(13 Jan 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Altadena, California – 12 January 2025
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Jim Orlandini, local resident:
“(On) Tuesday night we were here until about 10:30 when the fire… We were taking clothes out and evacuating because they had told us to evacuate and we were debating whether we would go in the pool and use one of those pump systems which I have to pump water out of the pool to fight the fire. But with the wind blowing so much and it was too hot the fire, we just decided it was better to get out. So I left, thinking I would probably never see this house again. The next morning we got up about 5:00 and went to my son’s house, Sonoma, Sinaloa I’m sorry, and we fought that until about 11 and then went to my other son’s and like, yeah right near Christmas Lane on Colman, and we fought that one and we saved about three or four other houses along with my sons’, both of them. So, you know, they didn’t want us to be there. But with the lack of water and the lack of manpower, we figured if we weren’t there, the houses wouldn’t be there and they wouldn’t have been. On Colman there’s probably 20 houses on the street and about seven are left.”
2. Burned home
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Jim Orlandini, local resident:
“Most of the neighbors have evacuated. Some of them stayed. Probably one of the biggest stories to me was the neighbor across the street from my son’s house, they’re in their 80s and they had these big Italian Cypress trees that were on fire behind the lot and he was out there fighting them to keep them from catching the house on fire. And it was really a, you know, to save those, and they had nothing to do with his house because it was on the other side of the street, but he just felt like they needed help and he was there and a few other neighbors were there too. So there’s a lot of heroes out there. There is a lot of people that battled the blaze.”
4. Burned car
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Jim Orlandini, local resident:
“You could watch the fire. It was daytime. The wind was not blowing that hard b the fires were intense. You could tell what was happening and the fire was going to come at you. You had plenty of time to get away. So there was no threat of us dying. I think the threat of people dying is the ones that weren’t aware there was a fire and didn’t evacuate. The fire came through the house.”
6. Burned home
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Jim Orlandini, local resident:
“Tuesday night we didn’t sleep at all because we figured the house was gone. Then Wednesday morning we were busy fighting the fire with the other two homes. So the whole time I was thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to find when I get back here and after 40 years, you know, you got a lot of stuff you forget about that would disappear if the house burned down. So we’re thankful that it didn’t, so.”
8. Various of home which survived the blaze
9. Burned home
STORYLINE:
A California resident on Sunday said he feared he wouldn’t see his home again after wildfires hit his neighborhood in Altadena.
Jim Orlandini said he lost a hardware store to the fires in Los Angles but his home of 40 years survived.
“Tuesday night we didn’t sleep at all because we figured the house was gone," he said as he recalled the moment the fires spread to his neighborhood.
"The whole time I was thinking, I don’t know what I’m going to find when I get back here and after 40 years, you know, you got a lot of stuff you forget about that would disappear if the house burned down. So we’re thankful that it didn’t."
While his house survived many in the area were not as fortunate.
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