Residents Return to See What the Fire Left Behind, and to Say Goodbye

For two weeks, Leslie Miller was desperate to recover only one thing: the urn that held the ashes of her daughter who died in early adulthood.

She wondered for days if it had survived the blaze that destroyed much of Altadena, Calif. What if, she feared, she couldn’t get back into her home before the rains came and washed her daughter’s ashes into an indistinguishable heap of debris and dust?

On Tuesday, Ms. Miller returned to her house for the first time since the Eaton fire consumed it two weeks ago. She rushed out of her car and immediately looked through the gaping hole where her stained-glass front door had once stood. She peered across a yawning pile of gray debris and saw it: the white urn, still sitting on the back patio atop a metal table that had also had survived.

A bonsai tree that had sat atop the urn was gone, and the ceramic vessel cracked when Ms. Miller picked it up. But the ashes of her daughter, Allison, who died four years ago at age 20 of congenital heart failure, were still there. Ms. Miller placed the urn in a cardboard box and prepared to load it into her car.

“Now it’s over,” she said, turning away from the rubble of her house. “Take it away.”

Altadena residents returned to their neighborhood for the first time this week to sift through the ruins of their lives. Most of them already knew the state of their homes before they arrived, based on damage assessments, aerial views and word of mouth. They came to see firsthand the extent of their losses, and to determine if they could salvage anything from their share of the sea of debris.

Some donned respirators, white Tyvek suits, gloves and goggles to shield themselves from toxic chemicals and the hazardous dust that puffed into the air each time they poked a shovel, stick or finger into what remained. Miraculous recoveries of wedding rings or family heirlooms were rare. Ceramic pieces and cast iron skillets were among the more common household items to survive.

“Everything’s special, you know,” said Shelan Joseph, 54, standing in front of her fireplace in a protective suit and picking through the tangle of melted glass and ash that remained of Christmas decorations that she hadn’t gotten around to taking down. “I was just trying to come and see what we could save of our lives. And I guess maybe just a little bit of closure.”

Some found dark humor in the wreckage. Ms. Joseph’s husband, Vernon Patterson, 63, gestured toward a chair next to their backyard pool.

“We’ve been trying to get rid of that chair forever,” he said. “And it’s no scratches, no nothing.”

Some approached the rubble with a sense of detachment and practicality. For others, the trip home was a shock.

Lou Avery Douglas, 26, returned to Altadena and parked in his regular spot in front of what was left of his apartment complex, the Mariposa Townhomes. It looked as though the fire had melted the building and everything in it, turning it all the same pale ash color. He identified his unit only thanks to a bright red patio table that had withstood the flames.

He started to sob.

Mr. Douglas and his roommate, Grace Colcord, picked through the ashes in a daze. Then she called out that she had found one of his mugs, decorated with a rainbow and the phrase “May your day be filled with happiness.”

“I was just overjoyed in that moment,” Mr. Douglas said. “One of my things survived. Even if everything else is gone, I have one thing.”

Other discoveries were painful. Mr. Douglas recognized the contours of his cookbooks, which were still stacked where he had left them. But they had all burned into the same shade of very light gray, “and the second you touch them, they turn to ash and they fly away — almost like a ghost,” he said.

Mat and Kate Stovall were both out of town when the fire destroyed their home of nearly a decade. They grieved from afar, then returned on Tuesday in Tyvek suits and respirators because they needed to see the loss for themselves.

They were thrilled that the fire had damaged but not killed a seven-foot cactus next to the house. Ms. Stovall had saved it from insect infestations a few times, which required “a lot of scrubbing with a brush and some dish soap.” On this day, she and her husband cut off several wrinkly limbs that were still green and plump, which they hoped to use to propagate the cactus.

The fire’s strange work was on display at the ruined home of Debra Tuttle, 52, where puddles of melted aluminum and brass sat on the ground and water pipes were bent near charred kitchen appliances.

A county official had taped a red piece of paper over what remained of her house’s facade, declaring it “UNSAFE.”

In the days after the fire, Ms. Tuttle’s mother, a ceramics artist who lived in the home with her, had mused about whether this or that treasured object might have survived. Ms. Tuttle recovered a porcelain bell and a beautifully glazed mug, both from Japan; a purple vase with a bit of glass melted onto it; and some of her mother’s wedding silverware, now blackened and charred.

Before driving away, she looked out over the “unrecognizable mass” of wreckage and pointed out a microwave, a small grill for fish and a muffin pan.

“All these little things, they’re kind of like finding old friends,” Ms. Tuttle said. “But on the other hand, they say to you, My time is done.”

Soumya Karlamangla contributed reporting.