ALTADENA, Calif. — A neighbor did what thousands were urged not to do when he stayed behind amid mandatory wildfire evacuations and saved his home and multiple others nearby with garden hoses and the help of a few fellow residents.
Antonio Antonetti, 66, said it wasn’t in his fabric to run as flames approached his part of Altadena and began jumping from home to home, transported by embers, on the morning of Jan. 8.
“I was raised to confront my problems, my fears,” he said in the driveway of his still-standing home. “I was not educated to fly away from fear, from pain, or from anything.”
Antonetti said he was also inspired by his practice of Buddhism, which he says taught him to take action, and also by the prospect of navigating red tape, government assistance and insurance claims should he lose the property.
“I don’t want to depend on the insurance companies,” he said. “That’s way too much hassle for me.”
He said he teamed up with a few of the neighbors who stayed, including a pair of brothers, as the collective made a stand with seven garden hoses, often one in the front yard and one in the back, on a cluster of parcels amid the 14,117-acre fire that started the previous day.
Ultimately, Antonetti said, the group’s efforts saved seven homes, a patch of existence in a community he said resembled the set of an apocalyptic film.
He’s an independent television producer who said he worked early on at a fledgling Spanish-language TV network, Telemundo, now owned by NBCUniversal alongside NBC News.
The neighborhood fighters did what they could that Wednesday morning, using the hoses’ low water pressure as professional and inmate firefighters fire-hosed the community of Craftsman bungalows, Tudor homes, midcentury modern structures and Spanish-style abodes, many eventually lost to the Eaton Fire.
It’s not clear what aided the group’s unlikely success, but Antonetti said he was never afraid. A neighbor called that day and urged him to evacuate, as he had done.
Antonetti says he responded, “Are you OK coming back tomorrow and there is no house?” he recalls saying.
Antonetti wasn’t OK with that.
“I’m going to stay and make sure you don’t lose your house, and I don’t lose my house,” he said he told the neighbor.
But this week, he said he knew how people reacted to his defiant and dangerous stance as first responders urged residents to leave. “In the video that I have, people are saying that I’m out of my mind,” Antonetti said.
He devised a plan in which he’d have to save neighbors’ homes to save his own, and the island of structures that needed defense expanded, he said.
“In order to save this house, I need to save the house next door and maybe perhaps the other house next door,” he said.
So the crew hosed down property and structures, front and back, with a sense of hope as embers crossed property lines. They lost a few, including a home situated diagonally from Antonetti’s, but kept at it, he said.
“These houses all burned, north and east — they are all gone,” he said.
The story of the Eaton Fire is still a rough draft. Its cause is under investigation and it was 81% contained on Sunday. The fire destroyed an estimated 9,300 structures and damaged 1,062, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The wildfire was among multiple, including the larger Palisades Fire, that broke out on Jan. 7 amid dry, offshore winds and climate change that Earth scientists believe has increased the frequency, size and severity of wildfires.
The Eaton and Palisades fires have been blamed for 27 deaths, according to the L.A. County medical examiner.
Antonetti said he didn’t feel his life was at risk and was ready to leave if he had to, but he advises others not to defy evacuation orders.
The gravity of the fires hit him amid the aftermath. Neighbors who were three generations deep in Altadena had gathered on the land where their home once stood, Antonetti said, and he could hear them cry.
“It hit me emotionally,” he said. “I wish I could’ve saved all their homes, you know?”
Maggie Vespa reported from Altadena and Dennis Romero from San Diego.
