“We had to leave everything behind, it looked like hell”

Carinthian Lia Obereder is currently living her “American Dream” in the USA, working for a Viennese architecture firm in Los Angeles. She lives with three friends in a house in San Fernando about five minutes from one of the big fires – the Hurst Fire. Suddenly she was caught in the middle of the fiery hell and had to flee headlong.

“We had to fly immediately”

“On Wednesday there was a mega wind blowing here, even our house shook. “In the evening we received the first information that the fire could be dangerous to us,” says the Klagenfurt native. Then things happened quickly: within a few hours, the fire spread quickly due to the strong wind. As she was about to go to sleep around midnight, the emergency alert came on her cell phone.

Sunset as a “greeting from hell”

© Private

Her roommate’s mother advised the three of them to pack their bags, leave the house and drive with her to the safety of Orange County. But there wasn’t even time for that: “A short time later the police knocked on our door and we had to flee immediately,” says Lia Obereder in a telephone conversation with the Kleine Zeitung. A friend had to be picked up on the way near West Hollywood – a horror, as the Carinthian woman describes: “The freeways were already closed in the city. The sky was bright red, the total darkness due to the increased power outages made it seem like hell – a real apocalypse.”

“We left everything behind”

Meanwhile, Lia is waiting in Orange County for the situation to improve. She is very concerned about the situation around her house: “We know that it is still standing. But no one can say what will happen next. Personal belongings, passport and documents, my car – everything is still in the disaster area.” One of her roommates works in a company that is located right where the hotspot of the fires is: “She doesn’t know whether her company is still standing. “

Even in Orange County, around an hour away from the fires, the Carinthian woman is not allowed outside because the smoke pollutes the air there too. In addition, everyone who has lost a house now knows this. A stressful situation for the Carinthian woman too: “I don’t sleep well, the uncertainty is indescribable.”

Conspiracy theories and criticism of the authorities

According to Lia Obereder, the mood in the population of Los Angeles is a mixture of fear and worry, of despair, astonishment and anger: “There are many conspiracy theories and criticism of the authorities, and people have already been arrested for setting fires.” But you also understand Not that it burns so much now in winter. A year ago there were floods in January due to heavy rain, now we have 25 degrees and fires.”