For the weeks after Eaton Fire destroyed her Altadena home, Ivana Lin lived in constant, overwhelming battles and flight conditions.
Her body was tense. She barely slept.
At one point, she wrote down all the to-do lists she felt in one day, including itemizing her lost belongings into an insurance company, applying for financial aid, and grasping the childcare of her 4-year-old son, who was on fire.
There were 50 tasks on the list.
“Stress keeps you up at night,” said Lynn, 38, who has lived with her husband in Altadena since 2017. …We wake up at 3 or 4am. Do everything you can. I fell asleep around midnight. ”
“It was a full-time job to manage how we could recover from this disaster,” said Chris Russo, who had closed the escrow at Parisades’ home in the Pacific Ocean a day before the Parisades fire burned out.
The house burned at the Tahitian Terrace Mobile Home Park in Pacific Palisade on January 24th.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Russo, who lived in West Hollywood for 24 years, thought she had found her paradise. A single wide trailer from Tahitian Terrace Mobile Home Park across the street from Beach, Wilrogers.
“To be honest, it was magic,” she said. “Now I have to pivot.”
A new poll of registered voters in Los Angeles County by the UC Berkeley Government Institute and co-hosted by the Times, the January 7th fire found that victims reported extreme levels of stress and dramatic changes in their daily activities.
They were asked to rank on a scale of 1-10. The additional levels of stress that fires added to life, 84% of respondents in the Pallisard Fire Zone and 77% of Eton Fire Zone gave a top ranking of 8-10.
Most of the affected LA County residents outside the area were also deeply affected. Almost a third reported high stress levels, and 40% reported moderate stress.
Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS poll, said about the people in the affected areas, that the tragedy would “have been with them for many years, while the rest of the county will try to get their lives back.”
Residents in burned areas were longer residents than those outside, more likely to own a home and were more likely to be satisfied with the quality of life in Los Angeles, Los Angeles.
Jessica Miller cries as she stands in front of Altadena’s destroyed art studio and home on February 4th.
(Allen J. Scheven/Los Angeles Times)
94% of Eton Fire Zone residents and 92% of Pallisard Fire Zone said they had lived in LA County for over 11 years.
The survey found that the majority of residents in burned areas were satisfied with their neighborhoods. But about 40% are thinking of leaving because of the fire – much more than residents of counties outside the burned area.
The people on the firebeat were “established residents of their community,” DiCamilo said. “They’ve been there for a long time. They tend to own their own homes. They’re not a temporary community. But they’ve had this huge mess in their lives.”
“There’s an interesting dichotomy,” he added. “They like La, but they’re more likely to be considering a move. It’s a shame.”
Poll respondent Lynn said she and her husband are planning to rebuild in Altadena and are actively talking to the architects, but they were thinking of leaving because the process of regaining their lives was so daunting.
“Even if people are saying, ‘I really love Altadena,’ you have to really consider whether they want to rebuild,” she said. “For me and many others, the fear was that this was forever and we should leave. I don’t want to wait 10 years. And some people don’t have 10 years.”
Shortly after the fire, she and her son were with step-in-law at Dana Point, and her husband was with a friend in Pasadena near his workplace. As the family was scattered and the houses were gone, her son said, “I had a cry I’d never heard before.
They quickly rented an apartment in Pasadena to resettle the boy as soon as possible.
Lin has lived primarily in LA county since she and her family moved from Brazil when she was 12 years old. The house was a complete loss.
US Army Corps of Engineers workers clear the debris from a Palm Street home in Altadena that was destroyed in the Eton fire.
(Allen J. Scheven/Los Angeles Times)
Polls show that 74% of respondents in the Eton Fire Zone have caused structural damage to a home or other property owned by a close relative. Nearly half of those who reported the damage said the structure was a complete loss.
In the Palisades fire zone, 64% of respondents suffered structural damage to their homes and other property. Among them, I experienced a total loss of more than half.
Bradley Adams and his wife, Esther Song, also lost their home in Altadena near the Cheney Trail in the hills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Adams said he hasn’t moved for the past two months after feeling deeply connected to Altadena. We stayed with our family in Long Beach and spent several nights at Joshua Tree with two exciting husky mixes.
Adams, 34, said he seriously considered leaving LA County due to the trauma of losing his home that he bought in 2020. He avoids seeing photos of their player life.
“Through all of this, I want to be happier than anything else, and being in LA County right now doesn’t make me happy,” he said. “We were very rooted in Altadena. We want to take root again, but we don’t want to hold back our lives.”
The 36-year-old Song said they were planning to maintain their Altadena estate and rebuild the house above it, but she said she liked the idea of being just outside of the area, probably in a nearby county, for the time being.
The couple owns Road Runner Bag, a small business based in Los Angeles, and makes bike bags and accessories. They lost the fleet of bicycles they used to promote their products and worry about their business floating around.
In the Eton Fire Zone, 20% of residents were self-employed, according to polls. Of these, 51% have caused damage to the business. In the Palisades fire zone, 36% were self-employed. Of these, 45% have caused damage to their businesses.
Polls showed that residents within the fire station helped increase city and county fire station funds, even if they meant higher taxes than residents in other counties.
EPA crews comb the abandoned houses destroyed by the fire in the Palisade.
(Robert Gautier/Los Angeles Times)
In the Palisade Fire Zone, 83% of respondents supported greater funding, as did 76% who lived in the Eton Fire Zone. Outside of affected areas, support fell to 64%.
The poll asked if the insurer should be allowed to raise fire insurance fees if they allow the insurer to provide coverage to everyone. This includes those found in high-risk zones where homeowners have been removed by providers in recent years.
In the Palisades fire zone, 66% of respondents supported higher fees and wider coverage, as did 56% of respondents in the Eaton Fire Zone. Outside these areas, only 38% supported that choice.
Russo, a post-production director and documentary filmmaker, said she is a California fairplan, the state’s last resort insurance company, and “is strictly uninsured.”
Russo said, “I’m confident that the Palisade village will be strong and beautiful.”
She hopes that the mobile home park will be rebuilt and will in fact move into her home.
Russo, who is from New York, said she “is not in love with LA, but I found this beautiful community and fell in love with Pallisard.”
But she said she needs to leave LA County for at least for now. She plans to visit her mother in Florida and spend time with friends in Cape Cod.
“I need a little reset,” she said. “For a while, we need another ocean view. We need a place to heal.”
The Berkeley IGS poll was conducted online in English and Spanish from February 17-26.
We surveyed 5,184 registered voters in Los Angeles County. The total included an oversample of 272 registered voters living in the Palisade Fire Zone and 293 registered voters living in the Eton Fire Zone. The margin of error can be inaccurate. However, the estimated error in the LA County voter survey is 2% points, and the margin of estimated error for people living in the burn zone is 4% points.
Source link
