Baldwin Hills: ‘Disaster After the Disaster’

Burneda Van Dyke stood in the rubble that was once her home as the cleanup of Baldwin Hills finally began Wednesday.

Forty-five California Conservation Corps workers started on what is expected to be a two-week task of clearing out the twisted metal and debris from Van Dyke’s home and most of the 47 others destroyed by the July 2 fire.

As she watched, “hoping against hope” that the crew assigned to her lot on Don Carlos Drive might “find something,” she said she found the cleanup symbolic.

“When all of this is cleared off, you have a feeling you can begin again,” she said.

“Beginning again” is actually what she, her husband, Rudolf, and 10-year-old son, Rudy, have been trying to do ever since the fire, she explained, but it wasn’t until last week “the reality began to hit.”

In the month since the fire ripped through seven streets of the hillside community, residents whose homes were destroyed have found apartments or are staying with family and friends.

The time has been spent dealing with insurance adjusters, making inventories of home contents, applying for loans and replacing a seemingly endless list of lost items: deeds, credit cards, eyeglasses, bed linens and clothes.

At the disaster assistance center that operated out of Dorsey High School, Steffan McCall of the Home Loan Counseling Center observed that the 122 fire victims who registered seemed to be “in a little fog,” buried under paper work and brochures explaining an array of government programs that may or may not eventually prove helpful to them.

“It’s the situation now of the disaster after the disaster,” he said.

The business of the last few weeks has delayed feelings of grief that have begun to surface, some of the victims say.

“You really don’t stop to think, and you get it a little at a time,” said Larkin Teasley, whose home on Don Milagro Drive was destroyed.

The grief, which county mental health experts say is equivalent to mourning over the death of a loved one, surfaces in different ways.

Van Dyke said, “My sleeping habits are bad. You wake up. You get up early. There’s so much to do. . . . It’s very depressing, but you have to keep going on.”

Trevia Russell, who is living with her husband and two sons in an apartment near Los Angeles International Airport until their house on Don Carlos is rebuilt, said she “blew up” at one of her sons recently for being late, something she would not normally do.

Her father, who doesn’t even live with her family, became so upset, she said, that he couldn’t sleep, stopped taking medications and has been hospitalized because a chronic heart condition has worsened.

“This affects whole families,” Russell noted.

Ruth Barr, an aide to City Councilwoman Pat Russell, whose district includes Baldwin Hills, noticed that fire victims who came to the office in the last week to sign waivers allowing Conservation Corps workers onto their properties were “very emotional. If one was not crying, they were talking very emotionally.”

“People who go through this kind of disaster are essentially normal people and the reactions they have are what we call post-traumatic stress,” said Norma Gordon, a psychologist who works as a consultant for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health Services in coordinating disaster response services.

Victims often follow stages of grief, Gordon said, beginning with a “heroic” phase just following the disaster, when they seem to be coping beautifully. Then follows a “recoil” phase, when “people are very busy,” solving immediate problems such as where to live.

Post-Traumatic Phase

“The later part,” she said, which can surface weeks or even months later, “is the post-traumatic phase, when they’re feeling a sense of shock and confusion, when they fully recognize what has happened. It’s not uncommon for people to have psychosomatic complaints, which are really stress reactions.”

Another common reaction is what Gordon calls “the compulsive retelling of the tale. Often disaster victims will tell and retell, tell and retell what it is that happened. Actually it’s a very healthy thing, a way of kind of reducing the intensity of the event.”

On Don Carlos Drive, Van Dyke pointed to where her spa had once stood. She had been about to get in the spa when the fire raced up the hill. She escaped in her bare feet, with shorts over her bathing suit.

“At 2:30 p.m. everything was OK; 20 minutes to 3 p.m. everything was up in flames, and at 3 p.m. it was gone,” said Van Dyke, a Los Angeles schoolteacher.

‘Tremendous Support’

The one positive thing, Van Dyke noted, has been the “tremendous support” that came from family, friends, strangers and organizations like the Red Cross.

As one of the victims, she was given a $100 food voucher from Boys Market, a voucher to get her contact lenses replaced by the Red Cross and vouchers to shop at Sears Roebuck & Co. from the Lions Club.

She was able to take her choice of thousands of items of clothing, kitchen utensils, bed linens, towels and even televisions donated by Los Angeles citizens. The items were offered at Dorsey High School in an effort organized by Mildred Moore, a Baldwin Hills resident who was not affected by the fire. Moore said she “just cared.”

Since Van Dyke and her family are staying with her brother, she did not use the services of the Brotherhood Crusade, a black community organization that set up a $25,000 victims fund within hours after the fire and paid the cost to house 15 families at the University Hilton. Since then, the Brotherhood Crusade has been helping victims find apartments and then help pay with first and last month rental fees.

Even though Baldwin Hills has the reputation of being well-to-do and is often called the “Black Beverly Hills,” the Brotherhood Crusade received, according to President Danny Bakewell, an additional $5,000 donation from low-income, Central City parishioners of the Mount Zion Baptist Church to help the victims.

Cleanup Free to Victims

The debris removal effort by the Conservation Corps, assisted by city crews who are trucking the material away, is being done without cost to the homeowners.

It is being done more slowly, however, than for victims of the June 30 Normal Heights fire in San Diego. There, city officials organized clearance within a week.

Ozie Hunt, aide to Councilwoman Russell, said Los Angeles’ delay stemmed from a concern about how the city will pay its share of assistance costs. (Conservation Corps costs are paid out of the state general fund.) Once President Reagan made Los Angeles eligible for federal disaster assistance on July 18, Hunt said, the city was assured of reimbursement of 75% of its assistance costs.