After evacuating her home early Wednesday morning and escaping the fires that had engulfed swaths of Altadena, Calif.winph, Monica Perez clutched her rosary and chanted a Hail Mary as her 19-year-old son drove the two of them up the I-5.

Then a neighbor called with miraculous news: Her century old Mission-style stucco house was still standing and all but unharmed.

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A fire crew had managed to save her home and two neighboring ones, Ms. Perez said. She and her son raced back to their neighborhood, in the evacuation zone, passing homes still ablaze, to see it with their own eyes.

ImageMs. Perez in Altadena, Calif., where her house managed to escape the Eaton fire largely unscathed. “I was at first overwhelmed with joy,” she said.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

“I was at first overwhelmed with joy,” said Ms. Perez, 56, a podcast host, in a phone interview.

But her happiness was short-lived. “It was a mixture of both a tremendous relief,th777 slots but a sense of it being a hollow victory because what we loved about that town is definitely gone forever,” said Ms. Perez, who bought the four-bedroom house in 2023.

In the aerial photographs that have become ubiquitous in this era of supersized wildfires, there is invariably a lonely house still standing, a baffling survivor. For the owners of the homes that manage to skirt fate, elation can turn to grief and frustration.

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But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

His debunked claims about Haitian migrants stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, helped stir a firestorm over immigration in that communitywinph, which has dealt with bomb threats and evacuations after Mr. Trump made his comments.