On the charred and burned front yard of her Camarillo home, Julie Kuehnel looks at the remains of what has been her home for 50-years. There’s nothing to save. All that is standing are two brick clad pillars which are blackened and her chimney stack.
"No one knows what to say," Kuehnel told KCLU.
"It's totaled. But luckily, I have good insurance," she said.
The speed at which the Mountain Fire descended on this community on Wednesday has left her, and so many others, in shock but also very pragmatic.
"I am going to stay at a Residence Inn as long as I can and then get a long term rental to before I figure out what to do," she said.
"Right now I'm still in shock. So I haven't processed it. I know it's going to hit me hard at some point, but so far I'm just like taking care of business, you know, canceling this and that," said Kuehnel.
She isn’t here alone. One of her two adult daughters is with her - daughters she raised in this home which holds a lot of memories.
Like so many – it was another member of the family in her home which she was concerned about when she got the evacuation order - the four-legged kind that she wouldn’t leave behind.
"I came up when I got the evacuation order. I was down at Cal State Channel Islands and I came here and it was smoky and there was fire in the front yards of some places. But my dog was home. And so I was like, 'I'm not leaving without Fergus'. So I pulled in their fire trucks out here and they're like, 'Maam, you need to leave'. I'm like, 'Not without Fergus'. So I ran and got him, and that's it. I had my purse, my dog and my car. That's it."
She says the community has been kind, as friends and colleagues have offered her places to stay and help.
But it's not just Julie stood her looking at the ashes of her life.
The exact number of homes lost here isn’t yet confirmed, but home after home in this neighborhood is razed to the ground, burned out cars in garages, in some you can make out the burned shell of a washer or dryer. The homeowners are stood out front of the smoldering remains as fire crews dampen down smoking hot spots.
The enormity of what happened here is just beginning to sink in, and the path to rebuilding a long, arduous and emotional process.
