Her family thought they would return home the next day. Now, their house is gone.
On the opening day of California’s destructive wildfires, Jinghuan Liu Tervalon was keeping an eye on Watch Duty, an app that tracks the flames. Altadena, her Los Angeles County town, was still only under an evacuation warning on Tuesday.
Then, a friend who’s married to a firefighter called and warned her that the Eaton Canyon fire was spreading quickly: she and her family should be prepared to leave.
The family took its time eating dinner and then packed some personal documents, some of the kids’ artwork and one night’s worth of clothes.
“We had no idea,” recalled Liu Tervalon, 42, who works in consumer insights and analytics.
When the family awoke Wednesday morning at a friend’s home, the app showed their house was now in a mandatory evacuation zone. But when they drove back to try to pick up more belongings, everything had changed.
“The sky was so dark,” Liu Tervalon recalled. “It felt like midnight and it was also raining ashes … and people were panicking.”
Her son, Samuel, 17, eventually made it back to their one-story home with a small pool in the backyard, but there was nothing to retrieve.
“It was entirely burned to the ground,” Liu Tervalon says. “I was stunned, absolutely stunned.”
Liu Tervalon’s three-bedroom home, which her husband, Jervey, has owned for more than a decade and a half, is among thousands of structures damaged or destroyed in the biggest wildfires to strike greater Los Angeles, according to LA County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone.
Liu Tervalon says she already misses the photos and art work on the walls and the memories of her husband’s 60th birthday, which they celebrated there. She spent part of Thursday on the phone with her insurance company, but she’s worried about the payout. She says a lot of the area around their home is considered high fire risk.
“We either don’t have fire coverage or not sufficient coverage,” she says.
Liu Tervalon says she loves Altadena, which she describes as a diverse, eclectic family-friendly community just north of Pasadena. But she’s not sure about the future. Her entire block has been razed and rebuilding will cost a lot of money.
She also says she blames herself for not being better prepared.
“I keep on waking up at night thinking, ‘Oh, my God, how did I not anticipate this?'” she says. “If I could go back in time, I would have packed a lot more stuff from the house.”
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