Column: The nightmare of evacuations for the elderly and disabled in the path of the fires

Fires ambushed the back of the building, and savage winds battered the windows while staffers at the Two Palms Nursing Center in Altadena raced to evacuate roughly four dozen elderly and disabled residents.

It was Jan. 7, that first night of the deadly Eaton fire, and Brenda Robinson, 76, a retired bookkeeper who is immobilized by a chronic tissue disease, "prayed to Jehovah" as an aide helped her into a wheelchair.

In another room, Valerie Fine, 66, a retired teacher who has multiple sclerosis and is unable to walk, smelled smoke.

“They rushed in and put N95s on us,” Fine said. “Thank God they did that, because the facility was on fire.”

A nurse's assistant wheeled her bed outside and into the inferno.

“She was right there, hugging me and making sure that embers didn’t catch me on fire,” Fine said.

Robinson and Fine were then hoisted into vehicles by staff members and driven, through heavy smoke and past leaping flames, to another care center. In one vehicle, a patient with dementia told the driver they needed to go back for her dog — a pet from an earlier phase of her life.

“It was scary,” said Fine, and the hellish ordeal took another jarring turn when fire advanced on the facility where they'd just been transported, forcing a second evacuation.

Fine and Robinson shared their experience with me the morning of Jan. 15 at a care center in Sylmar, their third and final stop on the night of the fire, which destroyed Two Palms. They praised the heroics of the staffers who ushered them to safety and said they were adjusting to new surroundings, but unsure whether this was a stopover or their new permanent home.

The Eaton and Palisades fires wiped out neighborhoods and displaced thousands. It’s been a blow to the psyche of the entire region, exposing our perpetual risk and serving as a reminder that when disasters hit, knocking out lines of communication, they can be more dangerous and traumatic for those who are older, less mobile and more isolated.

At least 27 people had died as of Jan. 15, and the ages of the 14 who have been identified included victims who were 66, 69, 77, 80-plus, 82, 83, 84, 84 and 95.

Anthony Mitchell Sr., an amputee in his 60s, died in his Altadena home along with his son Justin, who had cerebral palsy. As my colleague Sonja Sharp reported, Anthony Mitchell Jr. said his father told him on the phone early Wednesday morning that they were awaiting evacuation, but help never arrived.

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Going forward, Anthony Mitchell Jr. told me, there should be a better accounting, pre-disaster, of those with special needs, adding: “They should put those addresses down as priorities.”

The entire response to the fires is under review in the service of “being better prepared” for the next disaster, said Dr. Laura Trejo, director of L.A. County’s Aging & Disabilities Department. “Whether it be floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, any kind of disaster, usually the most impacts are to older adults and vulnerable groups like people with disabilities. We’re trying to learn from this and document … the needs that we’re seeing.”

That’s critical because the population is shifting dramatically as climate change raises the threat of wildfire and other disasters. In the 10 years ending in 2022, the number of L.A. County residents in their 60s rose by 32%, and the number of residents in their 70s rose by 40%.

Advocates for older adults say they’ve been pushing for updated and improved evacuation plans in recent years, and although thousands of people were safely rescued from nursing facilities, assisted living centers and private homes, the magnitude of the displacement initially overwhelmed shelters.

At the Pasadena Convention Center, responders scrambled to provide cots, medical supplies and care for streams of incoming evacuees. I was there on Jan. 8, the day after the Eaton fire exploded, and saw medical beds with severely disabled patients lining one corridor. In another section, dozens of people sat with aides and administrators of their retirement centers, awaiting word on their next move.

Ann Haeckl reclined on a cot — an American Red Cross blanket pulled over her — while her brother John sat nearby. They’re in their 70s, and John said they live “in the Stone Age,” without cellphones or computers, so they weren’t fully aware of the mounting catastrophe until a neighbor alerted them to flee their home in Altadena.

They tried numerous hotels, but either they were booked, Ann said, or the innkeepers were price-gouging “and demanding cash.” So they spent the night in their 2011 Mercedes-Benz.

“We stayed in the Stater Brothers parking lot at Washington and Allen,” John said.

Read more: 12 hours of fire that decimated Altadena: ‘I’m going to lose half of my town’

Marc Vanwalkenburgh, 63, sat next to his mother, Catherine, 92, who squirmed uncomfortably on a medical bed in the middle of the convention center. She’s “losing memory and losing her sight,” Marc said, and “seeing things that aren’t there.”

They were hoping to be able to return to the Altadena home where he grew up and where he is his mother’s primary caregiver. “They change our diapers, and then we change theirs,” said Marc, who got his mother into their car with the help of an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy and fled the fires.

While we spoke, Lela Arnold, 27, approached. She said she was an eldercare provider who had come to the evacuation center to volunteer her services.

“Whatever you need,” she said to Marc, who told her they were fine at the moment.

Arnold later told me she had served multiple Middle East deployments as a U.S. Navy aircraft mechanic and had worked at an eldercare facility before that. Many older people are set in their ways and take comfort in routine and familiar surroundings, Arnold told me, adding: “Taking them out of their normal routine is very dangerous and could cause a lot of harm."

Arnold said many of the evacuees were exhausted and soiled.

“They were sitting in pee and poop for hours," she said, adding that she spent hours changing clothes and helping people to the bathroom. “Their lives have just burned down. The least we could do is help them be clean.”

In the Palisades, therapist Alice Lynn, 84, fled in darkness past towering flames the first night of the blaze, terrified as she drove for hours in evacuation traffic to get to the home of her son in Topanga, only to find that he and his family were being evacuated as well. Her house survived even as the homes of some of her neighbors were destroyed, but although she’s in safe and comfortable quarters with relatives, she wishes she could go back to her own place.

“I cannot tell you the times I have said, ‘I just want to go home,’” said Lynn, who has been overwhelmed both by guilt about her home’s survival and heartbreak over the random destruction in her neighborhood.

I had visited Lynn in 2023 to talk to her about  the struggle of losing friends and relatives as we age, and now she was dealing with a different kind of loss.

Though she covets the comfort of home, Lynn knows she’ll be returning to something of a "Twilight Zone," revisiting a landscape that is both familiar and permanently altered. Neighbors of 32 years lost their home and said they won’t be back, and others are still sorting things out.

Those relationships have been a foundation of Lynn’s well-being, and she wonders if, in her 80s, she can summon the energy to start anew somewhere else, or to endure the work and uncertainty of re-establishing herself in a neighborhood that may forever be at risk.

Read more: Column: After years of helping the homeless, he’s one of them after Altadena fire destroys his house

“I think there’s another component” to the distress she and others are experiencing, Lynn said. “It’s the swirling of emotions that are incompatible. Relief and fear. Gratitude and anger. It’s being all over the place in a way that … many older people have never encountered. This has been a wallop unlike anything I have experienced. I can’t get my head around it.”

Steve Cron, 76, a friend and neighbor of Lynn's, evacuated and said he later watched his house burn remotely. Another friend who had to leave was able to activate a camera on his car, which was left behind, and they watched video of the destruction.

For Cron, it was the second of two recent gut punches.

“Six weeks before the fire, my wife died of lung disease, which had been plaguing her for four or five years,” Cron said. Nancee was 71.

Another friend of Lynn’s, Palisades resident Joe Halper, 95, got an evacuation notice while his wife Arline, 88, was playing bridge at a friend’s house. Halper, a former parks commissioner, told me he had been concerned about fire danger due to thick brush in the area. He reached Arline by phone and agreed to meet her at their son’s home in Brentwood. As he drove down the hill toward the water, fire and smoke were everywhere.

“I thought this was kind of nuts, so I finally went down, and the PCH also was on fire,” Halper said. He suspected their house would be lost, the way things were looking, and he turned out to be right.

Their son also had to evacuate, so they kept moving on that horrible night that marked the beginning of a new and difficult chapter for them, resettling at a nearby grandson’s home.

“We have insurance,” Halper said, but at their ages, and given the uncertainty ahead, “rebuilding may be problematic.”

Arline was trying to focus on what they have rather than what they lost.

“We’re fortunate,” she said, referring to family.

They lost all their possessions, however, including their clothes, photographs and personal keepsakes, and starting from scratch won’t be easy.

“But as they say,” Joe told me, “do we have a choice?”

They don’t, and thousands of others are in their company.

Many will suffer the continuing churn of emotions that Lynn described. Many will confront financial hardship as rents rise and competition sharpens for what was already a shortage of affordable housing. And many will be unsettled, in multiple ways, for years to come.

What will not change is that — given dry vegetation, frequent destructive winds and the proximity of so many homes to danger zones — the risk of the next big disaster will be ever present.

A few days after the fires, I got a call from the Pasadena Senior Center, where I’m a member. They were checking in to make sure my wife and I were OK and to ask if we needed anything, just as many senior centers did during the pandemic.

It was a reminder that one thing we can all do is make and keep those kinds of connections, watch out for vulnerable friends and neighbors and, even in this sprawling metropolis, create a sustaining form of small-town familiarity and rise to the challenge of building a stronger community.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.