The easy ironies abound when it comes to the new high-danger areas drawn onto the fire hazard maps of Southern California released by CalFire this week.

Most of them involve around a gallows-humor variation on the theme: “Now, they tell us!”

Because, you know, Altadena burned down, and that is that. Miles from the mountains, from the Angeles National Forest, where the Eaton fire started, homes and businesses and schools were incinerated.

So quite obviously the old maps that showed a “very high” fire danger in just a thin zone of a few blocks from the San Gabriel Mountains were prime for an update. (Both of the Eaton-incinerated homes in my own Altadena life — the house my parents built on Sunny Oaks Circle in 1960, and the first house I ever bought on my own, on Alpine Villa Drive — were well within the old, narrow zone. And the latter was essentially a wooden cabin, with, sheesh, a cedar-shingle roof.)

“Altadena and Pasadena in the previous map only had a very small strip along the foothills and the bottom of the mountains that were zoned in a very-high fire hazard severity zone,” state Fire Marshall Daniel Berlant said recently, as our staffer Jeff Collins reported. “In these new maps (that will) extend further into the communities itself.” The new map extends high and moderate fire zones about 3 ½ blocks south of Farnsworth Park on Lake Avenue, including about seven to eight blocks, or what Collins terms “the northern mile of Altadena.”

But, as he also notes, the new hazard zones leave out about half of the neighborhoods demolished in Altadena.

That’s why L.A. County Fire Deputy Chief Albert Yanagisawa said he was surprised about how the update impacted Altadena. “Before these maps were produced, I thought the very high-fire severity zones were really going to reach down deep, deep down into Altadena and they haven’t,” Yanagisawa said.

Maps are maps — if you will, graphics drawn for government bureaucracies.

Fires are something quite a bit realer than that. They’re not very good at reading maps.

“The old maps, as I recall, failed to identify Altadena as a high-hazard area,” Jack Cohen, a retired research physical scientist with the U.S. Forest Service who worked in Southern California during the 1980s, told Collins. That failure was “a little bit bizarre” since the community had a history of fire issues.

The reaction to the new maps going deeper into the community and farther from the mountains, where wildfires start, run along two main lines.

One, that since homes and other buildings burned about a mile farther downhill toward Pasadena than even the new hazard zones indicate as high fire hazard severity zones, they clearly don’t go far enough.

Two, that new subdivisions all over California are increasingly encroaching on former wilderness, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that we see more neighborhoods burning.

“We have been sprawling into the wildlands for the last 75-plus years with very little consideration of the impacts,” as Howard Penn, executive director of the Planning and Conservation League, told the Los Angeles Times this week.

Here’s my problem with such reasoning, vis a vis Altadena. The town of formerly 40,000 people is not like some new development in the High Sierra, or even an expanding hamlet in the Santa Cruz Mountains — or even Bel Air or Topanga or the Malibu hills.

It was built not in mountain passes or L.A. canyons, but on meadowland descending well away from the San Gabriels — and built not recently, but much of it well over a century ago. Only a few neighborhoods — the Meadows, the newer, gated La Vina development — go up into the mountains themselves.

The important thing here, to me at least, is that this was not a wildfire or even a suburban fire in the way we used to think of them. If I lived elsewhere in the nation or world and had only read about the Eaton fire, I think I would still imagine it as a town consumed by a wall of flame that moved from east to west. That is not what happened. The blaze started so quickly because the Eaton ridge was dry from drought. Then white-hot embers were blown by a Santa Ana stronger than any I recall in a January. That is why authorities didn’t know to evacuate west Altadena until it was too late. This was a disaster that in the weather extremes of post-2025 California can happen anywhere in any of our cities. Redrawn fire maps will not be able to save us.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.