‘Nobody’s dying’: A look inside how a senior home evacuated before burning down in LA wildfire
With her $1.25 winnings at the bingo tables, Sharon Tanner retreated to a room off the dining hall to discuss the biggest concern of her senior community’s resident council: what to do about people who leave their laundry in the washers and dryers.
Dinner at the Terraces at Park Marino in Pasadena, California, was about half over and residents gathered in the lobby for that evening’s movie, “Scent of a Woman.” Tanner and Carlene Sutherland, vice president and secretary of the board, were discussing the laundromats when something caught their attention.
“I smell smoke,” Tanner said.
“Me too,” Sutherland noted.
A fire burned high above in the surrounding hills. But staff concluded they were not in immediate danger, and the women thought they smelled a fire in the distance.
Then they heard a commotion in the lobby.
The room filled with people, many of them excited. The wind was howling outside. Then the power went out.
Tanner was looking out a window into the backyard, where she sometimes eats meals, when embers began falling from the sky “like hail.” She sat in amazement as first the bushes and then a wooden fence went up in flames.
Within an hour, the staff and residents of the Terraces would be in a race for their lives, walking, rolling and stumbling across a hellscape of swirling coals in what one called a “hurricane of flames.”
Four of the fifteen residents in the Safe Haven wing were in hospice care. As Memory Care Director Yesenia Cervantes rushed to get people ready for evacuation, a dark thought began to gnaw at her.
Oh my God, she thought. Will we have to decide which people to save and which to leave behind?
The wildfires that have ravaged the Los Angeles area since January 7 have claimed at least 20 lives and destroyed thousands of structures. AccuWeather, a company that provides data on weather and its impact, estimates 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 last week after the fires, the California Department of Public Health said.
Among them are the people who called the Terraces home.
A three-story wood and stucco building, partially covered in ivy, its terraces are 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.
January 7 started just like any other Tuesday. Breakfast was served from 7am to 9am. Then at 9:45 it was time for “Stay Fit” – what they call their chair exercises.
The Walking Club is usually at 10:15 a.m., but staff decided it was too windy for the residents – many of whom, like Tanner, use walkers. After lunch was “Tech Hour,” where staff helped residents with their devices, and dinner started at 4 p.m. Residents had the choice between orange chicken with rice and broccoli, or a cold shrimp salad.
At 5:30 p.m. it was time for Movie Night, a tradition for which 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, community relations director. , other residents began to join them and ‘Movie Night’ was born.
Not long into the film, a visiting nurse came by and told the staff that there was a fire in the hills above. Baum decided to jump in his car and go upstairs to take a closer look.
It was part of the Eaton Fire, which started earlier that day and, fanned by vicious Santa Ana winds, would eventually grow and virtually destroy the nearby community of Altadena. But when Baum stopped his car and looked around, he saw no reason to worry. There were many firefighters on the scene and the fire would have to jump over a major thoroughfare and a gorge stream to reach the Terraces.
So when he came back, he told his colleagues, “I think we’re doing well.”
Neither local nor state officials had suggested the Terraces would be evacuated, said Terraces CEO Adam Khalifa.
Still, staff decided to bring the 93 residents (two others were already in other facilities when the fire broke out) to the lobby.
They began methodically placing lanyards around each neck with badges bearing 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 employees showed up to volunteer. They started calling families to let them know what was happening, and some came to pick up their loved ones.
Suddenly the lights went out. It was around 6:40 PM
Cervantes was on the phone with the hospice getting help evacuating residents when the power went out. Then she saw the backyard catch fire. She and another employee grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran outside, followed closely by Cervantes’ Pomeranian-Yorkie mix WALL-E, and put out the fire.
Smoke began to fill the lobby. Residents wore protective masks.
By 7:45 p.m. the backyard had flared up again. Cervantes decided it was time to evacuate Safe Haven. Around the same time, they received an evacuation order.
Some residents were still in bed. One woman who had had a seizure earlier that day was too weak to get up; Cervantes picked her up and put her in a wheelchair.
Other staff made multiple trips to the upper floors, carrying residents downstairs strapped into emergency stair chairs, in wheelchairs, even on their backs. The dining room had caught fire and Cervantes eventually ran outside.
When they came outside it was chaos. Employees of Pasadena Park Healthcare & Wellness Center, a skilled nursing facility next door, wheeled their residents across the road in chairs and on beds. The first responders shouted and gestured.
“Go straight,” they shouted, heading down the street into the darkness. “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 to sit on the couch of her walker.
“Keep your feet up,” said the stranger, facing the Terraces. “Be careful.”
He dragged her across the road ‘like a bat out of hell’, made sure everything was fine and then disappeared into the haze looking for someone else to help.
Terraces director Maria Quizon was pushing a woman in a wheelchair when she saw a man sitting on a sidewalk bench. He was confused, probably in shock, and she begged him to follow her. The wind was so strong that Quizon was forced to zigzag, like a sailboat tacking in a storm, with the man close behind.
The Terraces is located approximately 60 meters from the street. Then it was another 250 meters to the 7-Eleven.
It was “the longest and scariest” walk of Quizon’s life.
When the adjacent nursing home had finished evacuating its 93 residents, the staff ended up with the people of Terraces.
“It didn’t matter who it was,” Rhea Bartolome, Pasadena Park’s vice president of operations, said to herself. “No one dies.”
When residents and staff reached the supermarket parking lot, transport vehicles were already waiting. Tanner and two other residents were loaded into an ambulance and taken away. Other residents were packed into buses and taken to the Pasadena Convention Center, five miles away.
Once he was sure everyone had gotten away, Baum drove to his condominium, about eight minutes away from the Terraces, to pick up the ashes of his late wife Patrice, medications, some shoe boxes full of photos and his two cats.
He then headed to the convention center to rejoin his staff and charges.
That evening at 10:25 p.m., Miller called her son, who was also under an evacuation order, to make sure he wasn’t worried about her. The call went to voicemail. “We’re in a huge complex 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 a lot of people.’
After providing Miller and the other refugees with cots, water and food, Terraces staff went to work finding a place to stay for all their residents – whether it was a home, a hospital or other senior housing. They found two facilities that could accommodate twenty residents each.
They made sure Miller and Eddie stayed together.
When the smoke cleared, all that was left of their former home was a charred, water-stained shell, while above the front door some black metal letters reading “the Terraces of Park Marino” were still intact.
Miller lost all her treasures, including the priceless papier-mâché sculptures her mother made – everything except her wallet, cell phone and the clothes she was wearing.
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 a great job in the very short notice they had.”
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 they will all be together again.
Tanner — a former waitress who had 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 is staying with her sister and brother-in-law in San Jose. But she can’t wait to see all her friends again.
“Wherever I go, it will only be temporary,” she says. ‘Because as soon as it’s built, I’m going back to the Terraces. That was my home and I want to live there.”
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Breed, an AP national writer, reported from Wake Forest, North Carolina; Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri.