The night of the Eaton fire, Edgar McGregor stood on a dark Altadena street, raised his phone and started recording, the sky behind him glowing orange.

In a calm voice, the 24-year-old amateur climate scientist urged people living between Washington and Allen avenues in Eaton to pack their bags and prepare to evacuate immediately.

Then the wind picked up. It made his voice deeper. So he started yelling.

"This is imminent!" McGregor said. "Don't wait for a formal evacuation notice. If you think you should leave, get out! Get out!"

At 7:17 p.m., he uploaded the 31-second video to his Facebook page, which has thousands of followers.

At 10:22 p.m., he posted: "You should not sleep tonight. If you are anywhere in the Foothills, it's time to pull an all-nighter. Fire danger is extremely high. Everyone in Altadena, even the West Country , everyone should prepare to evacuate.”

People took his advice. Now, they say he saved many lives.

McGregor, who lived with his parents in their Altadena home as a child, channeled his passion for weather three years ago into the Altadena Weather and Climate Facebook page, where he writes a handy guide for most of his neighbors Microscopic weather forecast. His following continues to grow, given the popularity of the San Gabriel Mountains and its hiking trails. His warnings on the night of January 7 convinced people to evacuate, earning him hero status in Altadena.

Tori Silverman, 37, of Altadena, wrote on his page: "Edgar McGregor is a true American hero."

"Thank you Edgar McGregor! I didn't sleep like you told me to but I'm still alive," another fan wrote.

And another: "Edgar absolutely saved my life."

McGregor studied climate science at San Jose State University and started his page while in college. He interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and served as director of recreation services for the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department.

On his Facebook page, he's known for sober details rather than alarmist hype. So when he said the Eaton fire was life-threatening, his thousands of followers knew he wasn't exaggerating.

"I'm very careful about my words," McGregor said in the interview. "This isn't just about warning people that conditions are ripe. Anyone can go online to spread fear and develop scare tactics. I would never hype a storm unless it requires a lot of hype."

The deadly Eaton fire, fueled by wind gusts of up to 100 mph near Altadena, needed a lot of publicity.

"I know this is serious because Edgar's posts are usually pretty consistent, so when he says get ready, we're ready," wrote one of hundreds of followers who expressed gratitude for his neighbor's prediction .

Silverman told the Times that she had been following McGregor's page since the summer of 2023, when the post-tropical cyclone known as Hurricane Hillary struck Southern California. McGregor, she said, "prepared us for that as well and kept things factual and not sensational."

When McGregor said last week that anyone north of Altadena Boulevard should leave immediately, Silverman said, "That's good enough for me."

Her house on Altadena Drive, which had been in her family since 1964, was destroyed by fire. "If I hadn't left," she said, "my four pets and I would have been burned."

McGregor has been fascinated by weather since he was a kid, even in sunny Southern California.

As a kindergarten teacher, he said, he would tell his teacher he needed to go to the bathroom so he could go out for a walk in the rain.

In December 2011, at the age of 11, he experienced his first big storm, a violent Santa Ana storm that, according to the Times, “wreaked havoc on Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane, A 100-foot treetop was snapped off at the Americana in Glendale Bland, causing many San Gabriel Valley cities to declare a state of emergency.

"This is the first extreme weather event in my life," McGregor said. "It was terrible. That incident got me interested in Santa Ana winds."

As a teenager, McGregor was inspired by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg to participate in school strikes to demand action on climate change.

Thousands of new followers flocked to his page on January 7, growing to more than 7,500 this week, He explains: “Southern California is full of microclimates, with the world’s hottest deserts colliding with the frigid California Coastal Current, towering snow-capped mountains and Mediterranean scrub.

“The diversity of our local climate makes it difficult for local weather officials to capture everyone’s conditions in their forecasts, and that’s where I come in – at least locally.”

Following the success of the Facebook page, he recently began writing WeatherMcGregor, a more in-depth weather forecast and weather analysis software on the Patreon platform for paying subscribers.

In the spring of 2019, he launched a viral volunteer campaign to clean up Eaton Canyon.

This week, he will celebrate his 2,000th day in the park, bucket in hand, braving the heat, rain, snow and wind to pick up trash. In recent days, he has been cleaning up outside the evacuation zone.

Over the years, he's found countless water bottles and candy wrappers on and around popular hiking trails. He picked up several passports. Some cash. During the epidemic, there are many masks. Recently, e-cigarettes have been popping up a lot.

In May last year, he posted photos of Eaton Canyon on social media platform X - full of green after a wet winter. What he saw frightened him.

"More photos today show just how lush the mountains north of Los Angeles have become after the wettest 18 months on record in 117 years of weather records," he wrote. "After these fuels are depleted this summer, wildfires will be more likely to burn this fall." Turn into a nuclear fire."

For the next seven months, there was essentially no rain.

On December 31, McGregor wrote on Facebook that he was paying close attention to the possibility of mountain wave activity in the local foothills from the evening of January 7 to the morning of January 8.

Mountain wind occurs when gusts of wind quickly come down hillsides and then gain strength as they hit flat terrain, a weather phenomenon that causes short bursts of strong and dangerous winds.

He estimated wind speeds in Altadena could be between 40 and 49 mph.

"This particular storm has huge potential," he wrote, "and my forecast will likely be upgraded in the coming days."

On January 5, he predicted gusts in excess of 65 mph. In that article, he added: "My concern here isn't the wind, it's the fire danger."

At 11:01 a.m. on January 7, the Palisades Fire broke out countywide. McGregor told the people of Altadena to make an evacuation plan early — find all important documents and park in the outward-facing driveway.

After seeing the post, longtime follower Janel Foo, who lives near the Altadena County Sheriff's Station in Los Angeles, packed up her family's belongings hours before the Eaton fire and put them away At the front door.

At 6:23 p.m., McGregor posted in all caps that there was a fire in Eaton Canyon.

"This is not a drill," he wrote.

Foo, 43, was having a kielbasa dinner by candlelight with her husband and 2-year-old son when the power went out.

In the kitchen, her husband saw an orange glow outside. Then they heard neighbors driving down the street, honking their horns and screaming for everyone to get out.

Foe told her frightened child to grab the blanket and not let go, and the family quickly fled - thanks to McGregor, their belongings were ready.

"As soon as we saw the fire, we ran out," said Foo, whose house survived but remains under a mandatory evacuation order a week later.

“We were able to evacuate — and find the cat — with less panic and less preparedness, and that’s all because of him.”

That night, after McGregor knocked on several neighbors' doors and told them to leave, he and his mother drove to a friend's house in South Pasadena. He worked through the night to post updates on the wind and flames, scouring publicly available forecast models and government data and explaining them in Atadnanian layman's terms.

At 5:33 a.m. on January 8, McGregor, who still didn’t know whether his house had survived, wrote on X: “This is the worst night of my life.”

On Friday, three days after the fire, Charles Phillips was using a borrowed chainsaw outside his Sinaloa Avenue home to cut through a piece of wood that had fallen in front of his home. branches.

His house was still under a mandatory evacuation order, but he easily got inside and hunkered down before the National Guard began blocking the streets.

But what about the first night? When he, his wife and three teenage daughters saw McGregor's Facebook post about the fire, they ran away.

"In three minutes, we were gone," said Phillips, 49, an aerospace engineer. "We didn't take anything. We just left. The fire was right there. We had two dogs, two cats - we packed them up."

The next morning, Phillips returned home alone. Three doors away, destroyed houses smoldered.

Phillips quoted McGregor's post verbatim.

"This man," he said, "is responsible for saving so many lives. The climate is so different in every neighborhood, and this little kid is trying to make predictions for us."

McGregor said all the praise was a bit surreal.

Despite his lifelong interest in weather, he had long thought his career would focus on long-term climate change issues rather than real-time predictions. He changed his mind.

“I didn’t want to get into meteorology,” he said. "I don't want to put someone else's safety in my hands."

But now, he knows, people trust him. It feels good during this difficult time.