As one of the costliest fires in all of the United States still blazes, many in Oak Park have been affected. From students to staff to administration, the struggle to cope with the deadly LA fires continues.
The first fire started as a brush fire at around 10:30 a.m. in the Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7. The fire grew from 300 acres to 3,000 by evening. The fire currently stands at 23,713 acres and killed eight people.
The Eaton fire in the Eaton Canyon area near Pasadena and Altadena, ignited at around 6:30 p.m. and has grown to 14,117 acres with the help of the dangerous windstorm plaguing the area. At the time of writing, sixteen people have been killed by the Eaton Fire and 4,000 to 5,000 structures have been destroyed. The Kenneth Fire started in Ventura County at 3:34 pm on Jan. 9. It has burned a total of 1,052 acres. Across all the fires, there have been more than 12,300 structures destroyed. Some OPHS students even had to evacuate due to the increasing flames and evacuation warnings.
“It was a bit nerve racking because you can’t take everything with you and especially since my parents were being super anxious about it,” an anonymous wrote to the Talon.
“I live near the fires so I was scared that my house was going to get burned down,” sophomore Sophia Jiang said.
The Kenneth fire is now fully contained and no longer poses a threat.
Currently, evacuation is mandatory in the Pacific Palisades area to Topanga State Park and the L.A. County Sanitation District Open Space. More than 800,000 people have been evacuated due to these orders. In addition, many people in Southern California are under a red flag warning which will end this Friday night.
As of January 21, Oak Park is not in the mandatory evacuation zone or evacuation warning zone, as indicated on the Los Angeles Times map. However, residents in certain areas are experiencing power outages as well. These power outages disrupted students from being able to do work or other important activities and overall was a hassle.
“It was really annoying. I was unable to get my work done and we constantly had to keep going to places with Wifi like Albertsons and the library. We had no light at night. It was really hard to deal with,” sophomore Aditi Jain said.
“If my parents tried calling me or I tried calling them nothing would go through and then I truly would feel like I was trapped and not know what to do,” sophomore Sophie Goldfarb said.
Oak Park High School was shut down for three days from Jan. 8 to Jan. 10 because of the risk it put students in with their health and safety. Fortunately, Oak Park Unified School District reopened schools on Monday, Jan. 13 and was able to keep schools open throughout the whole week.
