Those of us who were evacuated for a couple of days at the threat of the Eaton fire and yet were able to return intact, with intact cats, to intact homes are now feeling the survivors’ guilt.

Perhaps everyone in the San Gabriel Valley who didn’t actually lose that roof over our heads and everything beneath it is feeling that guilt. Because the scale of this devastation is so vast that almost all of us know someone who lost everything. Seventeen people were killed, Over 9,400 structures, most of them houses, were destroyed. Another 1,073 were damaged.

But survivors’ guilt, anxiety-producing as it may be in the middle of the night, is as nothing compared with not surviving. Compared with losing it all. Compared with the bureaucratic hell that is insurance claims. Compared with the angst over that picture of your kid that you failed to grab off the fridge, or that necklace that was your grandmother’s.

Over whether to rebuild.

And if you grew up in Altadena, as I did, and then later lived and worked there as an adult, you know hundreds of people who survived nothing like intact. The multiples of grief are too much to process.

I’d seen the fire not 10 minutes after it started when I walked out from our west Pasadena home to simply check out the howling winds. Not a brilliant idea, as 30 seconds after I passed under them, two huge branches from our tall streetside Brazilian pepper tree came crashing down into the driveway, blocking the two cars from leaving. Standing on the edge of the Arroyo Seco I could see that the fire was growing by the second, first heading east toward Kinneloa and Sierra Madre, then west toward Altadena. But far away from us, right? We half-packed the go bags anyway. (You have to love the correct cynicism of Outlook columnist Chris Erskine, who notes that very soon Versace will be peddling go bags.)

When I woke at 5 the next morning to the smell of smoke, it was clear that nowhere in town was too far for this fire to reach. I went to the sliding-glass door and looked through acrid air into the garden. But, wait, guys with flashlights in the drive?

“Pasadena police. Evacuate, now!” they said.

“Can’t do it, officer,” I said. “Can’t move these branches.”

But five strong cops, bless them, could, and they hauled them into the street so we could make a getaway.

Luckiest people on the planet, we were able to move into the Caltech faculty club, the fabled Athenaeum, for a couple of nights. But can I just say one little thing about evacuations, in case it helps for the future, as cities and Los Angeles County quite rightly do some soul-searching about how they notify residents of emergencies? We were ordered out — fine. Good call. Softball-sized embers were flying into our yard. It could have happened here. But we were literally never told we could come back in. Sure, like other mildly tech-savvy people, I soon had the Watch Duty app on my phone, and I could navigate the evac map on my own. But I have a lot of neighbors even older than me. So for the fire next time, City Hall, let’s figure out a way to give the all clear as well.

Far more important, obviously, is developing better ways to quickly mobilize residents in a wildfire emergency. I could hear the cops; some people can’t. I could drive; some can’t. The clearest thing authorities have learned from this already, is, as L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told the Board of Supervisors, that we need a “database to track people who have mobility challenges or health challenges. Trying to do it during an emergency is very, very difficult,” as Rebecca Ellis reported in the Times.

We have to figure out a way to protect those who can’t evacuate themselves.

We have to analyze how in the new winter Santa Ana wind and drought reality we can suss out how far those deadly embers can fly from a mountain wildfire, and learn to evacuate neighborhoods we never could have imagined would need it before.

The first morning in the Ath breakfast room, I introduced myself to a couple, Josephine and Steve Macenka, who were still trying to figure out whether their lifetime home on Alta Pine was gone. Around the corner from where I once lived. It was gone, they found. When he retired, Steve was made a Fellow of JPL for his “distinguished leadership in interferometry and advanced optical systems” on probes to other planets. Now, in their 80s, they were having to figure out where on Earth they were going to live on this planet.

And now those of us who love Altadena will spend the rest of our lives trying to help figure out how to build it back. Better? There’s that hope.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com