Over the past few weeks, thousands of residents in Los Angeles, California evacuated their homes due to raging wildfires throughout the city. Citizens and experts debate the most likely cause of the fires, and the local fire department is doing what they can to reduce the risk and stop the spread. Despite their efforts, the fires continue to engulf the city.
“It was just unrecognizable,” Altadena resident Joan Nguyen said in an interview with NPR. “It just felt so sad to see this beautiful community just turn into rubble and ash.”
Nguyen and her family lived in a home in Altadena that she and her husband worked hard for and cherished. Their family and thousands of others involuntarily abandoned their homes and most of their belongings over these past two weeks, packing small bags and only grabbing a few treasured items. They returned to homes, buildings and communities that were completely destroyed.
“I was driving with my husband, taking the kids from visiting a friend and going back to my mother-in-law’s house,” Nguyen said. “I said ‘Come on guys, it’s time to go home.’ And then my son—he’s 6—said we don’t have a home. And that just really broke me.”
Firefighters work to contain the fires and administer warnings and evacuations to areas at risk. They cut down trees, and helicopters fly chemicals over the landscape in hopes to calm the fires and prevent the spread. Despite these efforts, recent budget cuts, high winds and drought caused the fires to continue engulfing the city and prevented the firefighters from fully stopping the flames. Captain Chuong Ho describes what he saw on a night on the freeway in an interview with Katie Couric.
“I actually drove by a commercial fire with flame lengths I’d say were 20 feet in the air that, with wind speed, was laying down across the freeway,” Ho said. “I had to slow down my car. It was extremely dangerous and eerie.”
Less than a month before the fires started, firefighters expressed concerns about budget cuts and underemployment across the city at a local meeting. They spoke about the increase in calls yet the constant and even decreased number of firefighters and available resources in Los Angeles over the past decade, and how deploying services became challenging with dozens of calls at once.
“Our city has grown exponentially over the past decade, yet our fire department has remained relatively stagnant if not shrunk,” Ho said. “More 911 calls are occurring in the city, and if we don’t have enough people to respond to these calls, people will die.”
While citizens of Los Angeles face these devastating losses, several celebrities revealed losing their homes to the blaze as well. Paris Hilton, Ricki Lake, Mandy Moore, Tyra Banks, Joshua Jackson and many others lost their homes over the past two weeks. “This is Us” and “Gilmore Girls” star Milo Ventimiglia and his pregnant wife Jarah Mariano grieve the loss of their home and the nursery they had prepared for their baby.
“You start thinking about all of the memories in different parts of the house,” Ventimiglia said in a news segment with CBS. “Then you see your neighbors’ houses and everything around, and your heart just breaks.”
Several donation sites and pages are available to help those who lost their homes and belongings in the fires. Neighborhoods and communities come together in hopes of recovery and next steps in the wake of tragedy.
“It’s a disaster,” Fire Union Chief Freddy Escobar said in the interview with Katie Couric. “We have a long recovery, but we will get through this as one team.”
If you are interested in donating to those affected by the Los Angeles fires, consider one of the links below:
California Fire Foundation: https://www.cafirefoundation.org/
American Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org/
