A home destroyed by the Eaton Fire stands in front a home that survived in Altadena. Calif., on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Tim Kang has been evacuated from his home in La Crescenta for nearly a week, despite never officially receiving a mandatory evacuation order.
Kang, who lives with his two brothers, said they woke up around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning and left an hour later once they saw the Eaton fire was moving west at an “alarming rate.”
“It was super apocalyptic,” Kang said. “There was like trash everywhere, trees, shrubbery, huge cloud of black smoke in the background, no power, everything just felt like, ‘Oh man, the world’s ending.’”
They tried going to Highland Park, but the smoke was so bad that Kang developed a bad cough. After spending a few nights in Santa Clarita, he decided to stay with his girlfriend in Pasadena.
“I was mostly irritated by the smell of the smoke,” Kang said. “Started getting body chills, my headache was just really bad for two days, my body chills kind of got worse … I was coughing all throughout.”
They haven’t had running water in the kitchen for a week since his girlfriend’s sink broke right before the fires, and they’ve only been drinking bottled water due to concerns about the water quality in the area. Most of the grocery stores in the area were sold out of bottled water when the city first issued a boil notice so they had to get it from a liquor store.
