Daniel is a car designer for BMW, working at the company’s satellite design studio for the American market. Yvonne is a partner in a communication agency in downtown LA. After emigrating from Germany, they spent five years in a Malibu rental before they finally decided to take the plunge and buy their own home – which then burned to the ground less than a year later.
Following their move from one Malibu neighborhood to another at the end of 2017, the family loved their new place. Some of their best friends lived nearby. “Our street became the playground for all of our kids: there were eight kids right in that little area, all under the age of 10. It was a super cool playground,” Yvonne said. “The neighborhood felt instantly like family.
“I work downtown and Daniel works in the Conejo Valley [over the Santa Monica Mountains northwest of Malibu]. The afternoon before the Woolsey Fire, he called and said the Hill Fire was burning behind his office. When I got home that night until 9:00 pm, I was checking emails and a friend wrote that the fire was in Oak Park – and they weren’t sure they’d have a home tomorrow. It never occurred to us that we were in danger or that the fire would jump the 101 Freeway.
“The next morning, I woke up before 6:00 am – which is rare. We’d had a power outage overnight and my phone wouldn’t work. When I went upstairs to where our house faced the ocean (and not the mountains), suddenly the phone started working and it went crazy with incoming messages – bling bling bling bling.
“One friend texted that Seminole Springs [in the mountains north of Malibu] had already been evacuated. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’ I looked out back and saw the big smoke cloud, and I thought, ‘That doesn’t look good.’ I went outside. Nobody was on the street or panicking. The moment I went back, I had 10 to 20 messages now on the phone, and they were from neighbors saying they were already gone.
“I called my neighbor Nikki and she was extremely devastated; my neighbor Jackie said to pack well because they might not let us in for a few days; and we all packed for an hour – we’re pretty German when it comes to packing. We packed binders, hard drives, the computers, passports, three suitcases of clothes and toys – two cars full – a Mini-Cooper and a BMW.”
“I put Theo in front of the TV during that time, and he watched the movie ‘Sing’ – which has a scene where the animals sing in a theater and then it collapses. That scene happened the moment I turned off the TV, and I thought it wasn’t a good sign.
“We evacuated at 9:00 am. It felt strange. It felt serious and we later questioned some of the things we packed. We weren’t sure what to do – some actions accepted the fact that the fire could happen while others indicated that we were in denial,” Yvonne continued. “I packed all of Theo’s Legos because I’d just spent a whole day color-sorting them and putting them in plastic boxes. Dan looked at me like, ’Are you crazy?’ But it did save us from boredom in the coming weeks, and from too much screen time.”
“The next day, we were still feeling good – but that night, we got an email listing which houses were gone – including ours. It was like total devastation, super overwhelming, and we opened a bottle of red wine. Our five year-old told us not to cry, ‘Don’t be sad, it’s only a house.’
“The day after that, all the neighbors met at a food court and playground, and everybody was crying. It was a very good experience and very helpful that we were together. The night before, nobody had gotten much sleep; all of us were just exhausted, sad and angry at the same time.”
I thought, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here and go to Italy,’ or something,” Daniel said. “But the neighbors said they were going back” – so he went to work sketching out a design for their new home.
“Daniel’s employer gave him two weeks off, like it was a paid vacation – saying that he could come back whenever,” Yvonne added. “She even arranged for us to stay at her parents’ house for a few days because they were in Hawaii. Then she went on a ‘Target run’ for us and bought us all the basic clothes and toiletries. You feel the love there: her parents even had a sign on their front door saying ‘It’s good to be home.’
“That Monday, I was so angry about the whole situation. We made a list: all the utilities, mortgage, money, insurance. It felt like a second full-time job. I called all the utility companies and some said they’d cancel service – but they didn’t. There was some hassle with Spectrum Cable and Waste Management Industries. I mean, please. If you don’t stay on top of things with them, then suddenly you have credit people on you and they hit your credit score.”
“Dealing with Frontier Communications took two to three days of my life, minimum, going back and forth with them, saying I owed them $50. It took four months for them to take it off my credit report. The LA County revised property tax assessment had to be done twice. There was no mail, so I was afraid utilities and others couldn’t reach us.
“We were totally underinsured on California Fair Plan [a state-run exchange which limits most payouts to well below actual value], so we bought a “wraparound” policy from Farmers Insurance. I was very diligent going through every item in the policy – only to find out the hard way that it may have covered fires, but not wildfires.
“We started a GoFundMe and got $20,000 for mattresses, furniture, kitchen stuff and rent. Financial support came from all over the world. We’re losing money by renting, so raising the money helped a lot. Angel Moms helped with furniture – we got a whole dining set.
“Our plans for the rebuild are ready to go. Daniel learned an architectural software program in four days, and we also hired a local architect to supervise. We had all of the plans from the old house; my mother is a structural engineer, and she had reviewed those plans before we bought the house.”
“I wonder how different it will feel. It’ll be kind of the same house, but also so much different,” Daniel said. Yvonne added that “We had a completely new roof put on last year. We wanted a swim spa – bigger than a Jacuzzi spa – and bought it one week before the fire. We even expedited the delivery so that I could have it for my 40th birthday, two days before the fire. If I hadn’t been so impatient, we’d still have a swim spa. It didn’t survive.
“One of the worst feelings was that a little shed burned that we had just transformed into a guest room. We did all the work ourselves, with a new big window, drywall, electrical, flooring and everything – and it was so beautiful. It had a little TV with Netflix, a fridge, a coffee machine, artwork, little consoles and a queen bed and baskets.
“Our parents in Germany had booked a flight and were supposed to come over for Christmas because they hadn’t seen the house yet, and they were supposed to stay in the guest house. They came anyway and encouraged us, saying, ‘You have to rebuild.’ But there was never any thought of not going back there after the fire. The one year we lived there was awesome, and we want to have many more.”
