PROFILES OF THE FIRE: COURAGE ESCAMILLA
HOW THE FIRE CHANGED AN ACTIVIST’S LIFE FOREVER
By Christopher Nyerges
www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com
Courage at his home with neighbor’s home burning in background.
Courage Escamilla is an actor, activist, and “adventurer in training” who moved to Altadena almost four years ago. He explains that it felt like he finally found home when he moved to Altadena, which he describes as “our little friendly corner of the county.” Born in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, it was a life he missed as a “small town boy” he describes. But after many years of struggling in the city, he saw an opportunity to move to a small town once again but only after experiencing a great loss… He eventually found happiness until January 7th came…
JANUARY 7
“I was watching the Palisades fire spread ferociously when I got an alert that another fire had appeared in the Eaton Canyon at 8 p.m. It wasn’t even half an hour later when I got an order to evacuate on my Watch Duty app. It was during a terrible wind storm, so considering that a local weather activist had earlier stated that a fire at this time would be catastrophic, I knew this was serious. Since I had lived through so many years of home instability, I’ve always had an idea of what was truly irreplaceable. It was easy to pack and be ready but I only had a motorcycle so leaving with everything was a serious issue until a neighbor unexpectedly but kindly offered to take my bags in her car.”
At the last minute, Courage decided to evacuate on his motorcycle with his neighbor behind him, braving the 80-100 mph winds on his bike until he arrived at a friend’s apartment in Pasadena. He was up all night researching all the information he could find about the fate of his street. Watching the TV for any information with his friends, it felt like watching the end of the world; learning about one neighborhood being destroyed…and then another. It wasn’t until he found a map that a local resident had created that he was able to see all the houses that were said to be on fire based on police scanner reports. “To my shock, it looked like all the fires were jumping over my East side of town and hitting the West side,” he explains. He would soon learn that this was no ordinary fire; that because of the wind storm, it was literally raining embers from the sky all over the town. He finally fell asleep at 7am and woke up at 9 a.m in a panic, quickly making the crazy decision to ride his motorcycle back into the destroyed zone to see if his home was still there.
“I HAD to know, No matter the risk.” he said.
On his motorcycle, he zipped around live power lines, almost every-other house on fire or reduced to smoldering rubble. Then after riding through a park to arrive on his street he was mystified to find that his house looked untouched. “But across the street” he exclaims “every house was gone or totally consumed by a blaze twice as high as the houses I had remembered. Incinerated pieces of their beautiful homes falling to the ground like the burning corpses of the lives I remembered.”
Courage with “Altadena Not for Sale” sign. PHOTO BY C. NYERGES
A house just across the street from Courage is devoured by fire.
PUTTING OUT FIRES WITH POOL WATER
He soon found some of the other neighbors who had traveled back as well, and together they used five-gallon buckets full of swimming pool water to put out the spot fires on their side of the street so they would not spread to their surviving homes. “Afterwards, I decided to stay for an additional two nights after the fire… with no wind the entire time I was there,” he explains. “Even still, the first helicopter didn’t appear until 5pm that first day. What’s worse, I didn’t see a single emergency vehicle extinguish a single fire or be put out by anyone but the neighbors and I. Brutally, it very much felt like saving Altadenan homes was not a priority. Trucks would just continue to drive past us again and again, in fact, many intact houses reportedly were left to freshly catch fire that next morning.”
To top it off, he had to deal with looters on his first night who tried to break through the barricades he made using his patio furniture to block access to his backyard. Courage explains that they gave up pretty easily but he was terribly shaken by the experience. Outside the darkness and sounds of helicopters and occasional explosions made it feel dire; crying and curled up in his blankets, it felt like the world had ended and he was the only one holding out.
Courage spent a second night at his house, collecting all the items that could be used for weapons in case of more-violent looters; his neighbors gifting him food, supplies and baseball bats for a long and difficult haul.
He explained that there was a deafening silence in the neighborhood after the fire. “When I would perform checks down my street, bat in hand, walking past the burned-out cars, the crackle of homes and formerly beautiful trees twisted into macabre shapes, I could not help but notice that not a single sound could be heard. I felt like I was the only human left, and there was no wildlife – no birds, nothing. I never heard such silence in my life.”
“The most frustrating part of those nights was that my phone’s carrier, Mint Mobile, had horrible service in my area; where I had previously used wifi to make calls and receive data, the best I ever got was a single bar that lasted for two minutes every half hour,” he explains. “It was then in the middle of the night that I got a flurry of new evacuation orders. Unable to use data to load the details, I was very worried that my friend, who had all my most valued possessions, was being evacuated as well. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made, but I decided that losing those items would be worse than losing my home, so I decided to leave. Truly feeling that after almost losing my home once, I would likely be choosing to let go of it forever and not have anything to return to, if I would be allowed to return at all. I ended up being right. The National Guard arrived that night, not letting anyone go back up to defend their homes; our homes trapped with whomever was allowed to remain up there, hundreds of people… looters and all.”
Courage on motorcycle, with burning ruins in rear.
Courage on local TV news, the new face of Altadena.
FALLING IN LOVE WITH ALTADENA
Courage explains his love for Altadena. He lived in thirteen different places in LA and was miserable in every area he said, even experiencing homelessness for three-to-five years. But soon learned about the existence of Altadena when he started taking preparedness classes with the School of Self-Reliance in 2017. It was then he realized that he’d love to live in such an area. After Covid tragically took the life of his mother, he had the opportunity to move and later received an unexpected check in the mail from a recent commercial he did for $25,000 dollars. “I arrived consumed with grief but found Altadena to be the most kind, humble, and connected community I’ve ever lived in. They took me in and everyone’s generosity and endearing quirkiness made it feel like I was in a very special place. It was a paradise,” said Courage.
Courage still tries to understand why his house survived. “Only 10 houses had survived on my street, mine being one of them, where there once stood 40,” he pointed out. “I believe my house was in the center of a ‘microclimate’ which local weather experts describe as a location where the wind swirls around certain areas, like the eye of a fire storm. Even on Google Maps from above, you can see all our surviving houses safe inside a circle with anything outside it obliterated,” he points out.
He experienced great distress during the time he could not go back to his home. “I spent weeks feeling stranded in Pasadena, psychologically tormented every hour that something could be happening to my house, never knowing or able to hold anyone accountable for what would happen to the home I poured so much love into. My friends were very supportive of me, but I had never cried so much in my life. The worst part of this whole experience is reading another gut-wrenching story of someone else I knew everyday. When I finally was able to put one foot in front of the other, I immediately buried myself into activism; bringing back my background in community organizing in full force.”
A view of part of Altadena, destroyed by fire.
Courage began by getting involved in the creation of movements that emerged from the fire. The first such group was “Altadena: Not for Sale’ for which he did lots of publicity, operating as a central captain and even becoming the face of Altadena in the various marches and protests. The focus of Altadena: Not for Sale was to “unite people behind a message of keeping big outside developers from swooping in and building their own version of Altadena on the ruins of our homes and businesses.”
About 9,000 structures were destroyed in the fire, with another 2,000 heavily damaged, and 20-40K people displaced, or unable to return. Sixty percent of Altadena no longer exists.
“An entirely unrecognizable and gentrified Altadena would feel even worse than never getting Altadena back at all,” he adds.
As part of the movement he helped create, he even used his talent as an actor to create a character called “Mr. Sale” to satirize opportunistic real estate brokers trying to buy up the properties of vulnerable fire victims.
Courage has also become very involved with four other movements that he helped spearhead.
These are Altagether which seeks to recruit neighborhood captains on every street to communicate the needs, concerns and progress of each area with the larger interconnected network in Altadena.
He also helped facilitate the creation of Authentic Altadena, a new production company which seeks to become a media powerhouse for and by Altadenans to share news amongst each other and with the world about their community’s stories and recovery.
“I also joined Beautiful Altadena Preservation, which is centered around a detailed proposal where we are demanding the creation of resident-powered committees so that the people of Altadena will have an influential say in the rebuilding process,” he explains. He’s also been working with Altadena’s Filmmakers club, working to create a professional documentary about the town; following local activists like himself.
The lives of those impacted by the fire haven’t even begun to recover. It will be at least a year before the toxic rubble that used to be their homes is even removed and about two years before the first houses even start to take shape. “Most of our standing homes don’t have utilities. My house is the only one lit house on our street. A literal beacon in complete blackness.”
Courage even had to evacuate his house a third time when their first major rainfall turned into a flood; his house a few blocks away from the mountain with serious mud-slide conditions present. “What’s worse, many of us are being screwed over by our insurance companies. A huge percentage of our homes were also uninsured because they were generationally owned by families that never thought this could happen; bought for cheap a century ago. Black ownership was twice the national average, and their part of town has been wiped out.” explained Courage.
“I have been using every waking moment since the night of the fire to help every single survivor possible and fight for the town’s best interests. I have become a full-blown social worker, meeting people with my laptop in shops helping them apply for assistance, pushing 86 year olds in wheelchairs at the FEMA center renewing all her IDs to helping my landlady with every process and soon renting out the now vacated units in our house.” he says. “I created a Google calendar populating it with every single recovery-related event in the area, I run a Facebook and WhatsApp chat where I post new resources by the hour, I’m engaged in a WhatsApp group with 100 of my region’s neighbors as a neighborhood captain and I’m now organizing a visual database of every resource I’ve ever found in the last two months totaling around 1000 images”.
Even at the first sign of trouble getting some donations delivered, Courage took it upon himself to rent a U-Haul and deliver 200 boxes of donations to Altadena from Santa Clarita. As Native American man, he also says that he is “making a big effort to make sure that indigenous, brown and Latino people are not overlooked in this disaster. I want to give them visibility. Latinos make it 30% of Altadena”
Among other goals, Courage wants to see an underground power-grid, innovative fire-fighting systems, better evacuation systems citing the 17 who lost their lives because of no evacuation orders and even a discussion for Altadena to incorporate and become its own city and have more agency over decisions for what’s best for the town. Most ideally, he’d also like to see the beginnings of a project he’s calling project “Hollywood Trailers for Altadena” where he wants to persuade the film industry to come to aid of a town that for decades had been known as an area that had more filming take place in it than any part of Southern California. “At the very least, the immediate need for temporary housing HAS to be met because we still have tens of thousands of displaced residents who are living in their cars or running out of money spending it on hotels and overpriced apartments. They even closed down the shelter two weeks ago! Where are they expected to go?!”
“I want to be the connecting-tissue between all the different movements so I can cross-pollinate their efforts and create a culture of mutual-respect and unity between everyone,” he says. “Everyday when I wake up and try to convince myself this is real, I am filled with rage and sadness that such a catastrophe happened to genuinely the nicest people in Los Angeles. I refuse to accept this fate for them. I will not stop until every single person in Altadena has their life back.”
Contacts for Courage:
Courage Escamilla – Community organizer and activist
http://www.couragetheactor.com/altadena for all organized resources, directory of organizing efforts, locally-benefiting Altadena merch and a means of contact him.
Courage’s GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/stand-with-altadena-courage-needs-you
Donate to Help Courage Rebuild Altadena, organized by Courage Escamilla
