Sion Roy, MD, was on cardiac ICU service at Harbor UCLA Medical Center last week when he got a call from someone in his Big Rock neighborhood of Malibu.
The neighbor said, “You should leave,” he told MedPage Today. “This does not look good. Smoke is coming over the hill.”
Though it was hours before the evacuation order, Roy, a cardiologist, was aware of the fires affecting Los Angeles because of the uptick in patients seeking care for cardiac issues, probably due to smoke and stress. But fire warnings had happened before, even last month with the Franklin fire that threatened his neighborhood.
He called his wife, Kathleen Ruchalski, MD, a radiologist who was working from home with their 7-year-old son, to relay the news. “What are you talking about?” she said, as she went to the window. “Oh crap,” she said.
“She packed up some of our stuff in the car, sentimental stuff, valuable stuff, heirlooms and things like that, and she thought she would be going back home because it was still pretty far from us. And then it just escalated so quickly.”
“Not only did we lose our home,” he said. “We lost our community, we lost our neighborhood. We lost so many. All of the restaurants and things we love.”
Roy and his wife are among at least 9 Los Angeles physicians who reportedly lost their homes in the last several days due to fire. He and a California Medical Association (CMA) former president, David Aizuss, MD, an Encino ophthalmologist, told MedPage Today there are doubtless many more. Los Angeles County is home to some 33,000 licensed physicians of the 125,000 in the state.
For the time being, Roy and his family are staying with a friend in Santa Monica and wondering what they will do now. He posted on Facebook photos of the home that’s now gone, and happier days in their neighborhood.
“Amidst all the shocking pictures from so many parts of LA County during this apocalyptic fire, we chose to share some of the happy memories from our home and Big Rock,” he wrote. “This is a special place to us, and as we rebuild our home, we also hope to help support our larger community here and in all these ravaged neighborhoods in the coming years.”
A CMA spokesperson told MedPage Today at least 270 physicians own homes in the fire perimeter. It is unknown how many were burned or sustained damage from smoke and are now uninhabitable, but a Los Angeles County map of the area shows hundreds of homes damaged, destroyed, or inaccessible in many of the city’s most cherished neighborhoods along the coast.
‘Like a Bomb’
The 38-year home of Susan Reynolds, MD, a hospital medical staff consultant, is another fire victim. Like Roy and Ruchalski, she was unaware of the fire threat to her home in the Marquez Knolls section of Pacific Palisades until a neighbor tapped on the window where she was working.
“‘There’s a fire, there’s a fire,’ she said. We’re usually two canyons away from fires,” Reynolds told MedPage Today. “And I’m about a mile from the ocean and it’s usually not windy. A fire is unlikely here. But she says, ‘No, no no! You can see the flames.'”
She then looked out and saw yellow planes flying above, dropping water on the homes and hills above.
She worried about a neighbor’s corgi, all alone in the house, and ran up to rescue the dog, then quickly packed her computer and some files, and got in the car with the corgi and her golden retriever. She saw that “one house was totally in flames, and I’m like, oh my God … I’ve never seen this so close to where I live.”
There were roadblocks and traffic jams. A woman came up to her car and said, “You’ll never get there. They’ve stopped everything. It’s awful. Turn around.”
She finally found a road through a parking lot that led her down to the Pacific Coast Highway and safety.
Around 8 p.m., she heard from her neighbor that her home was still standing. But “that night, Tuesday night, the winds kicked up to 100 miles an hour, and those planes carrying the water couldn’t fly.”
“And I thought to myself, I probably won’t have a house tomorrow. Oh my God. And I didn’t … it’s gone. Everything I lived for for 38 years. The whole neighborhood. Everything. The whole town is gone. It just looks like a bomb.”
Coincidentally, her son, Christopher Root, MD, an emergency physician practicing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was in San Diego for an EMS conference. He rented a truck and drove up to help her find a new place to live, buy furniture, and help her restore her office.
For the time being, she has rented an apartment in Marina del Rey in the same complex she lived in while in training in internal medicine and cardiology at UCLA years ago.
“The Palisades was a real town, where I grew up,” Root told MedPage Today. “And yeah, it’s awful what has happened. … And scary going into the unknown going forward. But I realized right away that our community is so strong, and we have so many people who love us and support us.”
Long-time residents of the Palisades told MedPage Today that fire warnings have been relatively common over the years. For some, so common that they don’t pay that much attention to them, preferring to stay to manage their property. But Roy said for him and his neighbors, this time it was different. They knew this one was going to be bad.
‘Catastrophic and Apocalyptic’
Emergency physician and Navy veteran Sara Trepanier, MD, who had been seeing telemedicine patients one morning last week, saw smoke in the mountains near her Pacific Palisades home while out with her dog for a walk, People reported.
“You could see the fire just flying down the mountain,” Trepanier told People. “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.'”
The physician and her daughter lost everything in the fire, the outlet reported.
In Malibu, Chester Griffiths, MD, who specializes in head and neck surgery and endoscopic skull base surgery, had just finished a procedure when he led his son and a neighbor in a harrowing stand-off against the flames spreading through his neighborhood, the Telegraph reported.
“We had always known that a fire would come someday — but we didn’t know when,” Griffiths said in an interview with the BBC. “We never fathomed it would be this catastrophic and apocalyptic.”
Medical oncologist Ravi Salgia, MD, PhD, spoke with The Cancer Letter regarding his experience rushing out of his Eaton Canyon home as flames engulfed the area. He was also preparing to help evacuate more than 200 inpatients from the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte should that have been needed.
And Los Angeles cardiologist Danielle Belardo, MD, posted about the personal impact of the fires on Instagram.
“With a mix of luck and chance, after a week of evacuation from the LA fires, we have finally been able to return home,” Belardo wrote on the social media platform. “We are incredibly grateful that our house is still standing — but that gratitude is overshadowed by the heartbreak of knowing so many others lost everything, including many dear friends, patients, and neighbors in our community. The destruction is overwhelming, and entire communities have been changed forever.”
The devastating wildfires in and around Los Angeles are the latest example of healthcare professionals facing environmental disasters that affect them personally and professionally.
During and after multiple hurricanes last year, hospital representatives from North Carolina and Florida told MedPage Today that physicians and other healthcare professionals at local facilities were caring for patients as they were personally affected by flooding and destruction.
And in 2023, medical providers at a Honolulu burn unit told the New York Times they had found deep meaning in being able to help their state through the devastation of wildfires on Maui, as MedPage Today reported at the time.
The Los Angeles County Medical Association (LACMA) shared this “Physicians Toolkit,” which a spokesperson said provides doctors and their staffs with support for recovering their practices and homes, including financial assistance opportunities. It also lists places where they can donate and volunteer, and is being regularly updated as new information comes in.
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Publish date : 2025-01-15 20:32:23
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