“I have the feeling that we are not safe anywhere in the world,” says Ornella Antar, a resident of the Pasadena district, northeast of Los Angeles, for several months. Ten days after the start of the most destructive fires in the history of the second largest city in the United States, the thirty-year-old has still not returned home, fearing toxic waste After renting an Airbnb for two days in Newport, on the coast. south of Los Angeles, she is now waiting from Washington to be able to return home.
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This Thursday the 16th in the morning, local authorities explained that the situation remained “dangerous” in certain neighborhoods. The latest report shows 24 deaths, while 12,000 homes have been destroyed, in what already promises to be the costliest fires in the history of the United States, according to the AccuWeather forecasting service, cited by the BBC on January 10. “What was really shocking was that the fires spread into urban areas,” says Ornella Antar, whose neighborhood was hit by a second outbreak called the Eaton Fire.
The latter burned 57 km², according to the Cal Fire website, or three times the area of Beirut. “The Eaton Fire partly affected our Pasadena neighborhood, but our apartment was spared,” she explains, reassured. On the other hand, “a 60-year-old Lebanese couple, who had lived in the neighborhood for a long time, lost their house, which was consumed in less than an hour.” According to information circulating in the local press, the Lebanese community numbers nearly 14,500 people in Los Angeles.
“The force of the winds reminded me of the explosion at the port”
Unlike residents of California, a region particularly vulnerable to forest fires, Ornella Antar, an expatriate for three years, explains that she only experienced “the fires in Lebanon in October 2019”. She recounts an anxious first night from Tuesday January 7 to Wednesday January 8, upon learning that a fire had broken out in her region. She then downloaded the “Watch duty” application which “warns residents who need to evacuate by sending alert messages: “Be prepared to go” or “Go” (Go). After a sleepless night, spent on the phone with her sister in Lebanon, Ornella Antar and her husband finally fell asleep to wake up under “an orange sky”: “The fire was behind the mountains. We were very scared and we left,” she says.
Image of the sky taken by Ornella Antar on Wednesday, December 8, from her home in the Pasadena neighborhood, near the Eaton Fire
Sabine Ghanem Pfund, actress based in Los Angeles since 2019, explains that “the force of the winds reminded me of the explosion at the port” of Beirut on August 4, 2020. The wind gusts indeed reached the force of a hurricane , according to experts. “It started on Tuesday (January 7): the wind was such that I understood that something terrible was happening, the branches were falling from the trees,” she remembers.
-His neighborhood was ultimately spared, while the flames engulfed others “five minutes away by car”. Expatriated since 2019, the young thirty-year-old relates a similar situation, but reversed, to the one she experienced with her family last fall, in the middle of the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah: “It was like when I spoke to my relatives, who told me they were safe in Ashrafieh while the bombings were taking place in the southern suburbs of Beirut. »
Cedar and flames
Having lived in the Hollywood district for half a century, Ferris Wehbe, a 67-year-old Lebanese-American, was also evacuated, although his home was not damaged. “The fire was very close. When the fire broke out, I was at home with my children, we immediately grabbed the fire extinguishers to do our best,” says the father of four. “Fortunately the firefighters in our region were able to deploy air tankers to put out the fires. »
Co-founder of the Los Angeles Cedars Rotary Club, a branch of the humanitarian organization Rotary International, Ferris Wehbe is also behind the placing of a Lebanese cedar on a bench which created a buzz in a video on the networks social. We see a wooden bench, decorated with the Cedar of Lebanon, enthroned at the top of a hill, while the flames of the “Palisades Fire” – which burned 96 km² in west Los Angeles – set the horizon ablaze.
“In Los Angeles, one of the actions our club has taken is to place benches in strategic locations with a quote from Gibran Khalil Gebran, the image of a Lebanese cedar and the Rotary symbol. We placed 5 of them in Griffith Park, one of the most iconic locations in Los Angeles, overlooking the famous Hollywood sign,” explains Ferris Wehbe. The quote written on the bench is a verse from the wise Moustapha in the work The Prophet (1923) by the famous Lebanese poet: “Remember that the earth rejoices to feel your bare feet and that the winds would gladly play with your hair. »
“I have the feeling that nowhere in the world is safe,” says Ornella Antar, a resident of the Pasadena district, northeast of Los Angeles, for several months. Ten days after the start of the most destructive fires in the history of the second largest city in the United States, the thirty-year-old has still not returned home, fearing…
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