A British family living in America say they will have to ‘rethink their life’ after their business was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires.
The couple were looking forward to enjoying their ‘golden years’ stateside, but saw their livelihood burnt to the ground in the wildfires, which started in the Los Angeles area on January 7.
The fires have now claimed the lives of 25 people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses.
Mr Church, who had worked his way up in the company before he eventually bought it with his wife and daughter Shavahn Ahmadi, said he was ‘choked up’ after returning to the area and seeing all of his hard work turned to ashes.
He told ITV News: ‘I was in tears. I’m still choked up right now. It’s a lot of hard work building a business and seeing this is tough.’
The family are trying to continue to operate the business from their home in Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles.
But Mrs Church says they have lost all their equipment, tools and customer base because ‘Pacific Palisades is our patch’.
‘If we had any hindsight we would, of course, have taken some equipment out, moved the trucks out, but we didn’t, and we lost everything,’ Mrs Church said.
The business has a staff of seven who are ‘desperate for work to feed their families’ and the owners say they are relying on GoFundMe donations to pay them.
‘Any money that comes from the GoFundMe will be used for tools and payroll to pay the guys who work for us,’ said Mrs Church.
‘Ray and I will continue to pay until we can’t continue to pay. Then we will have to rethink our life. We were living the American dream but now we’ve lost everything.’
The three owners had returned to Pacific Palisades on January 8 to see if their business had survived and Mrs Ahmadi described the two-mile drive into the area as like ‘being in a war’.
‘It looked like someone had dropped bombs on these properties, and they were still engulfed in flames,’ she said. ‘The whole top floor of businesses had caved down to where our office was and it was just ash and rubble.’
The family say their insurance cover is liability only and will not cover any contents inside the office or the trucks.
Mrs Ahmadi slammed the local government for not being prepared for this disaster, stating that ‘it should never have happened’.
She said: ‘We found out that our water reservoir was completely empty.
‘I had customers tell me they would ask the firefighters to please save my house. And they said, we have no water.
‘These are our firefighters. They did everything they could with the resources that they had. They were just failed by the system. The system didn’t have enough to fight these fires.’
Many residents have tried to return to their homes, evading police road blocks, to assess the damage of the fires and to gather any belongings that remain.
At least 24 people have died and 23 others are missing in the Eaton and Palisades fire zones, while around 150,000 people remain under an evacuation warning.
More than 120,000 structures have been destroyed in the fires, with A-list celebrities including Mel Gibson and Paris Hilton among those who have lost their homes.
Meteorologists warn that unseasonable drought-like conditions have turned the city into potential kindling as high winds set in.
The last significant rainfall in downtown Los Angeles came in May 2024, and since October 1 just 0.16 inches of rain has fallen – compared to a historical average of 5.34 inches by this time, reports the LA Times.
Climatologist Bill Patzert told the outlet that ‘the past nine months has been one of the driest in the historical record going back to 1900. During my career, I’ve never seen punishing Santa Ana events so overwhelm the normal winter rain season.’
In each of the three previous instances of ‘particularly dangerous situation’ fire warnings being issued this season, the resulting blazes brought devastation to the area.
The first in November, the Mountain Fire in Ventura County, burned almost 20,000 acres and razed over 240 buildings.
The next month the Franklin fire hit Malibu and destroyed 20 buildings, before the Palisades and Eaton fires this month came and marked the most dangerous and destructive yet.
According to the LA Times, the ‘particularly dangerous situation’ alert was traditionally only used by the National Weather Service for particularly devastating tornadoes.
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