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For people whose homes are spared in a wildfire while their neighbors lose everything, the road ahead can be isolating, plagued by feelings of guilt and shame.
By Ronda Kaysen
Ronda Kaysen spoke with people whose homes had survived wildfires in California, Colorado and Hawaii.
Jan. 11, 2025Updated 10:04 p.m. ET
After evacuating her home early Wednesday morning and escaping the fires that had engulfed swaths of Altadena, Calif., Monica Perez clutched her rosary and chanted a Hail Mary as her 19-year-old son drove the two of them up the I-5.
Then a neighbor called with miraculous news: Her century old Mission-style stucco house was still standing and all but unharmed.
A fire crew had managed to save her home and two neighboring ones, Ms. Perez said. She and her son raced back to their neighborhood, in the evacuation zone, passing homes still ablaze, to see it with their own eyes.
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“I was at first overwhelmed with joy,” said Ms. Perez, 56, a podcast host, in a phone interview.
But her happiness was short-lived. “It was a mixture of both a tremendous relief, but a sense of it being a hollow victory because what we loved about that town is definitely gone forever,” said Ms. Perez, who bought the four-bedroom house in 2023.
In the aerial photographs that have become ubiquitous in this era of supersized wildfires, there is invariably a lonely house still standing, a baffling survivor. For the owners of the homes that manage to skirt fate, elation can turn to grief and frustration.
