The Eaton and Palisades Fires destroyed the homes and businesses of roughly 40 current and former Occidental professors, staff members and students, according to “Life After Fire,” an article in the Occidental Magazine. In the aftermath of the January 2025 fires, The Occidental interviewed seven Occidental community members who were affected by the Eaton Fire. Here are four of their stories a year later.
Senior Director of Administration for the Mary Norton Clapp Library Brian Chambers
The Eaton Fire destroyed roughly two-thirds of Brian Chambers’ vinyl collection, or around 600 records. The remaining third of Chambers’ collection — the records his wife “doesn’t mind being away from the house,” he said in our interview last year — was in the Mary Norton Clapp Library during the fire, where Chambers works as the senior director of administration.
Over the past year, Chambers said he has acquired between 150 and 200 records to replace those he lost. He bought them at shows and received them for free at fire relief events hosted by music distributors.
According to Chambers, most of his new additions are not replacements of what he lost.
“If I’ve been on a show or something, it’s like, ‘I need records,'” Chambers said. “It’s a nice freedom that I haven’t always had.”
Chambers said his family finalized their plans for a new house on their property in west Altadena.
“We’re very excited about them,” Chambers said of the plans.
Chambers and his family worked with a group of designers with ties to the community called the Altadena Collective on the plans. Chambers said the Altadena Collective is specifically interested in Jane’s Cottage style houses, which were once predominant in Altadena and northern Pasadena.
“When we saw the drawings for those, we were just like, ‘Those are beautiful, and we loved those houses when we were in the neighborhood — and we can have one of those?’ That’s what got us excited,” Chambers said.
The Chambers’ new Jane’s Cottage style home is going through the county’s permitting process, and Chambers has already received bids from contractors for the rebuild.
“We’re hoping to get construction started in the next six to eight weeks,” Chambers said.
According to the LA Times, the Eaton Fire destroyed nearly 9,400 structures, the majority of which were in Altadena, about a 20 minute drive from Occidental. Nineteen people died in the fire and all but one lived in west Altadena, a historically Black neighborhood that did not receive electronic evacuation warnings or timely evacuation orders. According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 40 percent of Altadena’s single family homes burned down in the fire, which began the night of Jan. 7, 2025.
Chambers said his family — he and his wife have two teenage daughters — lived in a ranch style house before the fire. They bought the home in 2022, and Chambers said that the fire hit just as they were starting to build a community beyond their immediate neighbors in Altadena.
“It felt like things were starting to come together,” Chambers said. “That Christmas, two weeks before the fire, we did a Christmas party with everybody and we all walked down to Christmas Tree Lane together. The kids had their group … it was really nice.”
After the fire destroyed their home, Chambers said he and his family moved into a house in north Burbank. As his family was searching for homes, they shared rental listings with his next door neighbors in Altadena, who also lost their home.
“Their 15 year old daughter is the girls’ best friend,” Chambers said.
When Chambers’ now-landlord called to move forward with their lease agreement, Chambers learned that his old neighbors wouldn’t be too far away.
“They ended up renting the apartment right behind the house that we’re renting,” he said.
Now, the families’ kids “just bounce back and forth between the two places,” Chambers said. His neighbors also plan to rebuild in Altadena, and recently came over to compare notes on contractors.
According to Chambers, Burbank is more active than Altadena, which is great for his daughters but not for him and his wife.
“It’s loud and busy. But the girls are within a mile of movie theaters and shops and restaurants,” Chambers said.
Chambers said Occidental went “above and beyond” in supporting him after the fire.
“The students, the faculty, the staff — the institution itself was a microcosm of what I saw with Los Angeles and the world and the outpouring of support,” Chambers said.
Because the Chambers bought their house in Altadena only a few years before the fire, its value was reflected in their insurance coverage.
“We have talked to quite a few people that were like, ‘we bought in 2010, or 2014, and we hadn’t had the value of our insurance coverage catch up with the market value of these homes,’” Chambers said. “So we are some of the few fortunate ones that have the money to rebuild.”
Chambers, a named plaintiff in a lawsuit against Southern California Edison, said it is clear that the power company’s electrical transformer started the fire.
“My anger is at what we’ve gone through over the past year,” Chambers said. “It’s an extreme disruption of life — for me, for my family and for my community.”
According to Chambers, he was in survival mode for the first six to eight months after the fire, thinking about what he had to do to keep his family safe and provided for.
“Probably sometime around Thanksgiving it started to get a bit exhausting. Like, ‘Oh my God, what happened?’” Chambers said.
According to Chambers, he has started to feel the weight of the fire a lot more over the past two to three months. “But we’ve got good people in our lives,” he added.
“We got to see a lot of them during the winter break and have some really good times with everybody,” Chambers said. “It was just sometimes in different spaces.”
Senior Director for Advancement Services in the Office of Institutional Advancement Natalie Greenhouse ’10
Senior Director for Advancement Services in the Office of Institutional Advancement Natalie Greenhouse ’10 said via email that her family is uncertain about the path they will take with their property in west Altadena after their home was destroyed by the Eaton Fire.
“It is hard to say that we are truly in a ‘rebuilding’ process, and the year has mostly been marked by grief, logistics and waiting,” Greenhouse wrote. “Our journey has taken us to consider an alternative path that feels best for our family. We’ve shifted our energy toward roots in Eagle Rock (where our kids have been in school, even pre-fire) and are moving forward with projects on a home we purchased in the fall.”
Greenhouse said via email that the rebuilding efforts are mostly taking longer than expected.
“The community remains fragmented and displaced. Even those whose homes remain are still not living there due to smoke damage and insurance claims,” Greenhouse wrote.
Student Wiley Calkins
On the night of Jan. 7, 2025, Wiley Calkins (senior) fought the Eaton Fire with his dad at their home in Altadena. While they were able to keep their home from burning down, the fire destroyed the Calkins’ pool cabana and outdoor furniture.
Calkins said his family rebuilt the cabana with new tiles after the fire and tracked down the exact furniture that burnt down. A statue of the Buddha’s head charred in the blaze remains in the refurbished space.
“It’s back to normal now,” Calkins said of his backyard. “Nicer than it was before.”
Calkins said his family expected to replace their HVAC system after the fire but did not need to, although they did replace their water filtration system.
According to Calkins, his neighborhood is quieter than it used to be. Across the street, there are empty lots where homes stood a year ago, now overgrown with vegetation. Ivy has grown back on a concrete wall in the family’s driveway. Above the wall, Calkins said that he helped his dad rebuild a wooden fence that burned down.
Calkins said that if his house had been destroyed in the fire, his family would have moved out of Altadena.
“Altadena’s not insanely expensive, but to rebuild our crib would have been a heinous amount of money … we were fortunate because we got it for cheap way back,” Calkins said.
Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas Amy Lyford
On the eve of the Eaton Fire’s first anniversary, Amy Lyford, an art historian and the Arthur G. Coons Professor in the History of Ideas, dropped in at the Altadena Ale & Wine House for the first time since the fire.
Before the Eaton Fire engulfed Lyford’s home of 25 years in northeast Altadena, Lyford said she was a weekly regular at the bar on Fair Oaks Avenue across from Mountain View Cemetery.
According to Lyford, the watering hole encapsulated Altadena’s richness and diversity — of age and gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Inside, where there are Dodgers bobbleheads batting from behind the bar, dollar bills dangling from the ceiling and old Westerns playing on the TV, there had been a “more fluid way of having a social network that was very Altadena,” Lyford said.
“People would bring a book, or you could go by yourself and you always saw somebody you knew, and there were always new people and old-timers, and younger and older … it was that kind of place,” she said.
Inside the Ale & Wine House in January 2026, Lyford talked with the owner, Gail Casburn, and her friends Matt, who she had not seen since before the fire, and Mike.
“We didn’t plan it, it was like we just gravitated toward going there,” Lyford said.
They stayed until around midnight, Lyford said, “just talking about where we were and how we felt. So it’s really nice that that place still exists.”
“Going in and seeing them, I mean, they brought tears to my eyes — big hugs,” Lyford said. “But then we were all like, well, we’re still here. We survived it. We didn’t go away.”
According to Lyford, Altadenans “scattered to the wind” after the fire.
“You don’t even know where people are. You can’t even figure out how to get in touch with them, because we would just see each other in real life,” Lyford said.
Lyford said the loss of her community has been the most painful part of recovering from the fire.
“What the fire did, because of the scale, is that it tore up, it burned up, literally, some of these places of community connection,” Lyford. “Not just the individual people, but the places we knew, if we went there, we would run into people we knew.”
Lyford’s return to the Ale & Wine House reminded her that spaces of community gathering are essential.
“Walking in and seeing those people, it’s not that it gave me hope, but it made me realize that the community isn’t completely torn asunder,” Lyford said.
Knowledge lost in the fire
Lyford, who said she is “the family archivist,” lost a trove of professional and personal research materials when her home burned down.
Lyford published a book about 20th Century sculptor Isamu Noguchi in 2018. She said she lost several Banker’s Boxes full of research materials about Noguchi in the fire. Inside the boxes were Noguchi’s FBI files, which Lyford acquired after taking trips to the National Archives and filing painstaking FOIA requests, and research materials from years of travel to the Hawaii State Archives and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
Lyford said she published some of her research about Noguchi in her 2018 monograph, but not all of it. According to Lyford, people forget how research is so physical.
“That’s what excites me about it. I go and look at something that this other person from so long ago actually touched,” Lyford said.
According to Lyford, one of the more painful aspects of the fire was losing records of her family history. Letters her parents wrote while her father served in World War II were destroyed by the fire, as were her dad’s dog tags.
Lyford’s house was itself a memory of her late husband, as well as her peers and friends in the art world. According to Lyford, in 2017, the couple planned to renovate their midcentury-modern house when Lyford’s husband died suddenly in a motorcycle crash. When the renovation finished in 2020, Lyford filled the house with artwork from her friends and colleagues, including Occidental Professor Emeriti Linda Besemer and Professor Mary Beth Heffernan.
Lyford said she now lives in a home she purchased last year in Echo Park. She has no plans to sell her property in Altadena.
Lyford is a litigant against Southern California Edison. If Lyford’s group wins its lawsuit, she said she expects a higher settlement from the electric utility company if she does not sell her property.
According to ABC News, the electric utility company’s CEO said in October 2025 that its equipment could “likely” be found responsible for the Eaton Fire.
Lyford said her attorneys will have her property’s soil toxicity tested.
“That’s going to impact if I go hang out there and put a tent up,” Lyford said.
Lyford said it will be interesting to see Altadena in three years.
“There’s pieces left, and we’re all waiting to see how it gets reconstructed,” Lyford said.
Contact James Miller at jmiller4@oxy.edu
