Ready in the Glen

Pasadena Glen is a small, tightknit neighborhood north of Pasadena between Altadena and Sierra Madre, where 150 residents share quiet, wooded acres with bears and bobcats. It’s where sleek, modern homes mix with European-style architecture, remodeled Craftsmans and traditional homes. Neighbors here know each other well, as was evident one afternoon when Mala Arthur ’82 provided a tour of the place she’s called home for 16 years.

Each driver traversing the sloped, single-lane road leading in and out of the unincorporated area stops to greet Mala. Updates and well wishes are exchanged. Jody is out and about again after an illness. Tim, who experienced the 1993 Kinneloa fire (5,485 acres torched; 28 of 66 homes here burned), is on his way to help a friend impacted by recent fires. Another neighbor greets Mala as he heads out in his convertible to enjoy the day.

Neighbors are the reason Mala’s Pasadena Glen home still stands after the January 2025 Eaton Fire. And Mala is one key reason the neighbors were prepared for it.

Mala, who has a background in computer systems, educational technology and instructional makerspaces, is president of the Pasadena Glen Improvement Association, one of the oldest neighborhood associations in California. She and her husband, Phil Wolf ’83, and son, Zephram, lived for 20 years in Altadena before moving to Pasadena Glen in 2009. She also is president of the association’s Fire Safe Council (FSC), a group that unites to make their neighborhood more fire resistant and emergency resilient.

After the 2009 Station Fire (160,557 acres torched, 89 structures burned), Pasadena Glen neighbors decided to be proactive about taking care of their area, which firefighters have difficulty reaching due to limited access and very steep hillsides. After forming the FSC, Mala registered for grants—securing over $1 million to date—much of which have been used for clearing brush and trees around homes and on the surrounding hillsides. Her work with the FSC expanded beyond her neighborhood when she became a regional representative during COVID, helping Southern California residents be better prepared to survive a wildfire. In her own neighborhood, Mala has hosted guest speakers and has led drills, community emergency response team (CERT) training and workshops. Her evacuation training sessions addressed things like what to do when you must evacuate quickly. Repetition of training and information is important for readiness, she has learned.

By noon the day of the Eaton Fire, Mala said they were already on high alert.

“We’d been getting all of the weather warnings, Edison had shut the power off at four that afternoon, and the winds were crazy, so everybody knew there was a lot of danger.” Pacific Palisades was already fiercely on fire, with hundreds of homes burned. To get more information about local fires, she turned to apps: Pulse Point for emergency agency activity, Watch Duty for active fires and number of units called to fight them. The Eaton Fire started at 6:17 p.m. and had around 30 units dispatched immediately to fight it. Mala thought, “It’s going to be huge.” Using Slack, email and emergency notification system One Call Now, around 6:30 p.m. she notified neighbors— many of whom had been preparing to leave—“You need to evacuate now.” An image Mala took around 7 p.m. as the neighborhood evacuated shows the flames frighteningly close to Pasadena Glen.

Mala and Phil helped evacuate a neighbor’s horses then returned to their own home and closed windows, turned off the gas, and pulled out and turned on the water for hoses. As the emergency response leader, Mala was the last in the neighborhood to leave—she thought. Several in the neighborhood, including a neighbor’s son, who is a firefighter, stayed behind to douse spot fires, saving her home and others. All the homes in Pasadena Glen were spared.

But when they left Pasadena Glen to stay at a friend’s house in northeast Pasadena around 7:30 p.m., the fire was expanding. “During dinner at our friend’s home, we got another evacuation notice, because the fire was not only burning the wilderness near Eaton Canyon but was starting to eat away at houses in Pasadena and Altadena. So, we evacuated to my mother-in-law’s in West Los Angeles,” she says. “We went to bed at 3 a.m. and then got up at 7 a.m. and turned the news on. We learned our rental home in southwest Altadena, miles from the mountains, was in danger. That street was on fire, and houses were burning down. We thought, What in the world is going on? Because that’s just insane. How could it have burned through that many houses? But it did. It did.”

Remarkably, their home in Altadena, a 1909 all-wood bungalow, still stands, once again thanks to neighbors. Their renters evacuated safely and have since returned to the remediated Altadena property. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the homes on that block are gone.

Throughout Altadena and Pasadena, there are structures within devastated neighborhoods that survived. “Most of those houses are still standing because somebody was there with a hose or a pool and a pump, because many of the firefighters were already away fighting the Palisades fire,” Mala says. The 100 mph winds were blowing the embers everywhere, so anything that was prone to ignite, did.”

Mala says her family is incredibly grateful to those who sacrificed their safety to save lives and property (14,120 acres burned; about 7,500 structures destroyed in the Eaton Fire alone). In the aftermath, intense storms on February 13 and March 13 caused all of the loose materials on hillsides where supporting vegetation was burned to flow down the Pasadena Glen stream. The fast- moving debris flows were full of gigantic boulders, trees and other materials. Many properties’ yards were damaged by the mud/rock slurry, including Mala’s and Phil’s, but no one was injured.

Now Mala is working with another Pasadena Glen organization, the Pasadena Glen Community Services District, to have the neighborhood stream channel and roads repaired, get water service restored and clean up the remaining mud along the roads and in many yards.

Those winter rains also deposited rich ash and silt from the uninhabited hills above the neighborhood, resulting in abundant weeds, vibrant flowers and overflowing fruit trees (Mala’s plum tree is sagging). It’s a seeming paradise that Mala and other residents realize may not last.

“Global warming makes me feel like what we’re doing is a little bit in vain because it’s just going to get hotter and the storms more extreme,” she says. “We can keep ramping up our efforts to prevent damage, but I don’t think we’re going to keep up. We’re going to start losing ground faster and faster. I don’t want to stop trying. I just think it will eventually become untenable to live in a neighborhood like this.”

Mala says she will continue leading neighbors in home hardening workshops and evacuation training so that, together, they’ll be prepared for whatever comes next.

Keys to a New Beginning

Harvey Mudd College donated its Bösendorfer grand piano to Jeanina Quezada, a pianist, teacher and director of a Foothills Music Together program whose Altadena residence was among the 6,000 homes destroyed during the Eaton Fire in February. The Bösendorfer, a high-end Austrian piano known for its quality and craftsmanship, resided for years on campus in the Garrett House (past HMC presidents’ residence). “This piano—that has brought music to this campus for so many years—to have this special new home is a heartwarming thing in the midst of this great tragedy in our community,” says music professor Bill Alves. Quezada credited the piano donation and other community support with helping her rebuild her professional life. “Being able to keep teaching gives my students—and myself—normalcy,” she says. “This gift ensures that my students and I can continue our work.”

Fire in the Cove

In The Conversation article “California Wildfires Force Students to Think About the Connections Between STEM and Society,” professors Erika Dyson (religion) and Darryl Yong ’96 (mathematics) describe HMC’s new Core Impact course, taught by a team of eight professors who share their own disciplinary perspectives and help students critically analyze proposed interventions for increasing wildfire risks.