PASADENA (AFP) – When Serena Null saw the flames roaring toward her family home in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, she ran to find her pet Domino, but the cat eluded her grasp.
“We could see the fire from the front door, and so we just didn’t have enough time, and we had to leave him,” the 27-year-old Null said.
The ferocious blaze reduced her mother-in-law’s house to ashes, and a search of the blackened rubble the following day proved fruitless. Null feared she would never see her green-eyed friend again.
But on Friday, to her amazement, she and Domino were reunited.
“I just was so relieved and just so happy that he was here,” a tearful Null told AFP outside the NGO Pasadena Humane, where Domino – suffering singed paws, a burnt nose and a high level of stress – had been taken after being rescued.
Domino is one of several hundred pets brought to the centre as the Eaton fire roared through Altadena, forcing thousands of people to flee their homes in such a rush that many left with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Pasadena Humane was accustomed to dealing with crises, but the sudden explosion in demand was without precedent.
“We’ve never had to take 350 at once in one day before,” said the centre’s Kevin McManus. “It’s been really overwhelming.”
Many animals were delivered by their owners, who had lost their homes and had to find temporary housing for pets while they themselves stayed in hotels or shelters.
But others were brought by rescue workers and volunteers. The centre says on its website that when it receives a report of a pet left behind, it sends “search and rescue teams as quickly as possible in areas that are safe to enter.”
The centre opened up as much space as it could to accommodate the influx, even placing some pets in offices.
And it was not just dogs and cats, McManus said. There were species rarely seen in an animal shelter – like a pony, which spent a night in the centre.
More than 10 days after the fires began raging through Los Angeles, the centre still houses some 400 animals, including rabbits, turtles, lizards and birds, including a huge green, red and blue macaw.
Many of the pets’ owners, still without permanent housing, come to the centre to visit their animal friends – people like Winston Ekpo, who came to see his three German shepherds, Salt, Pepper and Sugar.
As firefighters in the area make progress, many animal owners are able to come and recover their pets, tears of sadness turning to tears of joy.
The centre’s website posts photos of recovered animals, including information on the time and place where they were rescued.
McManus said some 250 pets have so far been returned to their owners.
One of them, curiously, was Bombon, who had actually been lost long before the fires.
The Chihuahua mix went missing from its Altadena home in November, said 23-year-old Erick Rico.
He had begun to resign himself to never seeing Bombon again.
Then one day a friend told him he had seen a picture on the Pasadena Humane website that caught his attention.
When Rico saw it, he was so excited he couldn’t sleep that night – “it looked exactly like him,” he said – and he arrived at the centre early the following morning.
When he saw his owners, Bombon “started crying a lot, wagging his tail and everything. He was very, very happy.”
After the painful days of uncertainty, Rico too finally felt relief. “Now I’m just happy that he’s back home.”
