By John Gittelsohn | Bloomberg
Wedding rings, children’s school artwork, and even urns with cremated remains of loved ones.
The wildfires that tore through the Los Angeles area this year reduced more than 16,000 structures to rubble and ash, causing as much as $131 billion in lost property and capital. But each day, a handful of small but priceless treasures are being salvaged.
Since shortly after the flames erupted in January, volunteers from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organization, and other groups have been searching through the ruins, dressed in white hazmat suits, armed with shovels, trowels and sifters.
In the Eaton Fire zone, east of the city of Los Angeles, the Army Corps of Engineers is quickly clearing debris to make way for rebuilding. Volunteers have already combed through hundreds of properties, racing ahead of the bulldozers.
“There’s always a key item,” said Aaron Richards, who came from North Carolina to manage Eaton Fire area operations for Samaritan’s Purse. “A watch from grandpa. A ring.”
On a recent day at the former home of Pedro and Mercedes Matus, a team of 10 volunteers carefully picked through the remains of what had been a three-bedroom bungalow built in 1928, which the family had owned for almost 40 years. The San Gabriel Mountains loomed behind them, with only the front stoop and a charred lemon tree still standing on the property. The yard next door was already scraped flat.
“We want to rebuild so my granddaughter has something,” said Mercedes Matus, a retired supermarket cashier.
The excavation process can turn up long-lost family artifacts, said Kathy Waltosz, a retired Coast Guard officer from Tacoma, Washington, who helped comb through the home. And you can learn a lot about people by how they react when something is rescued, she said.
“Some people own stuff,” said Waltosz. “Some people are owned by stuff.”
Waltosz has led clean-ups following tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires across the US. She’s found pottery stamped with children’s handprints, coin collections, melted gold and precious china.
Earlier this month, she discovered a clump of human ashes, which have a distinctly different consistency than burned wood. They were the remains of a homeowner’s mother whose last wish to her son was to be sprinkled in the ocean off Hawaii.
For the Matus family, the search offered a chance to say goodbye. They had fled in total darkness at about 3 a.m. on Jan. 8, their phones blasting evacuation warnings as thick smoke filled the sky.
Now, standing in the ruins, they watched as Waltosz brushed ash from a porcelain trinket box she’d found. The lid read: “Memories.”
“There’s nothing inside,” Mercedes said, “But it says ‘memories’ and that’s exactly what it’s going to be.”
A few minutes later her son Peter had returned to witness the cleanup and document it for his YouTube channel. Waltosz recovered some ceramic artwork by his 15-year-old daughter. And then she brought Peter something covered in soot — an ash-encrusted ring.
“They found my wedding ring!” Peter shouted to his followers over the livestream.
He had taken it off to keep it safe at work, and left it on the bedside table the night of the fires. His wife, he admitted, was less than amused. “I can finally get off the couch and back into bed,” said Peter, laughing.