Families of wildfire victims mired in grief

Los Angeles: The house was burning with her brother-in-law and nephew inside when Jackie McDaniels flagged down a firetruck and begged for help.

“Whoever is in there is no longer alive,” she recalled one of the firemen telling her before urging her to flee her Altadena neighbourhood. “I pray to God that they were. But it was horrible to have to leave them there.”

Now McDaniels, like so many, is facing the gripping realities of grief and questions about what more could have been done. Experts say these survivors are victims themselves; the fires that swept through the Los Angeles area this month were fast-moving and fierce.

“It’s really just a different beast of a fire when it’s this propagating entity of just total mayhem,” said Benjamin Hatchett, a fire meteorologist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.

But that doesn’t ease the pain or the questions for the families of the more than two dozen killed, some unable to escape, others unaware of what was coming, having survived other blazes unscathed.

Among the dead is Dalyce Curry, who rubbed shoulders with some of the elites of old Hollywood in her youth. To family, she went by a different name.

“Momma Dee, that’s the fire,” her granddaughter and namesake, Dalyce Kelley, recalls saying as she drove the 95-year-old to her Altadena home on January 7 after a day of medical tests.

But the flames they saw seemed so far away and power was still on. Now Kelley wishes she would have asked more questions, wishes she would have returned earlier.

“I will live with that regret for the rest of my life,” she said. That saddens Jennifer Marlon, a wildfire and climate research scientist at Yale’s School of the Environment. She said larger factors were at play, the summer the warmest on record in California, drying out the vegetation that fuelled the flames.

“These are, by and large, not situations that people could have really anticipated,” she said. “It’s incredibly tragic that people are blaming themselves and wracked with guilt.”

Yet it is a common response, said Tory Fiedler, a Red Cross disaster mental health manager who is helping to coordinate the response to the wildfires.

“Most of us get our sense of self and value from what we do in service to others,” she said. “When I’m not able to do that, I feel bad about that,” she added. “I feel guilty that I didn’t get to help. I didn’t do enough. I survived and other people didn’t, and I can’t help them. And it’s not just I survived and other people didn’t, but I don’t know what to do about that.”

Many families are awaiting formal notifications from the medical examiner, a process taking weeks. Carol Smith’s son, Randy Miod, stayed behind during a wildfire despite her pleas. In Altadena, McDaniels’ family struggled to evacuate her brother-in-law, Anthony Mitchell, and nephew Justin before the fire overwhelmed them. Both families now grapple with the pain of loss and

unanswered questions.