Exclusive | Six Californians describe terrifying moments they lost everything to LA wildfires: ‘Like being in a war zone’

As the southern California wildfires continued to rage, victims of the sprawling tragedy tried to pick up the pieces of lives not just shattered, but reduced to ash.

On Saturday, The Post’s Dana Kennedy, Katie Donlevy and Chris Harris spoke with six people who lost everything — except their will to endure.

Joshua Kotler, 39, an occupational therapist and his wife Emily, 39, lost their family home in Altadena, where they lived with their two daughters, Liberty, 4, and Eve, 2.

We got out of our house safely, thank God.

The whole house burnt down with everything in it … My wife and I snuck back up to the house, which is at the very top of the mountain and the firefighters happened to be on our street, casing house to house to tag them as “total destruction.”

I asked one of the firefighters if it’s stupid for me to push things around to try to find anything that was salvaged.

And she said, “No, it’s not stupid — a lot of times things fall on top of other things, and don’t burn.”

My wife and I recovered only one thing from our entire house, and it was my Holocaust-surviving
grandmother’s menorah.

It was insanely powerful.

The night before, I was on the phone with my cousin crying that I had time to grab it and I didn’t.

And the fact that I went there and it was the only thing recovered from the scene was just an insane feeling. The firefighters had to hold me up. I almost collapsed.

We knew the Pacific Palisades fire was burning.

My mom called me from New York and said, “You guys okay?”

I said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s so far from us, everything’s good.” And then about 6:30 p.m. we looked at the wind forecast, it was pushing east.

We were west. We were thinking we were going to be okay. But I looked at my wife and I said, “Let’s pack the overnight bag. Get out of here.”

We didn’t think the house would burn down.

We packed two pairs of clothes for my kids, two pairs of clothes for us and as a weird precaution, I took three pieces of art from the wall through to my trunk, and said, “Okay, let’s go to your sisters, who lives like 20 minutes in the city of Glassell Park.

So we drove over there, and then as the night was progressing, we saw that the winds were whipping in all directions.

I got in the car and I went up to our house.

The flames were very, very close, maybe 500 yards away. And I started hosing down my roof from my property to try to mitigate any risk of burning at that moment.

I’m kicking myself now — I should have ran into the house to grab stuff, but obviously, in that moment, I wasn’t thinking clearly. After about 10 minutes, I started to feel things coming. I got a text from my wife saying, “You need to get out of there right now.”

And then I got a call from my father-in-law, who said, who said, “My daughter and my grandkids need you. You need to leave now.” So I hopped in the car and left.

Driving out of there was like a scene out of a movie … Embers flying everywhere. It was pitch dark.

It was probably the scariest experience in my life.

I walked back in the house, hugged my kids, looked at my wife and said,” I’ll be surprised if our house makes it.” We spent the night holding each other and praying.

But, we’re alive. We’re alive. That’s all that matters.

Jazz multireedist Bennie Maupin, 84, lived in Altadena for 30 years.

I managed to get out. I lost all my instruments and all my music. All of that’s gone, but I’m still here.

I lived in that community ever since I moved from New York City and built my life there with my family and everything so all those things, those possessions, and all that that’s gone, I have to start from this point on and move on.

My neighbors saved me. I live alone, and I rent my house.

The house was completely destroyed. The area that I lived in is completely destroyed.

I was, I was in the back, it was like an area that I created for myself so that could be away from everyone, because sometimes I’m practicing late at night, early in the morning, and I created the perfect environment to not you could not hear anything.

But all the instruments are gone, all the music, everything, like decades to accumulate.

The extent of this is way beyond anything.

This is like being in a war zone where everything is destroyed. Many of my dear friends for decades now, they could not get out. I’m so saddened by that. I was there for so long. I love these people. They became my family.

I’m doing about as okay as you can do when you’ve lost everything you fought so hard for. And as time goes by, I’m quite sure I’m going to find out that I lost some of the most dear people because they could not get out.

There were a lot of seniors who lived in my community. They had bought their house, they worked all their lives to accumulate something, but they were sickly and unable to walk and unable to drive. That’s truly tragic.

I mean, the things that I lost, some of them can be replaced. Some of them cannot. My whole family history, photographs going way back, and all of that, all of the instruments and music and various things.

But I’m still alive.

Sigrid Rogers, 63, an artist from Altadena. Married to Greg, 63, who is totally paralyzed with ALS. Their home, which they owned, burned down in the fires early Thursday morning. They have one adult daughter. 

We moved here from Texas 8 years ago. We’ve been married 29 years and always loved California. My husband was diagnosed with ALS ten years ago and it’s gotten progressively worse since then. He is paralyzed and can’t speak. 

We were watching the news Wednesday night and the wind was howling outside, just crazy loud. The power went out but from what we could tell the fire was a ways from us so we went to sleep. At 2:30 am our neighbor called us and said she was evacuating and we should come. If it hadn’t been for her, we would have burned to death. We never got any evacuation alerts. 

We had already pre-loaded the van but I had to get my husband outside in his chair and up the ramp to the van. I hadn’t put him in the van for 6 years. The smoke was so strong and it was pitch black with these whipping winds. I was barely able to get him up the ramp. The wheelchair weighs 400 pounds and he weighs 175 pounds. I was so afraid I was going to fall off the ramp.  Had the chair tipped over, it would have been impossible to raise him up. As it was, I almost broke my hand trying to lock his chair in the van at this sharp right-angle turn.

I had our (female) caretaker with us and we got our cat, Edie. I managed to get one photo album of my daughter and my husband’s tracheotomy supplies but not much else. My husband needed electricity because the external battery on his ventilator only lasts two hours and it was getting depleted.

I managed to drive to the Pasadena Civic Center and was able to drop my husband off at the entrance while looking for a place to park. It was chaos inside, elderly people from nursing homes, families with kids and barking dogs. We were able to find a plug for Greg’s suction machine but then I had to call EMS because he was starting to turn blue.

We ended up at the hospital where Greg is doing better. Our daughter found a friend who has an Airbnb we can stay in in Highland Park. An ALS organization has given us some equipment.  I didn’t even know a GoFundMe had been set up until yesterday

I just can’t believe how wonderful and good people are.

Corby Gallegos, 57, high school drama teacher at the Pasadena Waldorf School. He has lived in his Altadena home for 20 years with wife, Kristie, 58, a family therapist, and their two children Mirabel, 21, and Mateo, 18, and two puppies, Oscar and Holly.

We had a power outage and we just thought, “Oh, we’re gonna it’s really windy. Let’s light some candles and we will just kind of have a nice night in.’ Then we started hearing the sirens, and immediately the evacuation notice came on our phone. I stepped down my driveway and looked down my street and saw fire literally creeping over the hill. And I just said, “Oh my God, we’ve got to get out!”

In a blind panic over the next few minutes, we grabbed what we could, loaded it up, the car, and took off. It was so sudden, and having lived in that area where there had been some fire activities, we knew it was serious.

We just had to make snap decisions. Luckily, my wife is much more logical than I am, so she grabbed all of our documents, so we have our passports and things like that. Thank God for her. We just grabbed what we could and called a friend and said, “We’re on the way.”

I think the most heartbreaking aspect of it is … [one of two campuses at] the Pasadena Waldorf school was completely wiped out. My heart breaks for like all of the little kids who were looking forward to going to school. There’s no more school to go home to. That school was just like a hub of community for all of Altadena, and the loss that was incurred there is just incomprehensible.

All of our wedding pictures are gone. Things that stand out are really weird. Like, I had just bought my wife a little turquoise ring for Christmas, and she tried to grab it, but ended up grabbing the wrong ring.

Somehow that is really heartbreaking. It’s all of the things that are tied to the memory of our time in that house. Any kind of memories, photos now just have to live literally in our mind, because we can’t look back and say, “Oh, this was the third birthday party.” All of those things are not gone.

The only reason that I want to go back is not to sift through the rubble, but our house was such a protective, wonderful place that I want to do a little ritual there, and like offer gratitude to the space that sheltered us so well for so many years.

Obviously there’s a lot of grief associated with a loss. But honestly, as I sit here today, I am just completely filled with gratitude, because as much as the story goes around that we’re so divided as a people — I’ve experienced exactly the opposite.

We’ve had such an outpouring of support and love from people.

Seeing the way that people are donating clothes and pitching in, and someone hearing that we are from Altadena, like Eva even bought our coffee for us today, that the real face of humanity has revealed itself to me in this process, and it’s a face of that’s why I’m crying here.

But it’s a face of beauty and love, and it’s just giving me so much hope for the future of this country and this world, because we are not as divided as people say.

Lori Schlachter, 53, a realtor, and her husband Antony Batt, 55, a creative technologist lost the Altadena home they bought seven years ago and everything in it. They have two daughters, 16 and 18, and three dogs.

The winds were terrible Monday night and no one slept. The next day we figured we better put a go-bag together for my daughter who’s a type 1 diabetic but we thought we were just being extra-careful.

Even on Tuesday it didn’t dawn on me how bad it was until my husband and daughter went out and we could see flames. I said Holy S–t. We panicked and grabbed our other daughter and the dogs and got everyone out to a hotel room. But even then we didn’t think it was going to be that serious. We went back to the house Tuesday night to get a few things like our passports and my engagement ring and family photos. The wind was so bad I thought my car door would fly off. It was apocalyptic outside.

Then a friend staying in our house called at 4:30 a.m. and said there are embers everywhere, the grass is on fire, it’s over.

But there was never an evacuation order and we didn’t see any fire trucks. We have a fire hydrant on the edge of our property. It wasn’t even touched. All the fire trucks ignored us and went to save JPL – the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada.

There were no signs of water anywhere. We feel failed and abandoned.

I called Chase Bank and she said we can give you a 90-day hold on paying your mortgage but we will start foreclosure proceedings after 90 days.

People have no idea what they’re in for. It was hard enough to get a contractor before this. The cost of building had gone up astronomically beforehand – and it’s still at least a three-year process to rebuild.

To me, Altadena was the most stunning place to live. Our house was 107 years old. It was part of the history of California. The warmth, the beauty, it was such an oasis. All the deodar trees. It was such a diverse and vibrant community.

Everyone feels so numb and dazed. This feels worse than the pandemic. It feels like a tragedy and we feel abandoned. 

Walter Butler, 83, a local track-and-field phenom who owned a successful shoe store, and his girlfriend, Marilyn Meyers 70, fled the Altadena home he’d owned for over 60 years.

I went outside Tuesday, and I looked up and the moon was red. I mean it was red red. The moon. It was just like a big ball of fire in the sky. I told my girlfriend, ‘The moon is red,’ because I told her a week before that something serious was going to happen soon. She dismissed it; I always have these visions.

Then, I look over towards the mountains, and I can see fire on the other side. And I thought, ‘That looks real.’ The fire then jumped over the mountain, like a shot put, and the wind was so bad, it was shaking the house. So, we left everything behind, hopped in the car and left. We parked in a nearby lot and slept. I actually got a good night’s sleep.

On Wednesday night, I tried to go up to see things.

I showed them my ID, but we weren’t allowed. A young contractor friend of mine was on the other side [of the police block], and so he took me up to see the house, and everything was gone.

Like gone, gone, gone. I had a new Corvette Stingray and some old classic cars that were beat up. The Corvette was gone. It didn’t exist, man. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Is this real? It can’t be, but I guess it is.’

I’m still trying to assess what really happened.

I’m not upset about it, because I am trying to process it. I will recover. I have three daughters and a son, and I have helped them all their lives. Now they’re really stepping it up big time to take care of the Big Guy.

It’s an overwhelming experience. I am one of those dumb athletes who thinks he can do everything. If you get hit in the gut, you just suck it up.

I am sucking it up and standing tall. I know I will overcome it. I will win the race. By this time next month, I’m gonna have my Corvette back.