They sat side by side on a cot, surrounded by dozens of other evacuees in the Pasadena Convention Center, a holding place for upended lives.
An exhausted and sooty Mark Turner had just returned Wednesday from inspecting his home in Altadena and removing valuables, and he was showing 13-year-old daughter May some photographs of the devastation.
May looked on, speechless, running her fingers through her long red hair.
Their house was still standing— “it’s a miracle,” her dad said. But the detached garage and a guest cottage were destroyed, as were all but three or four of the 20 or so houses on their block near the Altadena Golf Course.
Earlier in the day, Turner had watched as flames rapidly engulfed some of those houses and tried calling for help, but firefighters were overwhelmed. With no tap water, he dipped buckets into his swimming pool for hours and tried to douse flames on his property and at nearby homes. But the fires were unrelenting, devouring structures, vegetation and vehicles.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
The Turners, along with thousands of others who were displaced by infernos that destroyed much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades, are crushed, dazed, in limbo and not sure how to proceed.
The questions for them and others are countless, and not particularly easy to answer:
Do they want to return, rebuild and start over, knowing that for months if not years, they’ll be living in a massive construction zone? If so, when might they be able to start, how long will it take to restore what’s been lost, and how much will it cost? And with their favorite stores, restaurants and gathering places reduced to smoldering debris, and good friends possibly departing, what will they be returning to?
Los Angeles and catastrophe have never been strangers. The ground shakes. The hills collapse. Drought and downpour take turns, and firestorms erase everything in their path. But in this climate-change era of extreme conditions, is it worth starting over in a place where the risk of catastrophe may forever be part of the bargain?
“Possibly,” May said. “Because I love Altadena.”
Plus, her friends are there, she said.
“I’d be pretty scared,” May said about returning to a neighborhood still reeling from a nightmare of lost lives and incinerated homes. “But I grew up in that house.”
The indiscriminate force of the fire was on display at the convention center, where evacuees from retirement communities and assisted living centers gathered near the Turner family. A woman in her 80s, sitting in a wheelchair, told me she’d lost her home and didn’t know what she’d do.
A brother and sister in their 70s said they live “in the stone age,” without computers or cellphones, and, luckily, were informed by a neighbor that they had to evacuate. They couldn’t find a hotel, so they slept in their car in a Stater Brothers parking lot, and they were waiting to hear if it was true, as one neighbor claimed, that their house had survived.
A 63-year-old snake handler told me he evacuated himself and his 92-year-old mother, in her medical bed, with the help of law enforcement. He was hoping his house, where he has lived his entire life, was still standing.
The Turners, who spent time at the homes of two friends in addition to the convention center, were hurtling through a storm of emotions, including a touch of guilt. Their property was damaged, but the main structure was intact on a street where neighbors lost everything. And yet they weren’t sure, as embers continued to fly, that their house wouldn’t be the next to combust.
Mark Turner, an entertainment industry tech consultant, made several trips back to the house to watch over it and gather belongings. But his wife, yoga instructor Claire Wavell, wasn’t sure she wanted to return. Eventually, she did.
“I knew I had to see it at some point, but I didn’t really want to face it,” she said, still in a state of shock two days after evacuating. “I knew that seeing it was going to make it real, and I said to Mark and May, … ‘It was like seeing a dead relative.’ … I oscillated between survival mode and breaking down in tears. … when I talked to family and friends … or when I saw neighbors who lost everything.”
The Turners, both from England, have lived in Altadena for 15 years, the last 10 in a cream-colored Tudor with dark brown trim and a blue front door. They have a rental property in Arizona and talked about bailing on L.A. and moving there. But that would mean uprooting their daughter, leaving a neighborhood they love, and starting over while still being on the hook for the mortgage of a damaged property.
“Mark is usually the strong one, and I’ve seen him breaking down,” Wavell said of her husband, who cursed the fire while dumping water on spreading flames.
The house turns 100 this year, Wavell said, and she and her husband have been talking to it as if it’s a family member.
“We were in the house,” she said, “and saying, ‘You’re strong, you’re going to make your hundredth birthday, you’re a grand dame … You’ve been through all these people and stories and histories and earthquakes and Santa Anas and fires. You’re strong, and we love you.’”
When the family got a chance to return together for the first time, the view was a little reminiscent of driving through a graveyard. Some parts of Altadena were largely untouched by the fire, but in others, entire blocks were flattened, with trees scorched and cars hollowed out. The main commercial district, on Lake Avenue, was largely destroyed.
As we turned the corner onto the Turner’s street, smoke still rose from the ashes. Chimneys stood defiantly tall, but on lot after lot, walls and roofs were unrecognizable, the shapes of homes erased.
The front of the Turner’s house showed no evidence of there having been a fire in the neighborhood, and two more houses in succession also were largely unscathed. For some reason, the fire circled around the backs of those houses.
“It left these three houses,” Mark said. “Everything south of here is gone. Everything north of here is gone. But it burned around the back, and it’s just bizarre.”
The Turner’s backyard structures, a garage and cottage, were unrecognizable. Trees were toasted. Turner, who had joined with neighbors to shut off gas lines, dig fire lines and douse hot spots, had chucked pieces of burning fence into his pool, where they floated in the ash-laden muck.
A lemon, still hanging from a tree, appeared to have boiled, its juices bubbling over the rind. A terra cotta pot had partially melted. The next door neighbor’s house was obliterated, with the husk of a vehicle in the driveway.
“The fire was so hot, you can see the alloy wheels were completely melted,” Mark said of a neighbor’s car. “You can see puddles of liquid metal.”
For all of that, it seemed that the family — mother, father and daughter all back together for the first time — was becoming all the more committed to staying, as if both the strength and frailty of the house had reignited their sense of stewardship. They offered a tour of the inside, where the fire’s destruction was visible only by looking out the windows, and the lovingly decorated Christmas tree still stood in a corner of the living room.
In the center of an historic tragedy, the house remained, standing its ground, like the San Gabriel Mountains rising in the near distance.
I asked May if returning to the house made her more or less determined to continue living her life here.
“I think more,” she said. “Because it survived, and I’m proud of it.”
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