Los Angeles fires hit area chemists

Kitty Cahalan, a chemist turned assistant director for educational outreach at the California Institute of Technology, was cooking dinner for her family in Pasadena, California, when she got a text from a neighbor. They told her they could see flames from the fire burning in the mountains northeast of her, known as the Eaton fire and were getting ready to leave. Cahalan and her family immediately started to do the same. “We basically turned off dinner—left it on the stove with the stove off—and we packed some things and evacuated,” she says. Cahalan and her family spent the next two nights in her Caltech office, located safely outside the evacuation zones. While there, she says, she would periodically call her old-fashioned answering machine back at home. “I was like, ‘If it picks up, then our house probably hasn’t burned yet.’ ” Michael Vicic, a chemical engineering lecturer at Caltech, knew it