On the night the Eaton Fire began, Edgar McGregor stood on a dark Altadena street, held up his cellphone and began recording as the sky glowed orange behind him.
In a calm voice, the 24-year-old amateur climate scientist urged people who live between Eaton Wash and Allen Avenue to pack up and prepare to evacuate immediately.
Then the wind came out. It drowned out his audio. So he started screaming.
“It’s almost here!” McGregor said. “Don’t wait for an official evacuation advisory. If you think you should leave, then leave! Leave!”
At 7:17 p.m., he uploaded the 31-second video to his Facebook page, where he has thousands of followers.
At 10:22 p.m., he posted: “You shouldn’t sleep tonight. If you’re somewhere in the hills, now’s the time.” [to] Stay up all night. Fire risk is very high. Everyone in Altadena must prepare to evacuate, including those on the west side. ”
Wind-fueled embers from the Eaton Fire fly over a house on Vined Avenue in Altadena on January 7th.
(Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times)
People took his advice. It is now said that he saved many lives.
McGregor, who lives with his parents in his childhood home in Altadena, turned his passion for weather into the Altadena Weather and Climate Facebook page three years ago, where he primarily writes useful micro-weather forecasts for his neighbors. . Given the popularity of the San Gabriel Mountains and its hiking trails, his number of followers grew. And his warning on the night of January 7, urging people to evacuate, elevated him to the status of Altadena’s hero.
“Edgar McGregor is a true American hero,” Tori Silverman, 37, of Altadena, wrote on her page.
“Thank you Edgar McGregor! I didn’t sleep and lived like you said,” another follower wrote.
And another: “Edgar definitely saved my life.”
McGregor studied climate science at San Jose State University and began writing pages while there. He is an intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and works as a Recreation Services Leader for the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation.
His Facebook page is known for sober details rather than alarmist hype. So when he said the Eaton Fire was life-threatening, his thousands of supporters knew he wasn’t exaggerating.
McGregor said in an interview, “I’m very careful in choosing my words.” “It’s not just about warning people that the situation is right. Anyone can go online and incite fear and create fear strategies. I don’t want to overstate the storm unless it’s necessary to exaggerate it. I don’t mean to exaggerate.”
The deadly Eaton Fire, caused by wind gusts of 160 miles per hour near Altadena, needed a lot of publicity.
“We knew this was serious because Edgar’s posts are always so consistent. So when he said to get ready, we were,” he told the weather forecast for his neighborhood. wrote one of the hundreds of followers who expressed their gratitude.
Silverman told the Times that she has been following McGregor’s page since the summer of 2023, when the tropical storm formerly known as Hurricane Hillary hit Southern California. McGregor “prepared us for that too and kept things factual and not sensationalized,” she said.
Last week, when McGregor said residents north of Altadena Drive should leave immediately, Silverman said, “It was enough to leave.”
Her home on Calle Altadena, where her family had lived since 1964, went up in flames. “If I hadn’t left then, my four pets and I would have burned out,” she said.
Edgar McGregor near Eaton Canyon in Altadena.
(Ringo Chiu/For the Times)
Ever since he was a child, McGregor has been obsessed with the weather, even in sunny Southern California.
When she was in kindergarten, she told her teacher that she wanted to go to the bathroom so she could walk outside in the rain.
In December 2011, when he was 11 years old, he experienced his first major storm. It was strong Santa Ana winds that “wreaked havoc on Christmas Tree Lane in Altadena, snapping off the top of a 100-foot-tall Americana tree in Glendale’s Brand,” the Times reported. ” and declared a state of emergency in many cities in the San Gabriel Valley.
“That was the first extreme weather event in my life,” McGregor said. “That was scary. That event got me interested in Santa Ana winds.”
As a teenager, McGregor was inspired by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg to take part in school strikes to demand action on climate change.
On January 7th, as thousands of new followers flooded his page, increasing to more than 7,500 this week, he explained: “Southern California is filled with the world’s hottest desert, a microclimate dominated by the cold California Coastal Stream.” Snowy mountains and Mediterranean scrubland all collide.
“The diversity of our local climate makes it difficult for local weather officials to reflect everyone in their forecasts. That’s where I come in, at least locally.”
Following the success of his Facebook page, he recently started writing WeatherMcGregor, which provides more detailed forecasts and weather analysis for paid subscribers on the Patreon platform.
In the spring of 2019, he began volunteering to clean up Eaton Canyon, which has since spread.
This week, he will mark his 2,000th day coming to the park, bucket in hand, to pick up trash in the heat, rain, snow and wind. For the past few days, he has been cleaning just outside the evacuation zone.
Over the years, he has found countless water bottles and candy wrappers on and around popular hiking trails. He picked up some passports. Some cash. Lots of masks during the pandemic. There are a lot of vape pens these days.
Last May, he posted a photo on social media platform X of Eaton Canyon, which was covered in greenery after a wet winter. What he saw scared him.
“Today we see more photos showing how lush the mountains north of Los Angeles are after the wettest 18 months in 117 years of weather record,” he wrote. “If these fuels are depleted this summer, wildfires will trigger nuclear explosions this fall.”
For the next seven months, there was very little rain.
On Dec. 31, McGregor wrote on Facebook that he was “closely monitoring possible mountain wave activity” in the local foothills from the night of Jan. 7 to the morning of Jan. 8.
Mountain wave winds occur when gusts of wind rapidly move down mountain slopes and intensify as they hit flat terrain. This is a weather phenomenon that causes short bursts of strong and dangerous winds.
He thought wind speeds in Altadena were probably between 40 and 49 miles per hour.
“This particular storm has serious potential, and my forecast is very likely to worsen in the coming days,” he wrote.
On January 5th, he predicted wind gusts in excess of 105 mph. In the post, he added, “What I fear here is more the fire danger than the wind.”
Jan. 7 at 11:01 a.m. after the Palisades Fire broke out across the county. McGregor told Altadena residents to make evacuation plans early, including finding all important documents and parking cars facing outward in driveways.
After seeing the post, longtime believer Janelle Hu, who lives near the Altadena County Sheriff’s Department in Los Angeles County, packed up her family’s belongings and placed them by her front door hours before the Eaton Fire began.
At 6:23 p.m., McGregor posted in all caps that there was a fire in Eaton Canyon.
“This is not a drill,” he wrote.
The Eaton Fire burns down homes in Altadena on January 8th.
(Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Hu, 43, her husband and two-year-old son were eating kielbasa dinner by candlelight, the lights already out.
My husband was in the kitchen when he saw an orange light outside. Then I heard my neighbor driving down the street honking his horn and yelling for everyone to get out.
Hu told the frightened toddler to hold on to the blanket and the family quickly fled. I was thankful that McGregor had my stuff ready.
“We evacuated as soon as we saw the fire,” Fu said. Although her home survived, it was still under a mandatory evacuation order a week later.
“We were able to evacuate with less panic and better preparation, and we were able to pick up the cat. It was all thanks to him.”
That night, after knocking on the doors of several neighbors and telling them to leave, McGregor and his mother drove to a friend’s house in South Pasadena. He stayed up all night poring over publicly available forecasting models and government data, interpreting layman’s terminology for Altadenas, and posting updates on wind and fire.
At 5:33 a.m. on January 8, McGregor still didn’t know if his home was safe, but he wrote to X: “This is the worst night of my life.”
On Friday, three days after the fire started, Charles Phillips was outside his home on Sinaloa Avenue with a borrowed chainsaw, cutting off a tree branch that had fallen in front of his house.
Although his home was still under a mandatory evacuation order, he easily entered the house and crouched down before the National Guard began blocking the road.
Charles Phillips outside his home on Calle Sinaloa in Altadena.
(Haley Branson Potts/Los Angeles Times)
But that first night? He, his wife, and three teenage daughters jumped out when they saw McGregor’s Facebook post about the fire.
“In less than three minutes, we were gone,” said Phillips, a 49-year-old aerospace engineer. “We didn’t take anything with us. We just left. The fire was right there. We have two dogs and two cats, and we packed them up.”
The next morning, Phillips returned home alone. Three houses away, destroyed houses smoldered.
Phillips quoted McGregor’s post verbatim.
“This man is responsible for saving so many lives. The climate varies so much from region to region, and this young kid is trying to predict it just for us.”
McGregor said all the praise was a bit surreal.
Despite having a lifelong interest in weather, I had long considered building a career focused on long-term climate change issues rather than real-time forecasting. he changed his mind.
“I didn’t want to go into meteorology,” he says. “I didn’t want to put other people’s safety in my hands.”
But now he knows people trust him. And in these difficult times, I think that’s a good thing.
Edgar McGregor is credited with convincing many people to evacuate Altadena and saving their lives.
(Ringo Chiu/For the Times)
Source link
