Last week, in Altadena, Calif., local climate scientist Edgar McGregor, who posts hyper-local weather updates on the Facebook page Altadena Weather and Climate, was sounding the alarm about the wildfires before the deadly blazes in the Los Angeles area even began.
On Tuesday, Jan. 7, McGregor warned residents not to go to sleep, be hyper-vigilant and prepare to evacuate. So many locals listened and left that the 24-year-old is now being credited with saving hundreds of lives and being hailed as a local hero.
“I haven’t even been able to process that mentally,” McGregor tells PEOPLE of the accolades. “I didn’t run into a burning building and get third-degree burns trying to save someone’s life. So people are sending me all these comments and I’m thinking to myself, I just did my job.”
But McGregor says he realized there would be a major problem posed by the Santa Ana winds coming to L.A. a week before the wildfires broke out, and warned the public about it.
“I knew on Dec. 30th that when this windstorm hit, the conditions would be carbon copies of the conditions that were on the ground in Lahaina, Hawaii, and in Paradise, which both were completely leveled and lost around a hundred people each,” he says.
“I told people, if a wildfire breaks out, there’ll be a thousand homes burned down. This would be cataclysmic,” he adds.
He then warned his readers “to turn your car to face outwards, locate all of your important documents, your social security cards, your birth certificates, insurance documents, the deed to your house, things that are going to be either exceedingly difficult to replace or irreplaceable and put them by the door or put them in your car and just wait and watch.”
McGregor recalls, “I knew that that warning might’ve been a little bit excessive, but as it turns out, a thousand homes are not even a fraction of the loss, the ones that were lost.”
As an avid hiker — who also picks up trash in Eaton Canyon every day and posts videos about his daily trash pick-ups — says he knew the dry canyon was full of wildfire fuel.
“For years I’ve been telling people this canyon, it’s been decades since we last had a wildfire, and the fuels are abundant,” he says. “I see dead trees that have accumulated everywhere. So I knew this was coming. I certainly didn’t think January was the month it would occur, but I hope that I did my job in warning everybody.”
Now McGregor, who has gained thousands of new fans, is posting regular updates about what he thinks could happen next.
“I think for the most part the immediate threat is over,” he says. “The next couple of windstorms are not going to be all that impressive, especially not compared to what we saw on Tuesday. But it still hasn’t rained. So in the next couple of weeks, if we get another major windstorm, it could be Hollywood that faces disaster next. Santa Barbara. Any of these foothill towns. And then when it rains, we have the mudslides to get through.”
He warns, “What I’m saying is, this is not over yet.”
McGregor says his house in Altadena is still standing, but the houses next door — along with hundreds of homes in the surrounding blocks — are completely gone.
“And it could have been any community around here that got hit. It just happened to be mine. I think what was most important, for people who lost their homes, was I was able to get them an additional 30 minutes or an hour or even 12 hours to prepare and to pack their cars,” he says.
Now a local hero, he says he’ll continue to keep the public aware of the weather patterns, something he’s loved since he was a little kid.
“In kindergarten, I would ask to go to the restroom during rainstorms just to stand out in the rain, and I’d come back in soaking wet. I’ve never had a life where I wasn’t interested in storms and what was going on outside with the weather,” McGregor recalls.
