LOS ANGELES — Wyatt Ahders had a routine. Every week, the 18-year-old would step out his front door and walk to friends’ houses in the neighborhood. Along the way, he’d stop and exchange hellos with any neighbors he passed.
Then that routine was disrupted. The Ahders’ family home burned in the recent Palisades fire. Along with it, Ahders, who has autism, lost his familiar schedule that brought him a sense of security.
“Stability is the most important thing for someone like Wyatt, and this (ordeal) is the ultimate instability,” said Chase Ahders, Wyatt’s father.
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The family’s home was a gathering spot for Wyatt and his siblings’ friends, something that brought him a lot of joy, his mother, Erin Ahders said.
“I feel sad that my house burned down and sometimes I just want to sleep because my house burned down,” Wyatt Ahders said in a written statement to California Health Report.
The Ahders are among the thousands of families who lost their homes — and their communities — in the fires that swept through Los Angeles County in early January. The Palisades fire in West Los Angeles and the Eaton fire in the San Gabriel Valley were the most destructive.
Three months later, LA city and county leaders are struggling to expedite debris cleaning that would allow rebuilding to begin. For displaced families with children who have disabilities, starting anew has been particularly challenging.
Local and state disability advocates said they have been checking in with families and trying to provide support as they adjust to life after the fires. Some organizations are hosting information sessions and distributing resources about emergency preparedness. They’re also providing tips on how to deal with stress caused by disasters.
Judy Mark, the president of Disability Voices United, has been calling displaced families to see what their needs are. The West LA-based organization supports individuals with disabilities by offering advocacy workshops and lobbying with lawmakers on their behalf.
Mark lives in West LA and has a son with disabilities. Although the fires didn’t affect them directly, she’s in touch with many displaced families and with local regional centers contracted with LA County to provide services to people with disabilities. Mark said she’s frequently encountered individuals with physical or mental disabilities who struggled to evacuate during the fires. She pointed to a well-documented and tragic story of an amputee father and his son with cerebral palsy who died in their Altadena house while waiting to be evacuated from the Eaton fire.
In response, the LA County Board of Supervisors recently passed a motion to conduct a study for a potential registry for people with physical and mental disabilities who require assistance in a disaster. County employees will reach out to agencies that have an established registry, conduct research on the scope and identify estimated costs.
“What we’ve found is that when emergencies happen, that’s when discrimination against people is most visible,” Mark said.
Preparing for disaster
For years, disability advocates have been trying to get local first responders such as fire departments, police departments and hospitals to prioritize people with disabilities when administering services during a natural disaster.
Kausha King, the director of leadership and programs for Family Resource Navigators, said that families with children with disabilities often shoulder the burden of preparing for emergencies.
As the mother of a son with complex medical needs, King knows this all too well. “The thing about families like mine is we are already prepared for emergencies because an emergency can happen at any time,” King told California Health Report.
King contributed to compiling a list of LA fire resources that includes mental health support, shelters, LA County-based regional centers, and more. She also took part in an emergency preparedness webinar in mid-March hosted by Family Voices of California, a statewide collaborative of parent-run centers that advocates for children with special health care needs. She talked attendees through emergency support protocols that she uses.
Protocols included meeting with physicians beforehand to involve them in evacuation plans; contacting local shelters to make sure they can support a child with complex health needs; and forming connections with local fire departments, hospitals and perhaps religious institutions, like a church, so they’re aware of a child’s health issues in advance.
“We know our children best. And when we share this information with others, they will know your children too so they will know to come to you (when a disaster happens),” King said during the webinar.
Disaster’s unforeseen health effects
National child health care experts also took part in the webinar to talk about how disasters can exacerbate the mental and physical health of people with disabilities.
Erin Meyers, an education and administrative coordinator with the Ohio-based organization Child Life Disaster Relief, said that stress reactions from disasters can lead to stomach and body aches and other symptoms. To help parents, Child Life Disaster Relief created a free, downloadable trauma-mitigation model. The infographic includes a step-by-step process for managing stress levels for both the parent and the child.
Shelly Cox, a lifelong Malibu resident, is currently tending to her 41-year-old daughter’s physical and mental health issues brought on by the fires. Cox’s daughter Christina has cerebral palsy, is cognitively delayed and uses a wheelchair, which made it challenging to evacuate from their longtime Malibu home, which burned in the Palisades fire. To make matters more difficult, the family’s previous home in Malibu also burned, in a 1993 fire. This time, when the Palisades fire started, Christina and the rest of their family initially evacuated to her business location, Step by Step, in Santa Monica.
Finding a rental home that was accessible for Christina was a hard enough challenge, but Cox didn’t foresee her daughter having medical complications weeks after the fires subsided. Christina began coughing up blood and had to be taken to a hospital emergency room. Doctors told her she needed to see a gastroenterologist.
“I called the GI doctor who said they didn’t have an appointment until (weeks later) and I said out loud, ‘She could die before then,’” Cox recalled.
After a call to Christina’s primary care doctor, she managed to book an appointment the next day. But Cox wonders what would happen to her daughter if she also succumbs to the stress.
“I cannot fall apart right now,” Cox said.
Coming to terms with uncertainty
For Wyatt Ahders, the 18-year-old from the Palisades, coming to terms with the loss of his home and his old schedule has been a challenge. The day the fire reached the Palisades Highlands, his mom couldn’t reach him at school so she asked a friend to pick him up.
“I said, “Please don’t mention the fire to Wyatt but when he got in my car he obviously knew about it because the whole school was talking about it,’” Erin Ahders said.
The fire and its aftermath were incredibly stressful for Wyatt Ahders and it was hard for him to accept that his family’s house was gone, his family said.
“His next step was, ‘Can they rebuild it next week?’ and we said, ‘It’s not going to be next week,’” Erin Ahders said. “Then he said, ‘I want my house built exactly how it was.’”
It wasn’t until his parents showed him a video of the house’s charred remains that the young man fully processed what had happened. For weeks, he refused to go to school because he was so upset, his parents said.
“I was absent from school for a long time when the fires first happened because I wanted to stay with my family,” Wyatt Ahders said. “Now, I am going to school.”
Wyatt Ahders’ desire to stay by his parents’ side stemmed from the uncertainty of the situation: he no longer saw many of his neighbors or classmates, and his family had moved to six different places before securing a one-year rental lease for a house in the South Bay. “He really needed stability, he needed to know he had a place he was going to come back to every time (he left the house),” Erin Ahders said.
While their son settles into his temporary home, Chase and Erin Ahders have their own challenges. They’re juggling their full-time jobs while navigating dwindling finances, the frustratingly complex insurance system and monitoring the debris cleanup. They plan to eventually rebuild and move back to the Palisades. But, with many people not returning, they know the community will never be the same.
To cope with the loss and keep their eyes on the future, the couple draws from Wyatt Ahders’ straightforward brand of optimism. “Once he feels safe, he doesn’t dwell on the past; he’s like, ‘Let’s press forward and not look back,’” Erin Ahders said. “That’s the big piece for me, to kind of let things go.”
This story was produced in collaboration with the California Health Report.
