By Bruce Hensel
A Disaster I Had Once Reported — Never Imagined Living
The most surreal part of losing our home is that just a few years earlier, I had stood on the hill beside that very house, anchoring live coverage of the Topanga wildfire threatening our canyon. From that vantage point, I had a perfect view of helicopters dropping retardant and flames crawling along the ridgelines. Back then, I packed my car with our most important belongings — family photos, hard drives, documents, a few keepsakes — just in case.
But on January 7, 2025, I didn’t pack a thing.
Not because I was careless. Not out of fear. No fire had ever actually come near our home before that night, and we didn’t think this one would either. We simply put the dogs in the car, stepped out with only the clothes on our backs, and — crazy as it sounds — went to look at furniture.
How painfully ironic that turned out to be.
The Call That Changed Everything
I got the first call while walking through the showroom. A friend from Tampa.
“Your house is on fire,” he said gently.
I thought he must have misunderstood. Maybe he meant the canyon. Maybe he saw an old clip online. But then my former editor called — same message.
And then came the videos.
Raw, shaky phone footage from local news and neighbors. Flames pouring out of our roof. Smoke swallowing the sky above our backyard. In one clip, someone whispered, “That house is gone.”
Watching your home burn while you stand miles away feels like falling into an emotional freefall. There wasn’t time for panic or grief. Just blankness — a buzzing quiet in the center of an unthinkable storm.
Nowhere to Return To
We didn’t drive home; we couldn’t. Instead, we went to my nephew’s house, stunned and silent. We barely spoke in those first days. What could we say? How do you process the reality that everything you’ve built, gathered, chosen, and cherished — the place where your life took shape — is suddenly gone?
The weeks that followed were a blur of borrowed bedrooms, hotel rooms, and Airbnbs. We were grateful to have shelter, truly. But we never felt settled. Never felt home.
Eventually, we found a modest one-bedroom apartment — stark, quiet, barely furnished. A world away from what we had lost. It wasn’t just the size that felt unfamiliar; it was the absence of history. No creaking floorboards we knew by heart. No scent of old books. No echoes of laughter held in the walls. We were safe, but we were displaced.
Trying to Rebuild a Life
Four months after the fire, we leased a house for a year. I watched my wife smile for the first time in months as she made dinner in a kitchen that felt, even just a little, like ours again.
But inside, I was numb.
I had a new job, new responsibilities, and a new battle — not against flames, but against bureaucracy. Recovery became its own exhausting job. My days were consumed by paperwork, appeals, and phone calls.
State Farm had dropped our policy four months before the fire. The FAIR Plan we scrambled to get had strict limits and covered very little. It took relentless work just to recover enough to pay the mortgages. Nothing for rent. Only a token amount for personal belongings — as if the value of a life could be reduced to line items on a spreadsheet.
What the Fire Truly Took
The fire took more than material things. It took our sense of place. Our safety. Our continuity. It shattered the belief that tomorrow would look anything like today.
But slowly — through the numbness and beneath the grief — a strange gratitude began to emerge.
We had each other.
We had our dogs.
We were alive.
And as we began to rebuild not just a home, but a life, we learned something about resilience: sometimes it’s not a feeling. Sometimes it’s simply choosing to move forward, even when you’re not sure what “forward” looks like.
