One more headache for LA fire survivors: extra time in the car — a lot of it

To live in Los Angeles is to arrange life around traffic: avoiding it, enduring it, complaining about it.

So when the fires blew through the region in January, scattering the communities of Altadena and Pacific Palisades far and wide, it also disrupted a delicate balance. Routines designed to minimize drive times were thrown out the window. Familiar routes also disappeared with the burned-out landscape. Suddenly, getting just about anywhere was a new inconvenience.

In the months since the fires, some displaced people say they've been sitting in the car a lot more — adding to already high levels of stress.

" What it's done to my commute has been soul crushing," said Sarah Parker, who moved with her family to Arcadia after their home in Altadena was lost in the Eaton Fire.

Driving to Cedars-Sinai on the Westside for work was never easy, but Parker said living in Arcadia has tacked on an extra leg to her commute that pushes it to around 90 minutes each way.

Furmencio Quiroz and his family have had to move around a lot since they also lost their home in Altadena. That's included stints in Pomona and San Bernardino, which added a long drive between them and all their normal stomping grounds.

" Obviously, all our life is in Altadena, Pasadena," he said. "So we still have to drive back and forth and kind of commute."

The added stress of school

The shift in lifestyle has been particularly acute for parents, who often already rack up hours in the car ferrying kids to and fro. Multiple fire survivors told LAist they've still got to take their kids to school in Pasadena or near Altadena while living elsewhere.

Marisol Espino lost her childhood home in the Eaton Fire. She'd been living there with her father, sister, son, and nieces and nephews. The family stayed in short-term rentals and hotels until April. As they moved around, the kids still needed to get to school every day in Pasadena.

Eventually, the family had to split up to find more affordable temporary housing, and Espino is now living in La Verne with her son and niece. Summer offered some reprieve, but she's anxious about the school year ahead.

 "It's exhausting, just spending more time in the car," she said. "And I'm already kind of stressing out about what it's going to look like when school starts again."

Shannon Kearney and her husband purchased their home in Altadena specifically because it was walking distance to the Pasadena Waldorf School. When the school and their home burned down, the family lost the neighborhood feeling they'd worked so hard to build.

An aerial view of properties cleared of debris that burned in the Eaton Fire.

(

Mario Tama

/

Getty Images

)

Now in Silver Lake, Kearney said that until summer break, she'd been driving back and forth to take her 10-year-old son to and from the Waldorf School's temporary location near La Crescenta. That's been an annoyance, but it's been even harder to see her child struggle with all the changes. He used to ride his bike around their neighborhood and walk to Fair Oaks Burger with a friend after school. Now he rarely sees friends.

" He had a lot of freedom and a lot of playtime, and all of that is gone because he's in the car so much," she said.

Time forever lost

Time trapped in the car is not the biggest challenge those who lost everything in the fires are facing. It's also something many Angelenos face daily. But it is perhaps an apt metaphor for all the smaller injustices people have had to endure in the aftermath of the fires — time on the phone with insurance adjusters, appealing FEMA claims or waiting for building permits to be approved.

Technically, mileage for gas on the extra commute can be covered by insurance. Parker has gotten some money for extra gas and wear and tear that way.

But there are things insurance can't account for.

For Kearney, it's the time she can't get back.

" This was so much time wasted that I was never going to be able to get back. We can rebuild a house, we can re-buy certain stuff," she said. "But that time — that loss of time of my life — there's no way to compensate for that."

There are the intangible losses too. Espino said that almost seven months later, she's still grappling with the strangeness of her new environment, and the loss of the familiar drives she'd known since childhood.

She used to take North Altadena Drive, which curves through the neighborhood and hugs the mountains, to get home.

The mountains are still there, and the street is too. But so much else is gone.