Spared by the Eaton Fire, cemetery hopes to play active role in Altadena's next chapter

ALTADENA, Calif. (KABC) -- A 55-acre property full of green trees located in the middle of the Eaton Fire burn zone in Altadena isn't a park or private residence. It's Mountain View Cemetery and Mortuary, and everyone associated with the property, the living and the dead, survived the fire.

"This is not just a place of death, but this is a place of remembrance. This is a place to where when you walk the grounds, you might not know this individual, but just looking at the dates you almost get a snippet of the individual's life," said Keith Brown, cemetery operations manager at Mountain View. "From writers to Octavia Butler to scientists like Charles Richter and Richard Feynman to George Reeves, the original TV Superman."

The cemetery was founded in 1882 by Brown's great-great-great-grandfather and has more than 142,000 internments. Brown lives on site and says the cemetery means everything to him.

"The fire did come up to our administration building, and we were actually putting the flames out while we were removing people's loved ones. At 7 a.m. on Wednesday, when we had the fiery embers just raining on top of us, was when I had told my staff we need to go because our lives were at stake at that time. That was the hardest decision I had to make," said Brown.

As flames approached the preparation room at Mountain View Mortuary, one of the first things that staff did was move all the boxes of formaldehyde, a flammable chemical used in the embalming process, to a safe location. If the 60 boxes had caught fire, there could have been a massive explosion.

Fifty bodies were inside the mortuary at the time of the fire. Although most of Brown's staff left, some came back using fire extinguishers to save and then evacuate what remained.

All of the bodies awaiting funerals were saved and transported to other mortuaries.

"We are here for the families, for the living, so that they can say their final goodbyes. You can only say goodbye one more time, and this is the time to where we wanted to make sure we did everything to serve our families," said Brown.

Mountain View suffered minimal damage, only losing a few maintenance buildings. Its large size is believed to have stopped the fire from spreading south.

They hope to reopen in less than a month and will play an active role in Altadena's next chapter.