Dr. Sara Trepanier and family in the LA wildfire. Photo:
Courtesy Dr. Sara Trepanier and family
Emergency room physician and navy veteran Dr. Sara Trepanier was walking her dog Tuesday when she saw smoke in the mountains near her Pacific Palisades home.
“You could see the fire just flying down the mountain,” says Trepanier, 56, who had been seeing telemedicine patients that morning. “It was rapid, it was so fast. It was freaking me out. I ran home to get my daughters and tell my boss, ‘I can’t see any more patients because we’re going to evacuate.’ ”
But after she grabbed her 14-year-old and 18-year-old daughters, and their 30-pound Belgian Malinois, neighbors told them they weren’t able to leave.
“Our neighbor was like, ‘There’s too much traffic to leave,’ ” she says. “They bulldozed the cars out of the way. People were evacuating their cars.”
Dr. Sara Trepanier and family in the LA wildfire. Courtesy Dr. Sara Trepanier and family
She watched as people abandoned their cars and ran to the beach.
“It happened so fast and there was no communication and no, it seemed like there was no way out for a lot of people. They were literally abandoning their cars and then running to the beach,” she says.
Dr. Sara Trepanier and family in the LA wildfire. Courtesy Dr. Sara Trepanier and family
Trepanier is a North Carolina native and had never experienced a California fire. Her neighbor grew up in the Palisades and assured her the fire would never cross Sunset Boulevard, and that she could shelter in place.
“Me and my daughter are sitting there literally looking out our window, and as it hops to the next hill, which is our hill, I’m like, ‘If it comes down that hill, it’s going to hit the town,’ ” she recalls. “We’re like, they’re never going to let the downtown burn. They’re not going to let it burn. But what happened is they took all the water to try to prevent the fire from coming to the town. By the time it hit the town, they had no more water left, so they just let everything burn.”
Courtesy Dr. Sara Trepanier and family
Trepanier helped her 90-year-old neighbor get into his caregiver’s car and evacuate. She and her daughters evacuated around 5 p.m. and made it to Venice. “But we left everything thinking we’d be back,” she says. “Then they showed the videos – and there’s no houses on our street. It’s all gone, all of it. It was really traumatic. It’s bad. So now we’re homeless.”
She is staying with friends and looking for a house to rent. “I can’t sleep,” she says.
The mother of four’s two older sons are both in college and graduate school in North Carolina. But her two daughters attend high school in Pacific Palisades.
Dr. Sara Trepanier and family. Courtesy Dr. Sara Trepanier and family
“I don’t think people appreciate how fast that fire came, because I went walking at like 11 a.m. and by 4 p.m., it was two hills over and smoke billows,” she says. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the pictures of the downtown. It’s like an apocalypse. There’s nothing left. Their school’s burned. …all of the places that make that town special are all destroyed.”
Almost everyone she knows has lost their home. “My one friend whose house survived, her husband sat for six hours on the roof pouring water on it,” she says.
She says her town’s churches, restaurants and grocery stores are all gone. “There’s nothing standing,” she says. “There’s nothing left of the town. It’s all ashes.”
Dr. Sara Trepanier and family. Courtesy Dr. Sara Trepanier and family
Trepanier and her daughters lost everything.
“I don’t even have my wallet or my credit cards,” she says. “We had to rush.”
She grabbed their passport, but they stopped at Target to buy clothes. A GoFundMe has been established to help the single mother during this difficult time.
