Former LPGA Tour winner Mo Martin could barely believe her eyes as she stepped gingerly through the rubble and ashes of her childhood home. This was what remained after a January wildfire scorched her hometown of Altadena, California.
Only the night before this fiery hurricane arrived, she and mother Linda Martin had walked a few blocks to the local hardware store for supplies to hang Linda’s handcrafted, stained-glass windows that had taken her six months to complete.
They got one of her four windows suspended early on Tuesday evening, Jan. 7, and spent time together admiring the creation, taking a few snapshots and planning when they would finish hanging the remaining windows.
Wildfires were burning in the area, but Linda was not too concerned because fires had never threatened her neighborhood – located about three miles south of the San Gabriel Mountains. The game changer this time were the Santa Ana winds that had kicked up and suddenly placed Altadena on the fire’s path.
“Wind was ferocious that day,” said Linda, 78, who bought her Altadena home in 1985 with her late husband and spent the next 40 years there, rearing three children in the 1,000-square-foot abode. “When I opened the front door, it almost came off the hinges and the wind blew out a skylight in the attic.”
By early the next morning, thousands of burning embers were blowing horizontally across the yards in her neighborhood, igniting trees, roofs and surfaces wherever they landed. One burning ember the size of a coffee cup whizzed past Linda’s head and landed in a neighbor’s tree.
She and her son Don used garden hoses to water down their family home and lawn as fires set ablaze all around them. Meanwhile, Mo was ringing her mother’s cell phone, telling her to pack the car and head to her house in Redondo Beach as soon as possible.
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