It was 3 a.m. when they got the call.
Staff at the Altadena foster care facility had been monitoring the Eaton Fire since it sparked earlier that evening. But the growing flames looked to be moving in the opposite direction, and their location remained well outside the evacuation zone.
Last Tuesday, amid 100-mph gusts of Santa Ana winds, that changed in a flash. Suddenly, the flames were nearly upon the facility, a therapy program for youth in need of intensive, short-term therapeutic care. Three staff members rushed to wake 10 teenage boys and hustle them through thick, choking smoke into transport vans. No time to pack electronics, clothes, family photos.
Getting residents swiftly evacuated from El Nido was challenging, staff recounted. Some teens were sedated by medications that made them difficult to rouse from sleep. Each had lived through upsetting displacements from their homes, and the emotional aftermath of those disruptions: a familiar sense of agitation, instability and fear. In yet another moment of crisis last week, reactions to new instability and uncertainty quickly resurfaced.
“Our boys, they’ve already experienced a lot of trauma,” said Joe Ford, the chief program officer for Sycamores, the nonprofit that operates the center. “So anything that’s unpredictable and all-of-a-sudden, it’s very hard to get them to comply. They just have a lot of anxiety over what could happen.”
Ford and his wife had rushed from their home less than a mile down the road to help with the evacuation. He said that at first, the teens “tried to have bravado.” But their panic spiked when they headed out to the vans and saw embers flying through the eerily orange pre-dawn sky.