After evacuating her home early Wednesday morning and escaping the fires that had engulfed swaths of Altadena, Calif., Monica Perez clutched her rosary and chanted a Hail Mary as her 19-year-old son drove the two of them up the I-5.
Then a neighbor called with miraculous news: Her century old Mission-style stucco house was still standing and all but unharmed.
A fire crew had managed to save her home and two neighboring ones, Ms. Perez said. She and her son raced back to their neighborhood, in the evacuation zone, passing homes still ablaze, to see it with their own eyes.
“I was at first overwhelmed with joy,” said Ms. Perez, 56, a podcast host, in a phone interview.
But her happiness was short-lived. “It was a mixture of both a tremendous relief, but a sense of it being a hollow victory because what we loved about that town is definitely gone forever,” said Ms. Perez, who bought the four-bedroom house in 2023.
In the aerial photographs that have become ubiquitous in this era of supersized wildfires, there is invariably a lonely house still standing, a baffling survivor. For the owners of the homes that manage to skirt fate, elation can turn to grief and frustration.
The lucky often find themselves alone in a neighborhood stripped of friendly faces and beloved landmarks. They fight with insurance companies to cover toxic smoke or other expensive damage, and they are left out of much of the financial and emotional support bestowed upon those who lost everything. The road ahead is long, isolating, costly and often traumatic, plagued by feelings of guilt and shame.
While many stay and rebuild, others leave because the place they called home — with neighbors who watered their plants or watched their children — is gone, even if their house isn’t.
“The single standing home did not win,” said Jen Goodlin, the executive director of the Rebuild Paradise Foundation, an organization founded after the 2018 Camp Fire, which burned 153,000 acres and destroyed 18,000 structures in Northern California. “They may have their memories and possessions, but for many of them, their journey was much harder.”
The Eaton fire, which ripped through Ms. Perez’s neighborhood, has destroyed more than 7,000 structures around Pasadena and Altadena, making it the second-most destructive wildfire in California’s history. With their house intact, Ms. Perez and her son and husband spent the day, with their neighbors, continuing to put out embers in trees and shrubs, keeping the flames at bay from the few remaining homes.
Ms. Perez described her neighbors as tight-knit in a city known for its transience. “Every single person you talk to is like, ‘I grew up in that house. My mother still lives in that house. We’ve been here for two generations,’” she said. “It’s a really old place.”
Even a tight-knit community can vanish in a matter of hours. In November 2018, the day after the Camp Fire destroyed nearly all of Paradise, Josh Fisher, a firefighter with Cal Fire who had been battling the blaze, sent his wife Holly Fisher a video from their backyard. Their three-bedroom home had survived.
Ms. Fisher, 39, a registered nurse, who was staying with family in nearby Chico, broke down in tears. “I felt super grateful, but also guilty — you know, people lost their lives,” she said of a fire that killed 84 people.
She also worried that her neighbors would think her husband had saved their home at the expense of others. “He was trapped himself at a parking lot with hundreds of people trying to stay alive,” she said.
In the weeks and months that followed, Ms. Fisher, who’d lived in Paradise almost her entire life, found herself and her family in a precarious position. Her two brothers, her parents and her father-in-law had all lost their homes. Her house was standing, but unlivable: The inside was covered in an inch of ash — thick enough that Ms. Fisher’s lips tingled and her mouth tasted of soot. The roof, flooring, windows and appliances needed to be replaced, and the walls shellacked and repainted. Insulation and ductwork had been damaged, as had the deck.
“It kept going on and on and we kept finding things,” she said of damages that ultimately totaled over $200,000. “It was a very long, tedious process with insurance because everything was an argument.”
The aid that poured into the town was not intended for homeowners in her situation, she said.
She considered leaving a community where more than 90 percent of the homes were destroyed. “Do I want to go back and live in this area that was beautiful and was a nice neighborhood and now there’s nothing?” she said. But her husband still had a job there, and “If we don’t go back, like, where would we go?” she said. So in 2020, she and her husband and two children returned to a hollowed out community, and have watched it slowly come back to life.
Hillary Anaya, 43, a cosmetologist who also grew up in Paradise, moved back in to her two-bedroom house five months after the Camp Fire, partly because her insurance company wouldn’t pay for temporary lodging once the house once was deemed habitable.
She has no idea how her house was spared — a neighbor told her that someone saw flames jump over it, she said — even as her brother, sister, parents and grandmother lost their homes. Returning to a barren landscape with neither property nor people was eerie and surreal. Debris still clogged the streets, and from her front window, the view wasn’t of her neighbor’s house, but of a burned-out chimney stack and rubble. “You’d go to bed at night and there was no lights that you could see,” she said. “It could be creepy”
Once a neighborhood starts to rebuild, the residents who have returned find themselves living in an endless construction site. Jenn Kaaoush and her husband and two of their children moved back in to their house three weeks after the Marshall Fire tore through the Boulder, Colo., suburbs in 2021, destroying more than 1,000 homes. Though the space had been cleaned, the air inside irritated their eyes and throats. Environmental testing found that the dust was toxic, so the walls, floors and furniture had to be removed, a process that was ultimately covered by insurance, and cost $170,000.
When the family returned six months later, the landscape was still covered in debris, and most of the people who’d lived there were gone. Houses on their side of the block had largely been spared, but the other side and the rest of the neighborhood hadn’t been as fortunate. Once the rebuilding began around them, plots that had been homes where her children played became work sites with bulldozers and other heavy machinery.
“When it first happens, you say, ‘This is amazing, they’re rebuilding, our neighbors are coming home. They’re going to come home.’ But after three years, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, can you please stop building things?’” said Ms. Kaaoush, a real estate agent and city councilwoman in Superior, a town in Boulder County.
Ms. Kaaoush said that she and some neighbors whose houses were also spared but ravaged by smoke rarely spoke about the strain they were under. “People with smoke damage keep a cover or lid on their emotional needs because they feel like it’s a second-tier trauma,” she said.
Jennifer Gray Thompson, the chief executive of After the Fire, a nonprofit helping communities recovering from massive wildfires, said the toll on mental health is common. “The survivors’ guilt is massive,” she said. “Whether or not they lost their home, every single person from that community is going to be traumatized.”
For some homeowners, the survival of their property wasn’t enough to keep them tied to a community that turned to ash. Dan and Pam Nelson moved to Lahaina, in Maui, in 2021, hoping to retire there. Mr. Nelson, a California firefighter, would fly back to Sacramento for his 48-hour shifts every week.
Every morning, the couple would sit on the deck of their three-bedroom home and watch the whales in the Pacific. Then the 2023 wildfire tore through the Lahaina community, destroying more than 2,200 structures in a matter of hours. Mr. Nelson stayed behind to defend his property, but said it was only luck — the winds shifted — that saved it. After the fire, the ocean view was clouded by destruction and the community erased. By October 2023, the couple had moved to Utah, near Ms. Nelson’s brother. “It’s not healthy to live in the soot and ash,” Mr. Nelson, 47, said.
Last March, they sold the house to a neighbor whose home across the street had burned.
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