Since you read the newspaper every day, same as me — sometimes I see things earlier — you’re up to date on the always rather amazing outpouring of news in the aftermath of the Eaton fire, which destroyed Altadena three months and a week ago now.

Many of the stories are of the kind a person just hadn’t quite anticipated, or at least a person whose career is not in vector control.

But that’s an aspect of the massive tragedy that killed 18 Altadenans and destroyed over 9,400 homes, businesses and schools as it swept through over 14,000 acres that I just wouldn’t have known about without staffer David Wilson’s front-pager Tuesday: mosquitoes. Lots of them.

Aerial images show that there are about 2,900 more or less abandoned swimming pools in Altadena. Per David: “The San Gabriel Valley Mosquito and Vector Control District is going pool to pool inside and just outside the fire perimeter to treat unmaintained pools, which if left alone could breed 3 million mosquitoes in one month.”

That sounds about right for the number of skeeters that appear in my own yard just across the Arroyo Seco every summer as it is, and I’m one of those people treated by the insects as an all-you-can-eat buffet already, so don’t need to see even more of the damn things spreading West Nile virus and dengue fever as well as contributing to Benadryl’s coffers. Thanks to the district for knocking them down.

Then, insult to injury, there’s the new news about elevated levels of lead in burn areas just as FEMA is telling us, “You’re on your own after the first 6 inches, babe.” Thanks so much, federal government, for your concern.

But good on Supervisor Kathryn Barger for on Tuesday pushing through the County Board of Supervisors a motion to reallocate up to $3 million from the County’s Lead Paint Hazard Mitigation Program to support soil testing for residential property owners living near the Eaton fire burn area, where we have seen elevated lead levels in the soil.

Lead, bad. Especially bad for kids. Kids eat dirt. Can’t stop ‘em. Get the lead out.

I do appreciate, though, in new staffer Gladys Vargas’s story on the Pasadena schools’ approach to lead on their campuses, the practical approach favored by Lisa Kroese, PTA president at Don Benito Fundamental School, near the burn area. “Having information is better than not knowing if they hadn’t done any of the testing,” Kroese said. “Personally, being a realtor, I suspected that we probably had lead in the soil just because of the age of the buildings.” Lead is in the soil around most any old structure here built before 1978, when it was banned from paint in California.

And then there was the scary story by Lila Seidman in the Times about the resurgence along San Gabriel Mountains hiking trails of the damn poodle-dog bush, a “fire follower” plant that is pretty and smells like quality cannabis but causes a horrible rash that presents like this, as one trail runner found: “small, fluid-filled blisters up and down his legs.” Swell.

The classically cranky, keep-the-revenuers out, side of unincorporated Altadena continues to come up in the resistance by some to offers by Pasadena and other Southern California groups to help in the rebuilding, such as an upcoming conference titled “The Altadena You Want: Community-Based Urbanism.”

“It’s inappropriate for all of these not for profit representatives who have their own agendas to have all these meetings where they are telling us this is what we want without asking anyone first. I personally don’t want any kind of urbanism or more urban planning in Altadena,” writes the town’s crank in chief, Steve Lamb. “This is my alternative: Leave us alone,” writes Rod Kiewiet of Braeburn Road.

My personal post-fire passion project is to very much encourage what should have been done decades ago all over the Southland: bury the power lines beneath the ground. Where they can’t sway in the winds and arc out and cause fires. The big high power lines, and the smaller ones, along with the telephone lines, in our neighborhoods. So I was pleased to see Edison saying last Friday that it plans to bury more than 150 miles of power lines in Altadena and in Malibu. The project will cost more than $650 million. But you know what would cost more? Another suburban wildfire. In the 30 years I’ve been trying to get Pasadena to go underground, I’ve been told by City Hall that it’s too expensive. I’ve also been told by a guy I know who used to work for LADWP: “You know who killed the undergrounding? The union. Once wires are down there, there’s no maintenance or repair after a windstorm. Meaning, less overtime.”

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.