A blaze roughly fifteen hundred miles away is burning a little too close to home for some Redhawk families.
“I know that there is some damage to my apartment, but it’s still standing,” 2021 graduate Lily Young said. “I think a lot of the houses on my street are completely destroyed.”
On Dec. 9, the Franklin Fire broke out scorching across Malibu burning over 4,000 acres. Not even a month later the Palisades Fire erupted, exploding across Los Angeles followed by the Eaton and Hurst fires on Jan. 7. As of Wednesday, these fires have burned roughly 40,500 acres, destroyed more than 15,700 structures, and left 28 people dead according to Cal Fire.
Young is currently a senior at Pepperdine studying international business having graduated from Liberty in 2021. Young has been back home in Texas during the duration of the fires, but the lingering thoughts of her apartment’s condition have been racking her brain.
“It’s been kind of hard because I don’t know if I have, like, power at my apartment,” Young said. “I don’t know if I have hot water. I don’t know if I can even get there, if the roads are closed and there’s not really anyone to tell me, because, like, my neighbors and my landlord haven’t been able to drive over there, and if they are, they don’t have service to text me. So that’s been kind of hard.”
Young’s younger sister sophomore Anna Young currently still attends Liberty and has mentally felt the impact of the fires too.
“When we first, like, heard about the fires happening, we were having to track them on a website or something,” Anna said. “Her apartment was in the evacuation zone, [but] we weren’t able to get any info on it. The people she nannies for live in the Palisades, which got the worst of it. So it’s a lot of stress; is she going to have a job when she goes back?”
Midterms at Pepperdine were canceled due to the looming flames as well as classes. While classes at the campus have now resumed, the fire is yet to be fully extinguished.
For most people, the fires are limited to the phone or tv screens, but some Texas firefighters have been deployed to help the LA community..
“Texans know all too well the devastation wildfires can cause to our communities, and our country is stronger when we come together in times of crisis,” Governor Greg Abbott said in a press release. “I directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to deploy firefighters, fire engines, and firefighting equipment to help our fellow Americans battle these wildfires.”
