He and his wife, Julie, had originally left their house in Altadena with their two sons on Tuesday night because a tree smashed through a window in the heavy winds. Kirschner wasn’t prepared for that to be the last time they would see their house standing. “We honestly thought we were coming back because we didn’t [yet] know about the fire. I brought school uniforms because I thought there might be school the next day,” he said. There was a lot they didn’t get to take before leaving home.
“What if a single toy…?” Alex asked his father, trailing off at the end of his sentence. “That would be great, wouldn’t it? Would we keep that single part of the toy?” Kirshner asked his son. “Yeah,” Alex replied.
Nayeli Barajas, 24, Julia Osorno, 50
Nayeli Barajas and her mother, Julia Osorno, were picking up water at a mutual aid site in the parking lot of a Pasadena public library.
“[The city does] not recommend you drink regular water or use it for brushing teeth,” Osorno said. Since the fires began, tap water in the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and Pasadena has been unsafe to drink.
The family was unaware that the Eaton fire had started until Osorno stepped outside Tuesday night and saw the flames on the horizon outside her home on Glenrose Avenue in Altadena. “We had no power, we had no [WiFi or phone] signal. We couldn’t communicate with family. We had no idea what was going on,” Barajas said. “We heard about the Palisades fire. We were shocked when we found out that there was one right here.”
Since evacuating, they haven’t been able to return home to see if their house is still standing. Osorno, who runs a party supply store on Lake Avenue in Pasadena, is grateful that her business didn’t burn down, but right now she doesn’t have any customers. “I’m feeling very sad because I don’t know what [I will] do,” she said. “I need to pay the rent. I need to pay for the house. And I don’t know what happened with the house.”
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