Perez insisted on trying to save his property and his neighbours’ homes along El Molino Avenue. He ripped the filters from two water pitchers and doused the ground, his wooden fence and every ember he could reach
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Tristin Perez chose not to evacuate, but try to save his property from burning down. Reuters
Flames were licking his fence, he was choking on smoke, and bullets were whizzing by his leg. Despite it all, Tristin Perez never left his Altadena home during the deadly Eaton fire.
The 34-year-old carpenter felt he had no choice but to stay despite the life-threatening conditions. A police officer told him and his neighbors to evacuate early on Wednesday morning as the fire raced down the hillside above them.
Instead, Perez insisted on trying to save his property and his neighbours’ homes along El Molino Avenue. But he didn’t even have a garden hose. He ripped the filters from two water pitchers and doused the ground, his wooden fence and every ember he could reach.
“Your front yard is on fire, palm trees lit up – it looked like something out of a movie,” Perez told Reuters in an interview in his driveway. “I did everything I could to stop the line and save my house, help save their houses.”
His one-story yellow duplex survived. So did two more homes next door. Across the street, entire houses burned to the ground. A single brick chimney stood alone in the wreckage.
“When you look across the street… If I wasn’t here, that is what would have happened,” he said. “I felt so bad for them. It’s absolutely awful.”
Perez mourned the losses here. He moved to Altadena three years ago and rented his two-bedroom unit. He fell in love with the tranquil and tight-knit community of about 40,000 people north of Los Angeles, where neighbors are friendly and look out for each other.
As of late Saturday, officials said the Eaton fire was 15% contained, and that the fire threat remains high across the Los Angeles area. Overall, six simultaneous blazes that have ripped across Los Angeles County neighborhoods since Tuesday have killed at least 16 people and damaged or destroyed 12,000 structures.
Eleven of them were killed in the Eaton fire here. The death toll is expected to grow when firefighters are able to conduct house-to-house searches.
In Altadena, fire crews were walking house to house with shovels, looking for hot spots that were still burning. Sheriff’s deputies patrolled the streets and blocked residents from returning to their homes at checkpoints.
FAST-MOVING FLAMES
Perez provided a harrowing account of how the Eaton fire rapidly intensified early on Wednesday. The first indication something was wrong came on Tuesday evening. His neighbors were outside staring at a faint glow far in the distance.
“To be honest, I didn’t really consider it too much of a threat just because it was way out there,” he said.
Then the winds began to howl and blow toward them. The fire was coming right at them at alarming speed. “It looked like it was sprinting down a football field. It was flying,” Perez said.
Then he and his neighbors lost sight of the flames. Perez said that was the most nerve-wracking part of the night.
That soon changed. Looking up his street 200 yards away, entire homes and businesses were engulfed in flames. Perez told his neighbors to leave. “I was willing to go to the end. I saw the firefighters, e