A California woman who is 7 months pregnant is among the thousands of Los Angeles County residents who are still reeling as multiple wildfires continue to burn across Southern California.
Chloe Garcia and her partner Giovanni Figueroa lost their home and everything they owned in the Eaton Fire that decimated Altadena, California.
Now in her final trimester of pregnancy, Garcia said she and Figueroa will have to rebuild their lives from scratch.
“I was in disbelief, and I looked at Gio, and I was like, ‘That’s everything we have,’ all the things that we had started collecting for the baby and all of the memories that we had started,” the 36-year-old recalled to “Good Morning America” of seeing her house go up in flames.
Garcia, an occupational therapist at a children’s hospital, said she was at work on Jan. 7 when Figueroa called and told her their home, which they share with Figueroa’s daughter and their two dogs, had lost power. Initially, she didn’t think too much about it, because it had happened in the past.
“Everyone’s staying very positive because we’ve all lost power before. We’ve had fires around us so it wasn’t something that was immediately important,” Garcia recounted.
Garcia and Figueroa decided to stay the night in nearby Glendale and only packed enough for an overnight stay, thinking they could return to pick up necessities later.
But in the middle of the night, Garcia’s neighbor, who happens to be her cousin Alex and whom she refers to as her “sister,” called and told her they had to evacuate.
By then, the Eaton Fire, which started on Jan. 7, was encroaching on Altadena homes and residents. Since then, the wildfire has burned over 14,100 acres and destroyed over 7,100 structures, according to Cal Fire.
Garcia said she and Figueroa tried to return home to pick up essential items such as their passports and Figueroa’s daughter’s birth certificate, but it was already too late.
“As we turned the corner, I could see flames just going and I was like, that is right next to our home, if it’s not our home,” Garcia recalled, adding that “there were embers everywhere.”
“When we pulled up to my home, the house next to us, the tree and the back house were on fire. And I was like, ‘We can’t go in. We can’t go in. This is terrifying.'”
Garcia estimates that her house — nicknamed the “Dodger house” because it was painted blue and white like the Los Angeles Dodgers colors and which Garcia referred to as her “forever home” — caught fire and was gone within six hours.
Garcia said seeing the ruins of her home, which they had already started filling with baby items and a crib in preparation for their baby’s March 28 arrival, was “surreal” and felt like “a movie.”
But Garcia said the worst part for her was seeing her family members, who have also lived in Altadena for generations, lose their homes and all of their possessions as well.
“The thing that’s been most challenging for me is that it’s a multi-loss,” she continued, adding that it wasn’t just her home that had been destroyed but also her parents’ home, her cousin’s home and her uncle’s home in a community that’s near and dear to her heart.
“Altadena is such a special city. One of most amazing things about Altadena is that it has multi-generational families … primarily African American, Latino families that own property, which in Los Angeles is kind of unheard of,” Garcia said of her hometown.
As Garcia and Figueroa begin to figure out what they will do next after the Eaton Fire changed their lives overnight, Garcia said she’s living at a relative’s home in Marina Del Rey for the time being and trying to focus on staying healthy in the final weeks of her pregnancy.
“There’s so many things to process. I’ve just found it helpful to list everything and anything just to figure out how to get through every day,” the expectant mom said. “When you’ve lost everything, all you can do is rebuild, and I keep laughing with people and with my family, telling them that we’re going to have one hell of a story to tell my baby.”
ABC News: Top Stories
Read the full article .
