Life and Death and Weather and Planning

California Local first encountered Edgar McGregor a few years ago, back when we were posting updates regularly on Twitter (before we got booted off that once-great social media outlet). On our Santa Clara County Twitter feed, we noticed posts by a young man who had adopted Alum Rock Park in San Jose, where he was conducting almost daily trash-pick-up hikes.

Inspired, we followed him and retweeted him with some frequency. We reached out to him for an article, but he was pretty busy studying meteorology at San Jose State and keeping this park clean.

In the years since, McGregor has completed his studies and returned to his hometown of Altadena. There, he adopted a park in Eaton Canyon, in the mountains just outside of town. In addition to his cleanup efforts, he created a Facebook page to provide weather information to local residents.

It was on this page that McGregor began to issue warnings a couple weeks ago, as the Santa Ana winds became fierce amid what he knew to be dangerously dry foliage.

Haley Branson-Potts, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, picks up the story.

The night the Eaton fire started, Edgar McGregor stood on a darkened Altadena street, held up his cellphone and started recording as the sky glowed orange behind him.

His voice calm, the 24-year-old amateur climate scientist urged people living between the Eaton Wash and Allen Avenue to immediately pack their bags and get ready to evacuate.

Then the wind picked up. It muffled his audio. So he started shouting.

“This is imminent!” McGregor said. “Do not wait for an official evacuation notice. If you think you should leave, get out! Get out!”

Branson-Potts' epic article, with photos by Ringo Chiu, is titled “This young Altadena weather guy had a growing following. In the Eaton fire, he saved lives.”

Some highlights: 

Tori Silverman, 37, of Altadena wrote on his page: “Edgar McGregor is an actual American hero.”

Last week, when McGregor said that anyone north of Altadena Drive should leave immediately, Silverman said, “that was good enough for me to get gone.”

“Had I not left when I did,” she said, “my four pets and I would have burned up.”

On his Facebook page, he is known for dispassionate detail rather than alarmist hype. So when he said the Eaton fire was life-threatening, his thousands of followers knew he was not exaggerating.

“I’m very careful with my word choice,” McGregor said in an interview. “It’s not just about warning people that conditions are right. Anyone can go online and fearmonger and create scare tactics. I’d never hype up a storm unless it needed to be hyped up.”

(Learn more about Edgar from his Wikipedia entry.)

Speaking of Being Careful in the face of fearmongering: Raymond Martinez, 33, recently launched the website San Benito Blueprint to provide information about issues that could deeply impact the lives of the people who live in an around Hollister, in the agricultural communities of San Benito County, a mostly rural area just 45 miles south of San Jose. 

Martinez describes himself as “very civic-minded,” and reports that when he arrived in the county, he immediately started researching what was being built where and why, discovering the information he was looking for just plain wrong.

From Robert Eliason's article on BenitoLink (where I serve as interim editor):

Martinez thought he could fill an important role and started sharing his research. He started with last year’s Measure A, which proponents claimed would slow growth and stop new housing developments in San Benito County. What he found was the opposite.

“It was crazy,” he said. “I read the measure. And I found it only covers unincorporated land and leaves a giant housing loophole. Yes, it would stop some kinds of growth, but not the growth that voters necessarily want to stop.”

Martinez is now looking into a petition being circulated by an activist group seeking to rescind Hollister’s recently adopted 2040 General Plan—which was passed following a five-year process. Its proponents claim to be fighting the scourge of sprawl (a legitimate concern in the area), but Martinez is finding that if the petition succeeds, it will have profound implications for this struggling county.

Raymond Martinez and Edgar McGregor are practitioners of the art of digital citizenship. As allies in this endeavor, we commend their righteous efforts.