As jewelry designer Jaimie Geller was escaping the Palisades fire, she watched cars burning on the road in front of her.
It was a scene she’ll never forget.
Jaimie, who owns Jaimie Geller Jewelry with her husband, Michael, has lived in the Palisades with her family for 30 years, but lost her home and her business all in one go in the recent wildfires, she tells PEOPLE.
“I’ve been down this road before,” she shares. “They knew [the fire was] coming. You think you’re going to be okay, but I start driving [among the fires], and I’m like, ‘Oh my f—— God.”
After getting the evacuation notice, Jaimie says she and her husband and their two oldest sons who were home from high school, ages 17 and 15, just “started packing stuff.” Her husband, however, wasn’t convinced that they actually needed to leave just yet.
“He’s old-school,” she says, adding that he wanted to “stay back.”
She convinced him to leave, though, and they all made their escape. Jaimie piled into her car with her 15-year-old, her housekeeper jumped in her own car, and Michael, their 17-year-old, and their dogs took another car.
But when Jaimie started driving down the hill from their house, she quickly hit gridlock traffic — and her husband wasn’t right behind her.
“The fire starts coming on top of me and on the trees on the side of me on the hill,” Jaimie says. “Two cars in front of me catch on fire. My 15-year-old and I get out of the car and we start walking to Gladstone’s [Restaurant] with four luggages.”
None of those suitcases were her own, though, because Jaimie fled her house without any of her own things. She was too worried about just getting out.
Jaimie and one of her sons stayed at the restaurant while she tried to connect with her husband, but she says there was no phone service while the fires quickly raged on. Eventually, police escorted people “down the burning mountain,” she says, including her husband and their other teen, and they were able to reunite and go to a hotel. Her youngest son, 10, met them there after being picked up at school by Jaimie’s in-laws.
Despite sadly having “done this so many times,” Jaimie says it’s still disorienting to have to scramble to find what’s important in the house. The family has a safe, though, with “important papers,” their passports and a few other things. Admittedly, though, she just didn’t think everything was going to be destroyed.
And she didn’t think her store, also in Pacific Palisades, was going to burn down.
The wildfires, which began on Jan. 7 and are some of the worst the L.A. area has ever seen, have burned down thousands of structures in just a few days. Jaimie says she watched her store burn down on the news.
“That’s how everybody found out because you couldn’t go there,” she tells us. “First, I watched my kids’ elementary school go. Then the shop my son works at. And then I’m like, ‘Our store is gone.'”
She was watching the news with fellow jewelry designer Elyse Walker, whose store is next door to hers. Jaimie says the two of them sat there in tears watching their stores burn to the ground.
“I don’t think I slept. I just kept watching the news, and I’m watching all my friends’ houses burn,” she says. “I’m trying to figure out what streets are what.”
Jaimie is still investigating what’s left of her store — if anything. She tells PEOPLE she “doesn’t think” diamonds will fully burn up, but the “gold will melt.” Diamonds can sadly burn, but it takes an incredible amount of heat.
The store also had a safe, because it was required for insurance. A few of her employees threw some things in there before evacuating, but as of when she spoke to PEOPLE, she didn’t know the status of it. She was hopeful, though, that some pieces inside remained intact. One of her employees also grabbed the store phone and iPad before making a run for it.
For her family right now, they’re in limbo. Michael is dealing with the insurance while Jaimie is trying to keep the kids in as much normalcy as possible. But without a home, there’s only so much normal they can find. Her priorities at the moment are finding a place to live and getting the boys back in school — especially her youngest son, who has had to contend with multiple natural disasters already in his short life.
There have been “heroes” throughout the community, though, including one of Jaimie’s friends, Chuck Hart, who has tirelessly been putting out fires throughout the Palisades. Others have been donating money to help Jaimie’s employees stay afloat during this tough time.
“We’ve got to try to do what we can do to salvage what we can,” Jaimie says of her home and her business. “I don’t know what the future will hold. I just don’t know yet.”
