Roya Lavasani spent nearly 30 years building a home and business for her family on a Malibu street just off the Pacific Coast Highway. She and her husband, Majid Amirani, owned a four-unit condo, living in one unit and renting out the other three furnished spaces for a total of about $150,000 a year.
The building had a shock of pink flowers outside the entrance, orchids potted inside and out, and a mix of fruiting trees around the property, including apple, loquat, nectarine, peach, and avocado surrounding the building that Ms. Lavasani was known to climb and prune.
Years of careful attention and consistent income were lost last week when the Palisades fire burned down their property. The fire, now among the most destructive in California history, was one of multiple blazes that have swept through communities across Los Angeles County over the past week, putting nearly 200,000 people under evacuation orders.
Many other residents have chosen to leave, chased out by the ash-clogged air or the fear that their homes, even beyond the evacuation zones, were no longer safe. Each evacuee had to make a calculation, weighing physical safety with the financial hits that can come with leaving — and potentially losing — a home.
Some losses are incalculable. For Ms. Lavasani, it’s the photo albums of her two daughters, Xena and Rezvon, both now grown, that she mourns the most. She had hoped to save them as the fire drew nearer.
“I was so scared of losing those memories,” Ms. Lavasani, 57, said. “All memories — gone.”
Tricia Wachtendorf, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, said researchers think of the financial costs of evacuating a disaster in three buckets. First, before disaster strikes, there’s the preparation phase of getting supplies together. Then, the immediate needs of restocking necessities while being displaced and dealing with potential disruptions to work and income. Finally, there’s the long-term costs that come with recovery — big things like relocating or replacing a houseful of furniture.
But there are also personal costs that run parallel to these, like the effects on a person’s mental health, on a child’s education, on a mother’s memory or on the threads of connection that make a community.
Leaving their home saved the Amirani family’s lives, but it also put them on a long road to regaining what they lost. As the fires continue to burn and evacuees wait on news of their neighborhoods, families like the Amiranis are now wondering what they will be able to recover and at what cost.
What Was Saved
When the firefighters came knocking on Jan. 7, telling them it was time to go, Mr. Amirani, 64, and his daughter, Rezvon, 24, grabbed the family’s essentials, including their passports, important paperwork, jewelry, personal technology and Coco, a 9-year-old pet pygmy goat Rezvon received for her 15th birthday.
Ms. Lavasani stayed behind in hopes of gathering some other items and taking additional steps to protect their home. But then the flames arrived, coming toward her like “fireworks at my head,” she said. She ran away with just the items she had on her, pulling her sweatshirt hood around her face for protection. She escaped with a few burns.
That same evening, Marcell Scott opened the door of his two-bedroom Pasadena home to relatives and friends making their own hasty escapes from the Eaton fire in Altadena. Like the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire moved quickly, forcing many people to make split-second decisions about what to grab. Born and raised in Pasadena, Mr. Scott’s family has lived in the area for generations, with family spread across “Dena,” as he called it.
While some of their homes survived, one of his aunts and her three children lost theirs, now relying on the basic belongings they packed.
“Some people only packed a day’s worth of stuff, some only packed a few days worth of stuff, but nobody knew everything would be burned down by the next morning” Mr. Scott, 33, said. “Everybody thought they were going back to a home — they didn’t know.”
What Can Be Replaced
As the devastation became clear, Los Angeles County set up evacuation shelters where residents could sleep, grab a meal and get started on paperwork. The Amiranis are staying at one at the Westwood Recreation Center, living out of a pair of borrowed campers parked in the lot. Coco, their goat, is skittish around other animals, so the family members take turns sleeping and sitting with her in the parking lot.
The shelter offers basic supplies for evacuees, with pallets of water bottles stacked along the wall leading into the building. Still, the family has grabbed some additional items on their own from CVS, including medical tape for the burns Ms. Lavasani received from fleeing the fire. They have also received small gifts from people who have seen them on the local news, including a new pet bed for Coco.
While the immediate needs of evacuees can be extensive, it’s also the time when help is most easily accessible, according to Ms. Wachtendorf of the University of Delaware. Those who were not directly affected by the disaster often spring into action, starting fund-raisers or gathering supplies to donate, though Ms. Wachtendorf warned the latter can often do more harm than good, creating waste while failing to meet the actual needs of people forced out of their homes.
Mr. Scott spent a day over the weekend volunteering at a distribution center run by a nonprofit called WalkGood LA in Arlington Heights, which held a donation drive before pivoting to ask primarily for gift cards and cash. Marley Ralph, a co-founder of the organization, hoped this would allow evacuees to meet their own evolving needs.
“There’s a lot of people that don’t have their fire insurance, and it’s just going to be hell trying to get some money to help support them,” Ms. Ralph said.
Thousands have created fund-raising pages to gather additional cash while they await answers from insurance and government aid. The Amirani family is among them. They have set a goal of $35,000, an amount Fritz Porter, Ms. Lavasani’s son-in-law, described as “a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of costs,” but enough to get them out of their campers and start covering the rent they will likely need to pay in the coming months (they have raised about $25,000, so far).
Though they have not yet been authorized to return, they’ve seen photos from neighbors of the wreckage that once was their home: The new roof they recently paid $60,000 to install has collapsed; the trees Ms. Lavansi tended are now skeletal and scorched. Zooming in and out, trying to parse blurry pixels to identify belongings, Ms. Lavasani estimated it will take them years to rebuild, which means years without rental income. They have already applied for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and filed an insurance claim for damages to the house. The family has fire insurance under the California FAIR plan, the state’s self-described “insurer of last resort” for those who could not get other coverage, but they are concerned the provider is not financially equipped to handle the losses from these fires. For now their focus is on getting back to the house. Beyond that, much remains uncertain.
“My husband is almost a senior, I am 57 years old,” Ms. Lavasani said. “This is not a time to rebuild your business again.”
What Was Lost
With the smoke from the fires that burned down so much of her community still swirling into the sky in front of her, Ms. Lavasani talked about the future. Not the near-term concerns of where she might sleep next week, or how she and her husband would afford to rebuild, but of the grandchildren she might hold one day and the memories those children will never get to see of their own mothers growing up, lost in photo albums.
Lui Elliot, 30, grew up in Altadena on a street where it was common for neighbors to poke their faces over his backyard fence just to say hi and hang out. Mr. Elliot was in the process of making the house his own when it became one of the Eaton fire’s casualties, taking along with it family photos and the extensive, eclectic record collection that his father, a musician who died last year, had carefully curated.
Still, it’s the loss of his neighborhood community that he brings up the most. Both Mr. Elliot and Mr. Scott recalled Altadena’s roots as a Black community and shared their fears that this history could get lost in the lengthy and expensive rebuilding process. Mr. Elliot said all the neighbors he has checked in with are planning to rebuild, but he also recognized that the cost to rebuild the neighborhood extends beyond their means.
“The water is tainted, they probably don’t have power and probably won’t have power for a long time. Your sewer system is probably cooked,” he said. “We can have all the money and be ready to build, but we can’t build because there’s no infrastructure.”
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