‘Nobody’s dying’: A look inside how a senior home evacuated before burning down in LA wildfire
Flush with her $1.25 winnings at the bingo tables, Sharon Tanner retired to a room off the dining hall to discuss the top worry for the residents council at her senior living community: what to do about people leaving their laundry in the washing machines and dryers.
Dinner service at the Terraces at Park Marino in Pasadena, California, was about half over, and residents were gathering in the lobby for the night’s movie feature: “Scent of a Woman.” Tanner and Carlene Sutherland, the council vice president and secretary, were discussing the laundry scofflaws when something caught their attention.
“I smell smoke,” Tanner said.
“So do I,” remarked Sutherland.
High above in the surrounding hills, a fire was burning. But staff had decided they were in no immediate danger, and the women figured they were smelling a distant fire.
Then they heard a commotion in the lobby.
The space was filling up with people, many of them agitated. Outside, the wind was howling. Then the power went out.
Tanner was looking out a picture window toward the backyard, where she sometimes takes meals, when embers began falling from the sky “like hail.” She sat amazed as first the bushes, then a wooden fence burst into flames.
Within an hour, the Terraces’ staff and residents would be in a race for their lives, walking, rolling and stumbling out into a hellscape of swirling coals in what one person called a “hurricane with flames.”
Four of 15 residents in the Safe Haven wing were in hospice care. As Yesenia Cervantes, director of the memory care unit, scrambled to get people prepared to evacuate, a dark thought began gnawing at her.
Oh, my God, she thought. Will we have to decide which people we can save, and which to leave behind?
Deadly fires
The wildfires that have ravaged the Los Angeles area since Jan. 7 have claimed at least two dozen lives and destroyed thousands of structures. AccuWeather, a company that provides data on weather and its impact, puts the damage and economic losses at $250 billion to $275 billion.
About 150,000 people in Los Angeles County remain under evacuation orders.
Around 850 patients and residents of nursing homes, assisted living facilities and group homes were evacuated after the blazes last week, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Among them are the people who called the Terraces home.
A place for people’s next stage
A three-story wood and stucco building partially covered with ivy, the Terraces nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The 95 residents — ranging in age from 60 to 102 — were divided between assisted living and memory care.
Jan. 7 started out just like any other Tuesday. Breakfast was served from 7-9 a.m. Then at 9:45, it was time for “Stay Fit” — what they call their chair exercises.
Walking Club is usually at 10:15, but the staff decided it was too windy for the residents — many of whom, like Tanner, use a walker. After lunch, it was “Tech Hour,” where staffers helped residents with their devices, and dinner started at 4. Residents had a choice between orange chicken with rice and broccoli, or a cold shrimp salad.
At 5:30, it was time for Movie Night, a tradition for which the residents could thank Louise Miller.
The 83-year-old widow and her neighbor, a 70-year-old man named Eddie, were inseparable, and also “kind of night owls” and wanted something to do after dinner, said Sam Baum, the community relations director. Soon, other residents began joining them, and “Movie Night” was born.
Not long into the film, a visiting nurse came by and told staff there was a fire in the hills above. Baum decided to jump in his car and head up for a closer look.
It was part of the Eaton fire, which began earlier that day and, fanned by vicious Santa Ana Winds, would eventually grow and all but obliterate the nearby community of Altadena. But when Baum stopped his car and took a look around, he didn’t see cause for alarm. There were lots of firefighters on the scene, and the blaze would have to jump a major thoroughfare and a canyon stream to get to the Terraces.
So, when he got back, he told his colleagues, “I think we’re OK.”
Neither local nor state officials had suggested that the Terraces evacuate, says Terraces CEO Adam Khalifa.
Just the same, staff decided to begin bringing the 93 residents (two others were already in other facilities when the fire broke out) down to the lobby.
They started methodically draping lanyards around each neck with badges containing the resident’s photo, name and apartment number; on the back were medical details: any conditions, cognitive deficits and “do not resuscitate” orders.
Off-duty staffers began showing up to volunteer. They started calling families to let them know what was happening, and some came and picked up their loved ones.
Suddenly, the lights went out. It was around 6:40 p.m.
A rush to escape the flames
Cervantes was on the phone with hospice to get some help evacuating those residents when the power went out. That’s when she saw the backyard catch fire. She and another employee grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran outside, trailed closely by Cervantes’ Pomeranian-Yorkie mix WALL-E, and put out the blaze.
Smoke began filling the lobby. Residents donned protective masks.
By 7:45 p.m., the backyard had reignited. Cervantes decided it was time to clear Safe Haven. Around the same time they got an evacuation order.
Some residents were still in bed. One woman who’d had a seizure earlier that day was too weak to rise; Cervantes lifted her up and put her in a wheelchair.
Other staff made multiple forays to the upper floors, carrying residents down strapped in emergency stair chairs, in wheelchairs, even on their backs. The dining room had caught fire, and Cervantes finally rushed out.
When they got outside, it was bedlam. Workers from the Pasadena Park Healthcare & Wellness Center, a skilled-nursing facility next door, were wheeling their residents across the road in chairs and on beds. First responders were shouting and gesturing.
“Go straight,” they yelled, pointing down the street into the murk. “Go to 7-Eleven.” Cervantes made multiple trips back and forth to the 7-Eleven, WALL-E following her every move.
Tanner, 72, was struggling when a man with dark hair appeared out of the smoke and told her sit on the bench of her walker.
“Hold your feet up,” the stranger said as she faced back toward to the Terraces. “Be careful.”
He towed her across the road “like a bat out of hell,” made sure she was OK, then disappeared into the haze in search of someone else to help.
Terraces executive director Maria Quizon was pushing a woman in a wheelchair when she noticed a man sitting on a sidewalk bench. He was confused, probably in shock, and she begged him to follow her. The winds were so fierce that Quizon was forced to zig and zag, like a sailboat tacking in a gale, the man close in her wake.
The Terraces is set about 200 feet back from the street. Then it was another 800 feet to the 7-Eleven.
It was “the longest, scariest” walk of Quizon’s life.
When the nursing home next door had finished evacuating its 93 residents, staff pitched in with the Terraces folks.
“It didn’t matter who it was,” Pasadena Park vice president of operations Rhea Bartolome said to herself. “Nobody’s dying.”
When residents and staff reached the convenience store parking lot, transport vehicles were already waiting. Tanner and two other residents were loaded into an ambulance and whisked away. Other residents were packed into buses and whisked away to the Pasadena Convention Center 5 miles away.
When he was sure everyone had gotten away, Baum drove to his condominium about eight minutes away from the Terraces to retrieve the ashes of his late wife Patrice, medications, some shoeboxes full of photos and his two cats.
Then he headed to the convention center to rejoin his staff and charges.
A temporary shelter
At 10:25 p.m. that night, Miller called her son, who was also under an evacuation order, to make sure he didn’t worry about her. The call went to voicemail. “We are in some giant facility in Pasadena,” his mother said in a sweet, even tone. ” She had no idea where that was _“It’s like a football field with a linoleum floor and lots and lots of people.”
After Miller and the other refugees were situated with cots, water and food, the Terraces staff went to work finding each of their residents a place to stay — be it a home, a hospital or another senior living facility. They found two facilities that would take 20 residents each.
They made sure Miller and Eddie were kept together.
When the smoke cleared, all that remained of their former home was a charred, water-stained shell, some of the black metal letters spelling out “the Terraces at Park Marino” still intact over the front door.
Miller lost all her treasures, including the precious papier-mâché sculptures her mother made — everything but her wallet, cellphone and the clothes on her back.
Her son, James Dyer, had nothing but praise and admiration for the Terraces staff.
“It was like a hurricane with flames,” he says of the disaster. “And they did amazing work for the very short notice that they had.”
The Terraces staff set up a makeshift “command center” in the lobby of a hotel just a few miles away to continue advocating for their residents and employees. Baum has vowed that his “second home” will be rebuilt, and that they will al be together again.
Tanner — a former waitress who’d worked at Denny’s, Frisch’s Big Boy and too many other restaurants to count — had only been at the Terraces for 10 months. She loved the place so much that she was already a “resident ambassador.”
For now, she’s staying with her sister and brother-in-law in San Jose. But she can’t wait to see all of her friends again.
“Wherever I go is going to be just temporary,” she says. “Because as soon as it’s built, I’m back to the Terraces. That was my home, and that’s where I want to live.”
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Breed, an AP national writer, reported from Wake Forest, North Carolina; Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri.