Fire Evacuees Prepare to Return Home Unsure of What They'll Find

Ray López-Chang stays with his grandma in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles, south of Pasadena, for now. The tall, bubbly 30-year-old with glowing skin hushed his dog, Cielo, from barking when we met at this temporary home: a one-story house on a hill. He lived here off and on when he was younger.

López-Chang evacuated his family from their home in Altadena at 3 a.m. on Jan. 8. The Eaton Fire roared, forcing evacuations across the town. Six hours later, he briefly returned to grab clothes, medications and valuables they didn’t want to lose.

“It felt very chaotic and perilous inside with cars snaking through small streets, folks running through sidewalks,” he said.

They also spent precious time spraying down their house with water in hopes of preventing wind-whipped embers from igniting the house. Before they left, López-Chang said his mom grabbed a figurine of a Catholic saint. But then placed the icon back “to protect the home,” López-Chang said.

Salomón Huerta rents a small home in Altadena several blocks away. The figurative painter was on his way home from work when his wife called nervously as the fire approached. “She goes: ‘You better hurry up because I can see the fire,’” he said.

The fires burning in Southern California have consumed more than 40,000 acres and more than 10,700 structures, as well as the lives of 25 people, at least. The Eaton Fire ripped through Altadena and is still not contained.

López-Chang and Huerta are two of the thousands of residents within that evacuation zone who cannot return, many who have yet to find out if their homes are still standing. KQED sent me to report on the fires, and friends connected me to them. The families tried to reach their homes multiple times after the wind and flames moderated, but the National Guard turned them around.

Cal Fire and Los Angeles County created a website where families can check on the status of their homes. When I checked, López-Chang’s home was not yet listed. On my next trip to the fire zone, I drove by to see for myself.

Turn off the 210 Freeway onto Lincoln Avenue and move toward the San Gabriel Mountains, and all along the road, you’ll find shops and groups of people collecting donations — boxes of clothes, stacks of bottled water and mountains of food — for fire victims, many of whom were still waiting to see what remains, if anything, of their homes.

I flashed my press pass to a public information officer at a National Guard station. When I arrived at López-Chang’s home, I found his one-story white house with bright green grass and a palm tree still standing, without scorch marks or piles of ash surrounding it. Later, I’d show him a photo of it, and he couldn’t stop staring at the phone, virtually expressionless.

“I’m just locking eyes with it,” López-Chang said. “It’s like seeing someone you haven’t seen in a long time, and I just don’t want to lose that image.”

López-Chang said his mom made the right decision to leave the figurine of a Catholic saint to watch over their home.

“Maybe the saints helped,” he said, noting that it was originally his grandmother’s figurine. “We tried as much as we could, but her hand was over the home as much as possible.”

He said his parents would be so relieved to learn that the house they bought about a decade ago after immigrating from Nicaragua in the 1970s is still standing.

“This helps clarify a lot for us about what the next several weeks look like,” López-Chang said.

Although the house did not burn, the smoke that enveloped the house could have rendered it uninhabitable. “At minimum, we’ll be able to access some of our belongings and memories,” he said.

But not all residents were so lucky.

Huerta and his wife, Ana Morales-Huerta, rented a small home several blocks east of López-Chang.

Huerta said he had five minutes to pack his belongings, selecting items he could resell in case he needed the cash. “I grabbed a large sketchbook with a David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album in it that’s worth a lot of money,” he said.

But in the evacuation frenzy, he did not even have time to think about grabbing his archives — mainly transparencies and photos of his previous work — dating back to 1992.

When I drove down Huerta’s street, all the homes on the block had burned. Only a pile of rubble remained of his house, surrounded by a charred hedge and a tall tree.

“I don’t recognize it,” Huerta said, leaning back in his chair, his face pressed into lines of confusion when I showed him photos of the burned mess. “I don’t know what I’m looking at because it doesn’t look like what I remember it to be.”

The fire destroyed not only his home but also his favorite cafe, the diner where he met art collectors and his gym.

“I don’t know anything about construction, but I don’t see how they’re going to rebuild for a very long time because the damage is just too massive,” he said.

Huerta is looking for a new home but doesn’t have renters insurance. His art dealer started a GoFundMe to help with relocation costs.

“Even if we get 50% of what we had, we’d be really happy,” he said.

Even though López-Chang’s home is still standing, as a young person in Los Angeles living with the effects of human-caused climate change in real time, he wasn’t too surprised the fire grew out of control. Scientists believe human-caused climate change exacerbated the dry conditions that made the area easy to burn.

“If this isn’t a perfect example of what the outcome of fast climate change looks like, I don’t know what is,” López-Chang said. “This affected people’s homes, businesses, livelihoods and memories.”