McKenna Blackshire ’25 was sitting at home over Winter Break when her mom stepped outside to let the dogs into the yard. A moment later, Blackshire’s mom called for her.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Blackshire’s mom asked, her voice urgent.

Blackshire stepped outside their home in Altadena, a residential suburb of Los Angeles, Calif., near the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and watched as the flames glowed orange against the darkening sky, racing down the hills toward her. Smoke billowed into the air with the acrid scent of burning brush already creeping into her lungs, a scene she recalled in a recent interview with The Argus.

“Let’s get out of here,” Blackshire said.

The mother and daughter brought their three dogs to McKenna’s grandmother’s house, about 15 minutes away. According to Blackshire, they didn’t have time to coax their nine reluctant cats into the car. Blackshire stayed up all night looking at the news.

It was Jan. 7, 2025, the first day of the Eaton fire, which would eventually burn around 14,021 acres, destroy 9,418 structures, and kill 17 people.

The next morning, Blackshire drove back to her house, trying once more to get the cats out. On her way, she saw police knocking on every door, demanding that people evacuate.

“We tried to grab our cats, but they wouldn’t come with us because they were too freaked out,” she said. “But my mom is an immigrant and left her important papers—like her passport— so we had to go back and grab that stuff, too.”

As Blackshire recounted, the National Guard came into the neighborhood soon after. With checkpoints erected around the neighborhood, their house was unreachable.

“Every day, we’d watch the news. At 3 p.m. every day, they’d announce which neighborhoods were safe to return to,” Blackshire said. “We’d be waiting, waiting, and every day it wouldn’t be us.”

While Blackshire and her mother waited, another wildfire was tearing through West Los Angeles: the Palisades fire, which would consume approximately 23,448 acres, destroy at least 6,837 structures, and result in 12 confirmed fatalities.

More than 100 students at the University hail from Los Angeles, according to the University’s Office of Institutional Research, many of whom were directly affected as multiple fires tore through the region in January. Many were forced to evacuate and leave behind what they had called home.

While both fires are now fully contained, and nearly all affected University students are back in Connecticut, returning to normal remains nearly impossible.

For students like Kyle Reims ’25, a disaster as traumatic as this winter’s fires cannot be dismissed or forgotten by returning to the classroom. Reims is from the San Fernando Valley, just a 20-minute drive from the Palisades fire. While he never had to evacuate, he said the fire came dangerously close.

“The fire crept up over the crest of the mountain range and started to come down on us,” Reims said. “We packed our bags and were ready to go.”

That night, Reims drove to the highest point he could find near his house and looked out over a city shrouded in a haze of burned material and pollutants reaching the atmosphere.

“It smelled like smoke outside,” Reims said. “At night, there was a glow in the air. It was crazy. It was apocalyptic.”

Reims took a photo of the city from his home, showing an eerie orange glow dominating the skyline. His family took in his cousins, who had been forced to evacuate. Amber alerts and emergency alarms blared, and updates from local news and social media became a constant waiting game.

“I’ve never watched so much local news,” Reims said. “It was really hard to contextualize while I was there. The scope and scale of it didn’t hit at first. I saw all the destruction, I saw friends who lost their houses, [and] had to evacuate, but it wasn’t until I got messages from people outside L.A. that I realized this was the story.”

“Every season for the last six or seven years, we’ve had intense fires that have canceled school but haven’t been national news,” he said. “It has become weirdly normal. But this one was different.”

While Reims watched the fire from a distance, Ted Greenberg ’26 was in the middle of it.

Greenberg, a College of Social Studies major from Brentwood—just a five-minute drive from where the Palisades Fire started—watched the smoke and flames directly from his house. For days, he and his family lived in a state of constant uncertainty.

“We’d stand outside on the sidewalk, just watching,” Greenberg said. “For three to five days, that was all we did.”

The fire wasn’t just close by, it was personal. Greenberg had spent much of his childhood in the Palisades and had stayed at a friend’s house there—about five minutes away from his own—the night before the fire broke out.

“I woke up one day later to hear that his house had burned to the ground,” Greenberg said. “It was really shocking, really intense.”

Greenberg explained that, due to highly erratic winds, the fire’s movement remained unpredictable, forcing constantly shifting evacuation zones and expectations. One place would seem safe, only for embers driven by high winds to start another blaze, pushing families to evacuate again.

“You relocate to one place to get away from one fire, just to have another one pop up where you moved to,” he said. “We were in constant evacuation.”

For three nights, his family scattered. His mother and brother stayed with friends, his father cared for his 95-year-old grandfather, and Greenberg himself lived at a friend’s house. Finding a hotel room was nearly impossible. Between the emergency alerts, the air thick with smoke, and the 24/7 news coverage, there was no real rest.

Five days after it began, the Palisades Fire was only 10% contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, with firefighters struggling against high winds and dry conditions which fueled its spread and combined into a record-breaking winter fire season.

The fires that swept through Los Angeles in January are part of a larger trend of worsening wildfires in California. While wildfires were once mostly a summer and early fall threat, climate change has lengthened fire seasons and made even winter blazes more destructive. Helen Poulos, Distinguished Associate Professor of the College of the Environment and Environmental Studies, offered insight into the changing trends, explaining that rising temperatures, extreme droughts, and shifting wind patterns have created conditions where fires can start and spread rapidly year-round.

“Fires in January used to be uncommon, but now more and more fires are happening in winter,” Poulos wrote in an email to The Argus. 

These fires are not just burning undeveloped land, they also tear through communities in places where houses transition to vegetation in fire-prone areas.

“Once closely spaced houses in neighborhoods ignite, fires spread fast as embers travel between houses,” Poulus wrote.

This makes it nearly impossible to contain the flames once they start, leading to widespread destruction even in areas previously considered safe.

According to Mia Foster ’25, who hails from Malibu, Calif., the January fires were part of a cycle.

“I’ve been around fires before,” Foster said. “One burned thousands of acres, and I was out of school for a month. This was par for the course.”

But even as someone familiar with wildfires, this one felt different. Just days earlier, Foster’s family was allowed to return from evacuation from the Franklin fire, another major blaze that forced many from their homes. As the Palisades fire broke out, she saw a smoke cloud again from her driveway.

“I told my mom, ‘We need to go now,’” Foster said.

As they drove away, stuck in traffic, there were few updates from official sources. Often, they were forced to choose between frustratingly sparse information from government websites and chaotic, sometimes inaccurate reports on social media.

For Foster, the emotional weight of the fire set in when she saw a video of her favorite local Thai restaurant—where she’d celebrated her 16th birthday—engulfed in flames. The places that had made her home feel like home were disappearing. Sitting at a mostly empty café the next morning, she found ash in her coffee.

While waiting for news about her own home, she struggled with the uncertainty.

“I was having dreams about my house being gone,” Foster said. “The days just blurred together.”

And then the update came: her house had survived.

“It was such a relief,” Foster said. “I had been going through in my head all the things that I had lost—my journals, my car, family photos, just the space itself.”

But her relief was mixed with something harder to define.

“The house was still there, but nothing around it was the same,” Foster said. “Our neighborhood is different now.”

Foster said her family’s Christmas decorations were still up.

“Nothing inside changed, but outside, everything had,” she said.

Nearly everyone who lived near the fires has found that the aftereffects lingered, even as they returned to classes and moved back into cozy senior houses and dorm rooms. Many students’ families are still displaced, staying in rentals or with friends. The rebuilding process will take years.

Foster recalled how, in the aftermath of the fire, locals stepped up. Gyms, coworking spaces, and restaurants opened their doors to evacuees, and neighbors donated supplies to those who had lost everything. Still, future questions linger. 

“This fire could have been a moment where people finally took climate change seriously,” Foster said. “There is a world where maybe we’d have leadership that would recognize how urgent this is. But obviously, that’s not the world we live in.”

For now, those who lost homes, businesses, and entire communities are left to pick up the pieces. And for students like Foster, Blackshire, Greenberg, and Reims, the experience is not something they can leave behind, even as they settle back into life in peaceful, snowy Middletown.

“I wish I was still there,” Foster said. “I want to be home, be with my parents, be with my dogs.”

Reims found it difficult to explain to people what his break had been like.

“I’ve talked about it a lot since I got back to Wes,”Reims said. “People asked, especially at the beginning, like, ‘Oh, how was your break?’ and I’m like, ‘Well—weird.’”

“For me, the predominant thing is that it was just strange,” Reims said. “I think I’m really lucky to have that be the prevailing emotion because, you know, I didn’t experience personal losses, didn’t evacuate, [and] didn’t lose anything. But it cast this ridiculous shadow over everything—literally and figuratively. There was nothing else on anybody’s mind. It was all anyone could think or talk about. It was just surreal.”

For Blackshire, being away has been even harder.

“Knowing my mom is across the country without power…there’s this kind of longing to be there and take care of her,” Blackshire said. 

Three thousand miles away, Blackshire threw herself into fundraising efforts, helping organize events to raise money for those displaced by the fires. But the reality of the destruction lingered, making everyday life at school feel detached from what was happening at home.

“I had a lot of conversations at first, getting back, with people asking how I am, and my reflex is to just say, ‘I’m good,’” Blackshire said. “But in reality, I wasn’t good. I hate to be that person, but my break wasn’t good. I’m learning to say that things aren’t okay in a way that’s bigger than myself. When someone asks me how I am, just being willing to say, ‘This sucks, and what are we going to do about it?’”

The fires are out now, their orange glow faded into the ever-present Los Angeles haze. But the weight of it all remains for those who lived through them—in the air, in their neighborhoods, and in the way they speak about home. Stuck in the smoke of January, normality still feels far away.

“It’s been hard to be back here,” Blackshire said. 

At the very least, she had some good news to hold onto: When her family was finally allowed to return home, they found that, against all odds, all nine of their cats were safe.

Ben Shifrel can be reached at bshifrel@wesleyan.edu.