‘Nothing Left’: As California Fires Burn, Some Residents Begin to Mourn Lost Homes

Mazen Sheikhly’s heart was pounding on Thursday as he drove up a winding road to his one-bedroom home of nearly two decades outside the community of El Cariso Village in the Santa Ana Mountains in California. He could feel his blood pressure rising because of the uncertainty of what he and a friend would find.

The Airport fire southeast of Los Angeles had exploded in the canyons of Orange County earlier in the week before crossing the mountains into Riverside County, forcing Mr. Sheikhly and thousands of others in the area to evacuate.

Now, on his return, he opened the gates to the long driveway of his 20-acre property known for its glittering views of Lake Elsinore below. Then he saw the emptiness.

There was “nothing left of the house,” Mr. Sheikhly said. “Completely gone.”

A 2000 Indian motorcycle that he treated as his baby was now a gutted hunk of metal. Pictures of his mother and the designer clothes and jewelry that he had from his years working at Neiman Marcus were turned to ash.

“It’s like a loss in your family and you can’t get it back. It’s death,” he said.

Three major wildfires in Southern California — the Bridge fire, the Line fire and the Airport fire — have destroyed dozens of homes, scorched over 110,000 acres and displaced tens of thousands of people. Cooler, more humid weather has helped slow the fires’ spread and enabled firefighters to make progress trying to contain the blazes, allowing some evacuation alerts to be lifted or downgraded on Friday.

But even as crews gain more ground, many residents must deal with the shock of seeing a lifetime of memories reduced to ashes, or the stress of not knowing what they will find, or when they will be able to go back.

“I never, never thought my house was going to burn down,” said Mr. Sheikhly, 61, who retired a few years ago from a sales job at Neiman Marcus and has been staying with relatives in Mission Viejo.

Spared under the rubble were some of the Mexican tiles Mr. Sheikhly had used for flooring. Outside the house, a sitting Buddha statue atop a fountain under a tree was still intact. And somehow, so were some of Mr. Sheikhly’s vehicles, including a 1968 black Cadillac convertible.

“But everything else is unrecognizable,” said Wendy Greenberg, Mr. Sheikhly’s friend who came with him and who lives in Laguna Beach. “You can’t even decipher that this was a home. This man put so much love and so much work into his home and poof, in just minutes, gone.”

Ms. Greenberg knows the emotions all too well. She once lived on that property in an apartment slightly below where Mr. Sheikhly’s home stood on the mountain. It was built out of two steel containers, she said, but provided everything she loved. But in the Holy fire in 2018 that roared through the Cleveland National Forest, everything melted to the ground.

Lost in that fire were her grandfather’s papers from when he came through Ellis Island from Russia, along with his birth certificate, and pictures of her father when he was a baby. Ms. Greenberg said she spent a week sifting through the rubble and then a year in therapy “trying to get my reality back.”

Dan Warren, 37, was ordered to evacuate his home in Mount Baldy northeast of Los Angeles on Monday as the Bridge fire approached. Mr. Warren, a leasing agent, rushed to collect his two dogs, cat, important documents and sentimental items, including a leather-bound copy of “The Hobbit” belonging to his fiancée, Andrea Garner, 31.

Despite evacuating, Mr. Warren did not anticipate the Bridge fire would grow so severe. But it rapidly expanded from a few thousand acres to 48,000 in a matter of hours on Tuesday. By Thursday, Mr. Warren learned that his home had burned to the ground.

On Saturday, he said he went through the “five stages of grief.” Among the things he lost were Daruma dolls and other souvenirs from a trip to Japan, and some knives from when he was a chef.

Breaking the news to his fiancée, who was away, was especially difficult. “She didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to the house,” he said.

They had been preparing to put a deposit down on a wedding venue before the fire, but that process will most likely be set back, Mr. Warren said. Still, he was determined to stay positive.

“If you can make it through everything we’ve made it through as a couple, you can make it through anything,” he said.

In Wrightwood, Chuck Lyons, 83, has been up to his destroyed home several times.

“Each time it gets harder to look at it,” he said.

Near his home, the Bridge fire seemed to hopscotch properties, consuming one home while leaving the next unscathed.

For Mr. Lyons, a tall chimney sticking up on a knoll was the only thing standing from his four-bedroom house. The place where he and wife of 36 years, Melanie, raised their three children was now in ruins. The washer and dryer were a hunk of gnarled metal. Parts of the first floor had caved into the basement.

“We absolutely loved it because of the location and the view,” he said. “It’s gorgeous, and today it is just debris, and we didn’t even get a chance to get a toothbrush out of there.”

Mr. Lyons purchased the Blue Ridge Inn restaurant downtown 54 years ago, and he and his wife had been thinking of retiring. But that decision is now more difficult.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “You don’t want to make a rash decision.”

For many of the thousands of residents who had evacuated, it was still unclear on Saturday when they could go back, creating its own kind of worry about whether their home was damaged, or still could be.

Florencia Walker, 61, a retired aerospace employee, has been staying at a shelter in Fontana, Calif., with her husband and daughter since early Sunday, after the Line fire forced them to evacuate from the cabin they rent in Running Springs.

The family is tired and not sure how much longer they will need to stay there. Ms. Walker said she was told it could be another week. She can keep tabs on their home through a camera app, and so far, the cabin is OK. She said she checked it maybe once in the morning and late at night. But she’s worried about what she might see.

“I’m just always afraid of that,” she said. One time, she added, she’s going to call it up “and it’s not going to be there.”

Her daughter, Lisa Castanon, 35, a housekeeper, is confident they will all be fine no matter what happens. She is grateful they still have one another. But she’s also prepared for anything.

“If we can’t go back up there, the only thing we could really do is just start over,” she said, adding that, “I mean, that’s all we can do.”

Mark Abramson contributed reporting.