LA fires: Man who lost house saw flames engulf road

A man whose house in Los Angeles is now a pile of ash has told how he stood in his road with smaller fires all around him, hot embers falling from the sky and a bank of flames from the wildfire ahead.

Dr Warren Skidmore, an astrophysicist originally from Wordsley, near Stourbridge, said the Eaton fire approached and "engulfed" everything.

His home, where he lived with his wife and two daughters, has been reduced to rubble with just the chimney stack still standing.

The Eaton fire alone wiped out a residential area larger than Wordsley itself, he said, with thousands now displaced.

Dr Skidmore, who has lived in California for 22 years, said the family were sitting down to dinner last Tuesday when they heard the fire had started in the Eaton Canyon, a Pasadena nature reserve.

Standing on the front lawn, they saw smoke coming up the hillside, illuminated from underneath and glowing orange, and within 20 minutes, they saw flames.

At that point, the fire was going in the opposite direction, he said.

He and his wife Isabelle, with their daughters, Hannah, 18, and Tessa, 16, prepared to evacuate.

They left after the power went out and sheltered in his office for the night.

In the early hours, police started knocking on doors, evacuating the area, he said, and at that point the fire was a few hundred yards away.

He drove back up the next morning to see what was happening, he said.

"I got quite a way up into town - way above where the fire line eventually was.

"There were lots of spot fires around me, and stuff was falling down on the car, and I knew it was a risky place. I didn't want to get into a dangerous situation, and I could see up the street it looked like a bank of fire, with lots of smoke coming off it."

He said hot embers were falling out of the sky, sparking new fires.

"There was no way it was safe," he said. "Further up the street, there was just fire.

"I'm looking up the street, and there's fire right across the street."

Dr Skidmore said that after the fire engulfed their road, his house had been left "just a big pile of ash".

There were "little bits of wall standing", he said, and the big chimney, which was a solid structure, was still there.

But he said: "The frame has burnt out. The walls have collapsed."

The area was now completely closed off for safety reasons, he said, and they did not know what was left.

They had left behind heirloom jewellery, and there were also the children's playthings, which was the family's story.

"Our kids were brought home from the hospital to that house, so they've grown up in the house," he said. "All their little bits of artwork when they were children and that kind of thing, it's all gone."

Homes that had not burnt down have been left uninhabitable, he said.

"They're thick with smoke, often have some kind of damage, which means there's no services, there's no electricity, there's no gas, nothing."

He said there was now a whole town of people who were now nomadic.

"The area of houses that burnt here is bigger than all of Wordsley, where I'm from," he added. "Imagine all of Wordsley, just gone. That's the magnitude of this."

The family was now navigating insurance and emergency aid and had bought clothes, found food and were staying in an Airbnb, he said.

"We count ourselves among the lucky ones," he added. "Nothing happened to us.

"We're fit and healthy. We've got lots of support, lots of help. It's just that our life has been capsized.

"We've got to deal with that and find a path forward."

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