‘The stress keeps you up at night’: Emotional devastation lingers in L.A. fire zones

For weeks after the Eaton fire ravaged her Altadena home, Ivana Lin lived in a constant, overwhelming state of fight or flight.

Her body was tense. She barely slept.

At one point, she jotted down a to-do list of everything she felt pressure to get done in one day — including itemizing her lost belongings for her insurer, applying for financial assistance and figuring out child care for her 4-year-old son whose preschool burned.

The list had 50 tasks.

“The stress keeps you up at night,” said Lin, 38, who had lived with her husband in Altadena since 2017. “You feel like you’re never done. … We wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning. Do as much as we can. Fall asleep around midnight.”

Chris Russo, who had closed escrow on a house in Pacific Palisades one day before the Palisades fire burned it down, said it has “been a full-time job to manage how to recover from this disaster.”

Russo, who had lived in West Hollywood for 24 years, thought she had found her paradise: a single-wide trailer in the Tahitian Terrace mobile home park across the street from Will Rogers State Beach.

“Honestly, it was magical,” she said. “Now, I have to pivot.”

A new poll of registered voters in Los Angeles County by the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies, and co-sponsored by the Times, found that the Jan. 7 fires had an enormous emotional toll on victims, who reported extreme levels of stress and dramatic changes in their day-to-day activities.

Asked to rank on a scale of one to 10 the level of additional stress the fires added to their lives, 84% of respondents in the Palisades fire zone and 77% in the Eaton fire zone gave the highest rankings, between eight and 10.

Significant portions of L.A. County residents outside the impacted areas were deeply impacted as well. Nearly a third reported high stress levels and 40% reported moderate stress.

Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll, said for those in the affected areas, the tragedy “is probably going to be with them for many years whereas the rest of the county will move on and try to regain their lives.”

Residents in the burn areas were more likely than those outside it to be longtime residents to own their homes, and to be more satisfied with the quality of life in Greater Los Angeles.

Jessica Miller cries as she stands in front of her destroyed art studio and home in Altadena on Feb. 4.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Ninety-four percent of residents in the Eaton fire zone and 92% in the Palisades fire zone said they had lived in L.A. County for 11 or more years.

The survey found that the vast majority of residents in the burn areas expressed satisfaction with their neighborhoods. Yet roughly 40% have thought about leaving because of the fires — significantly more than county residents outside the burn areas.

People in the fire zones were “established residents of their communities,” DiCamillo said. “They’ve been there a long time. They tend to own their homes. They’re not a transient community. But they’ve had this tremendous disruption to their lives.”

“There’s kind of an interesting dichotomy,” he added. “They like L.A. more, but they’re more likely to be considering moving. It’s unfortunate.”

Lin, a poll respondent, said that although she and her husband plan to rebuild in Altadena and have been actively talking with architects, they did give some thought to leaving because the process of putting their lives back together has been so daunting.

“Even if people are like, ‘I really love Altadena,’ you have to really consider if you want to rebuild,” she said. “For me and many others, the fear was that this is going to take forever and we should leave. I don’t want to wait 10 years. And some people don’t have 10 years.”

Just after the fire, she and her son stayed with her in-laws in Dana Point, and her husband stayed with friends in Pasadena, closer to his workplace. With their family scattered and home gone, her son had “a cry I’ve never heard before — just so much anguish.”

They hurriedly rented an apartment in Pasadena in order to get their boy resettled as quickly as possible.

Lin has lived primarily in L.A. County since she and her family emigrated from Brazil when she was 12. She and her husband bought their home on Loma Alta Drive in 2017, the year they got married. The house was a total loss.

Workers with the U.S Army Corps of Engineers clear debris from a house on Palm Street in Altadena that was destroyed in the Eaton fire.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The poll indicated that 74% of respondents in the Eaton fire zone had structural damage to their homes or other properties owned by their immediate families. Among those who reported damage, nearly half said the structures were a total loss.

In the Palisades fire zone, 64% of respondents had structural damage to their homes or other properties. Among those, just over half experienced total losses.

Bradley Adams and his wife, Ester Song, also lost their Altadena home near Chaney Trail, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains foothills.

After feeling deeply connected to Altadena, Adams said they have been unmoored for the last two months — staying occasionally with family in Long Beach, spending a few nights in Joshua Tree with their two excitable Husky mixes.

Adams, 34, said he has seriously considered leaving L.A. County because of the trauma of losing the house, which they bought in 2020. He avoids looking at photos of their prefire life — joyful scenes of cooking in the kitchen, playing games at the table, working in the garden.

“Throughout all of this, I want to be happy more than anything, and being in L.A. County right now is not making me happy,” he said. “We were so rooted in Altadena. We want to get rooted again. But we don’t want to put life on hold.”

Song, 36, said they plan to keep their Altadena property and rebuild a home on it — but that she liked the idea of being just outside the area, perhaps in a neighboring county, for the time being.

The couple own a small, downtown Los Angeles-based business, Road Runner bags, that makes bicycle bags and accessories. They lost a fleet of bicycles that they used to promote their products and worry about keeping their business afloat.

In the Eaton fire zone, according to the poll, 20% of residents were self-employed. Among those, 51% had damage to their business. In the Palisades fire zone, 36% were self-employed. Of those, 45% had damage to their business.

The poll showed that residents inside the fire zone supported increasing funding for city and county fire departments — even if it meant higher taxes — at a higher level than other county residents.

EPA crews comb the ruins of homes destroyed by the Palisades fire.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

In the Palisades fire zone, 83% of respondents supported greater funding, as did 76% living in the Eaton fire zone. Outside the impacted areas, support fell to 64%.

The poll asked if insurance companies should be allowed to increase their rates for fire insurance if it enables them to offer coverage for everyone. That would include those in high-risk zones where homeowners have been dropped by their providers in recent years.

In the Palisades fire zone, 66% of respondents supported higher fees and broader coverage, as did 56% of respondents in the Eaton fire zone. Outside those areas, just 38% supported that choice.

Russo, a post-production supervisor and documentary filmmaker, said she was covered by the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, and “severely underinsured.”

Russo said she has “a lot of confidence that the village of the Palisades will come back strong and beautiful,” though “it’s not going to be quick.”

She would like to see the mobile home park be rebuilt and actually get to move into her home, which was destroyed before she even received the key.

Russo, originally from New York, said she was “not in love with L.A., but I found this beautiful community and fell in love with the Palisades.”

But she said she needs to leave L.A. County, at least for now. She is planning to visit her mother in Florida and spend some time with friends on Cape Cod.

“I need a bit of a reset,” she said. “I need a different ocean view for a while. I need a place to heal.”

The Berkeley IGS poll was conducted online in English and Spanish from Feb. 17-26.

It surveyed 5,184 registered voters in Los Angeles County. The total included over-samples of 272 registered voters living in the Palisades fire zone and 293 registered voters living in the Eaton fire zone. The margin of error may be imprecise; however, the survey’s estimated margin of error for L.A. County voters is 2 percentage points, and the estimated margin of error for people living in the burn zones is 4 percentage points.