An 83-year-old retired airline employee is grateful to a neighbor for helping her evacuate her Pacific Palisades home on the day the destructive wildfire erupted in the Los Angeles-area neighborhood.
“I could see [the fire] coming and then the phone started giving me the information that I needed to evacuate,” Sarah Purkart tells PEOPLE on Wednesday, Jan. 8, at Los Angeles’ West Recreation Center. “[My neighbor Carla] came over to check on me because I live alone and she helped me start getting ready. The fire came much faster and the evacuation came.”
“It was a true act of love,” Purkart further says of her neighbor, ”because she went to check on her family, then she came back to help me.”
Purkart escaped the fire in her car with no money or identification, and only with a few photos of her ancestors and son on Tuesday. To her, the Palisades fire was the most devastating blaze she has ever witnessed.
“I’ve never seen [a fire like this],” she says. “Usually it’s north of Sunset. This time it crossed south of Sunset. I live on a very wide street. It’s called El Medio [Ave.] or the ‘middle.’ Normally you don’t get it. Some of the more narrow streets where houses are more close together had smoke, but nothing like this. In the 50 years I’ve lived there, this is the first time I’ve had to evacuate.”
“We’re sort of accustomed to seeing [fires] but not like this,” she later adds. “This was totally out of hand. It was the worst wind I’ve seen in years.”
Purkart was able to sleep at a friend’s place and was planning on staying at another friend’s home in Orange County. She later learned from a neighbor that the house she had lived in for five decades was gone.
“I wasn’t surprised,” she says upon hearing the news of her home, “because of the intensity.”
For now, Purkart is taking her next steps day by day. “I had insurance,” she says. “I doubt very seriously that I would go back to the house.”
“Just the lot [in the Palisades] is $3 million,” she adds. “So it’s a very high price. Have one of the original bungalows. I wouldn’t want to rebuild that in that neighborhood. And I don’t have any need for a bigger house.”
Purkart says she is looking towards living somewhere else. “I have a niece in Vista, which is down in San Diego. So I might go down the coast.”
She has been in communication with her son, who lives in Oregon and works for Boeing. “He was making phone calls for me trying to get [me] identification…I have nothing,” she says.
On whether the experience has hit her yet, Purkart says she considers herself more of a realist. “I think there was always that chance [of a big fire],” she explains. “I think it wasn’t necessarily the fire as much as the wind… This kind of weather is very unusual for us.”
