residents are Black while nearly a third are Latino, according to US Census data. The Black homeownership rate in Altadena is nearly double the national rate at 81.5%.
Kincey was born and raised in the neighborhood, and grew up in the same house as his grandmother. Though he lived in different places around the world, he always came back here – there was nowhere else he wanted to be. “It’s the best place,” he said in an interview this week in Pasadena, the scorched earth visible behind him.
After he finished work last Tuesday and learned about a fire, he knew what to do. “We’re always on alert on the mountain, knowing that there are going to be wildfires,” he said. “It’s just part of life.”
He headed to his parents’ house at the top of the hill, right up against the wildland. They had left town that morning for Kincey’s sister’s home in Bakersfield, and he got to work spraying down the property like he had seen his dad do so many times in the past.
But the blaze was approaching in the form of embers. “It was so close, it singed my hair,” he said. “I could smell my hair burning.”
He ran into the home and collected the most important thing he could think of – his father’s artwork. Kincey had grown up with art made by his father, and it was a symbol of home. Then, he said goodbye to the house he had grown up in and headed to his house.
The fire was racing down the mountain by the time Kincey arrived home, but he never believed his own house would burn. “In my mind, the whole neighborhood would have to go up before my house would catch fire, so I was just putting out ember fires to protect the house and my neighbors’,” he said.
He decided not to leave when the evacuation order came in. “I really thought I could save our block,” he said. As a palm tree lit up, it sent embers cascading into homes like bullets, he said: “The water went out and I just had to watch everything burn.”
Kincey had stayed until it was clear there was nothing he could do, and the wind knocked him into the ground. At that moment, he thought of his great-aunt, who had been like a grandmother to him and lived had in this home. He thought of how these houses represented the legacies of so many Black families.
When he was able to stand, Kincey fled to his truck, leaving behind all of his own art, and finally left. He drove over fallen power lines and past countless homes consumed by flames.
In its race through Altadena, the Eaton fire killed 15 people and destroyed more than 7,000 buildings. Kincey drove to his house hours after the fire had moved through and saw that the flames had taken nearly everything. Most of his house had collapsed, although the bedroom where his great-aunt once slept was charred but standing.
Each burned lot offers a glimpse at lives derailed by disaster. Just down the road from Kincey’s home, collapsed walls reveal the remnants of a kitchen – pitchers scorched an onyx color and cookbooks with half burned pages. Kincey shuddered when he thought back on the image of an engulfed tree spewing embers into his neighborhood.
“I love the palm trees, but I don’t want to see them in my neighborhood anymore,” he said.
Kincey has spent recent days reckoning with anger and hurt – frustration over the fact that no one saved his community and sadness about outsiders looking to take advantage of the crisis and buy up the burned-out lots. He fears how the disaster will affect Altadena’s surviving elders who won’t have time to rebuild and mourns those who perished – elders have so far made up the majority of the identified victims of the fire.
“Nobody came into my neighborhood at all. No megaphone telling us to get out, no assistance at all,” he said. Kincey is grateful for the firefighters and other first responders deployed across the region, but said he couldn’t help but feel like the community was left to burn. “I know the vultures are circling right now,” he said.
Fears about displacement due to insurmountable building costs and gentrification are widespread. “Altadena is not for sale,” said Jose Velazquez, whose home survived the fire; the houses next door perished despite his efforts to save them. The 30-year-old wants to see his neighbors be able to return. “Everybody wants to come back to this community. They’re pushing to not get bought out,” he said.
Kincey hopes for the same. “I want to see what can be done to keep those homes with Black families to preserve our legacy in Altadena,” he said. “Not enough people know how big of a deal having a Black neighborhood on this side of town is. There aren’t any others.”
Amid all the loss, Kincey has been heartened by the enormous outpouring of support he’s received. Countless people – co-workers, friends and students – have reached out to offer support or even temporary housing. Someone set up a GoFundMe for him that has raised more than $66,000. In a few days, he plans to return to the classroom, and one day soon he’ll go back to Altadena.
“We’re not going anywhere. We’ll never go anywhere,” Kincey said. “There’s no other city, no other town, like ours.”
