A woman who lost her home in the Eaton fire 'has no more tears to cry'

Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times on Jan 10, 2025

Published in Women

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The sky was blue, empty of smoke, as if no ruin had come to the house where Maria Sanchez once lived at the foot of the San Gabriels in Altadena. But as she wandered through the wreckage on Thursday, she stepped amid cinders left by the flames that had swarmed the land and erased the life she had built.

It was quiet on West Palm Street. Ash descended over burned cars, toppled homes, and charred fences and trees. A helicopter skimmed the distance. Firetrucks navigated around fallen power lines. People who once lived here, like Sanchez, walked around in unchanged clothes, humbled and stunned by the force that showed them no mercy a day earlier.

"I'm sorry for your loss," a woman, as if at a funeral, whispered to Sanchez as she passed.

"I don't have any more tears to cry," said Sanchez, her voice muffled by a face mask to protect her from smoke. "I cried all last night. My heart is broken. Our life savings, everything is gone. We don't know where to start. What do I need? I need everything."

She paused.

"We called the insurance yesterday."

Sanchez is an education site coordinator at Willard Elementary School in Pasadena. She bought her house on a corner lot from a retired schoolteacher in 2018 and lived there with five adults, two children, ages 5 and 12, chickens, roosters, 10 cats she was fostering, and two Rottweilers. Relatives lived on nearby streets in a neighborhood of palms and orange trees, where the night air from the mountains cooled backyards and people embraced lives deeper than just knowing someone's name.

She spotted the approaching fury as she was leaving school at 6:20 p.m. on Tuesday. "I saw sparks in Eaton Canyon," she said. "I heard firetrucks." The Eaton fire chased her and her family and menagerie of pets from the home about 3 a.m. Wednesday.

"We could see it," said Sanchez, now living with relatives in Ontario. "It was so close. We saved the animals but I only got out with a pair of jeans and these Crocs."

The shoes were the colors of a rainbow, bright against the devastation. She looked around, wondering about time, chance, wind direction, fate, the things that come with life in a state where cruelty hides in beauty and nature is increasingly riled. Her neighbors felt it too, a few of them carrying backpacks through the rubble, pointing out where a couch once was and contemplating how a refrigerator could disappear. One woman salvaged a statue of Buddha, another marveled at how lemons hung yellow and unscathed in a yard where a house had fallen and vanished. A spare eloquence arose from the unexplainable.

"Four homes owned by my family are destroyed," said Sanchez. "We're all burned down."

Blackbirds cawed from trees and flapped over block after block of destruction. A man took photographs. A boy wearing a Spider-Man suit, a tiny hero on a battered street, walked hand-in-hand with his father. Scraps of flame broke out here and there but were quickly tamped down by neighbors. The larger fire beyond this scorched neighborhood, though, was still strong, keeping evacuation orders in place as it climbed nearby Mt. Wilson.

"I came here hoping to find one thing that was alive," said Sanchez, looking around her property. "I did. A small desert plant. I said, 'Well, that gives me hope."