It took just a spark, and it was gone.

Not just a home, but entire neighborhoods and communities were largely wiped off the map following the spate of January wildfires that devastated southern California. The impact of the destruction was felt far beyond the borders of these communities and the tens of billions in damage will take years to clean up.

From the emotional toll of losing almost everything to the financial burden of starting over, ABC News is chronicling the journeys of a few affected Los Angeles residents over the next several months as they try to rebuild from the ashes of the Los Angeles fires.

The Palisades and Eaton fires both erupted on Jan. 7, fueled by severe drought conditions and strong Santa Ana winds, thousands of firefighters battled flames across 45 square miles of densely populated Los Angeles County.

After burning for 24 days, both fires were fully contained on Jan. 31, with over 37,000 acres burned and more than 16,000 structures destroyed.

At least 29 people were killed in the two fires — 17 in the Eaton Fire and 12 in the Palisades Fire, according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner.

Those who survived are now left to pick up the pieces of their lives that were so suddenly changed forever.

Marcus and Ursula Ubungen left their Altadena, California, home just before bedtime on Jan. 7, fearing a late-night evacuation would disrupt their two young children’s routine.

Little did they know that night, the Eaton Fire would upend their lives completely — decimating their home of four years, reducing their children’s school to rubble and leaving them still searching for a sense of normalcy over two months later.

“You know, days out from the fire looks very different than a month out, right? It has felt so fast, like we’ve lived many lifetimes in between the fire and today,” Ursula Ubungen said.

Picking up the pieces

“It’s a process where you’re numb and shocked. In the first week, you can’t even do anything. Second week, you’re panicking and you’re just reliving and then you sort of try to turn the anxiety into the path forward,” Katia Hausman, a Pacific Palisades resident, told ABC News.

Katia Hausman and her husband, Adam Hausman, settled into the coastal neighborhood as newlyweds in 2012, purchasing a condominium tucked above Temescal Canyon with views of the Pacific Ocean.

Six weeks since the Palisades Fire forced them to flee their home, the couple has returned twice to their red-taped former home, looking to find anything salvageable in the ashes.

“[It’s] a weird feeling, some may say, ‘like, why they even go there? Why do you want to see it?’ But for me, personally, I do want to see… to take just one more look at what I used to have,” Katia Hausman said.

“We saw our daughter’s water bottle, and we recognized it, and that’s kind of like a glimpse of our lives that we had … we’re moving on to the next stage. But these are the little bits and pieces that you still hang on.”

“In fact,” Katia Hausman told ABC News, “We took one little saucepan just because I wanted what was mine.”

Dale Fielder, 68, and his wife, Patricia, moved to Altadena in 2009 shortly before they married. Fielder said their house was the first one they looked at and they immediately fell in love.

“I’ll never forget, I sat out on the terrace there, and I said, ‘This is our home,'” he told ABC News. “Now the shock is kind of wearing off and reality is setting in, and we just realized, I really miss our home.”

On the night of Jan. 7, Fielder, a musician, was playing at a jazz club, and his wife was getting calls from friends, saying they had a heard about a fire and if they were alright. In the early hours of the morning, they got an evacuation warning and packed up to go to a friend’s house. They could see the fires from their windows.

“You never think that your house is going to be the one that gets burned down, you know?” he said. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll be able to go, maybe everything will be scorched up a little good.”

The next day, Fielder drove back to his neighborhood. As he traveled, he saw house after house destroyed, until he reached his.

“I get to my block … and I could not believe it,” he said. “Not a single house was standing an I’ll never forget that as long as I live … And finally I pull up in front of my house, and just — it was smoldering. It was gone. And that’s when I just sat in that car. I couldn’t move. And I, for 15, 20 minutes, I just cry. I bellowed.”

Fielder took videos of the remains of his home and shared them on social media. He’s returned a few times since that day, trying to see if any of his and his wife’s belongings had been saved. He found nothing, including several of his instruments and thousands of pages of original sheet music.

“I run the independent jazz label Clarion jazz out of my garage I converted into a studio office, just flattened, just nothing,” he said. “The entire inventory gone. I took my saxophones, but I left my clarinet flutes and piccolos, and I had an 88-key digital piano that was gone. But the most valuable and important thing to me, personally, was my music. I had about eight different piles of manuscripts, which goes back to the 70s, when I first started writing. I have about 25% of it but 75% of it is gone.”

The Ubungens, who became first-time home-buyers with their Altadena residence, said the barrage of tasks on top of tending to their children’s needs forced them to “step out of their grief.”

“As parents, you still have to parent whether or not you’re grieving, whether or not you’ve just experienced a very traumatic disaster, and so there are these like tensions and these wide ranges of emotions… along with this mounting to-do list,” Ursula Ubungen said.

Marcus Ubungen, a professional photographer and director, said on top of everything else engulfed in flames, was his equipment, a decade of worth of photos on hard drives, his entire film negative archive and the footage from a documentary five years in the making.

“I don’t think it fully has hit my body yet — like I don’t think my body has fully digested what has happened with that, because we’ve been trying to find housing and get my photo gear,” he said.

Finding a new home

For the Hausman family, being close to the daughter’s school was a necessity — and also a significant challenge.

Because they had to be location-specific, the Hausman family was unable to utilize the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lodging reimbursement since the only hotels available to book were over 30 miles away from their daughter’s school, in Long Beach, California.

Not knowing where to turn, the Hausmans said a family at their daughter’s school offered for them to stay in their remodeled garage while they secured short-term housing for the remainder of the school year.

The reality of maintaining a mortgage, paying HOA fees and also paying rent has the family looking at a future outside of California.

“Maybe we can power through another year here for our daughter to finish elementary school,” Adam Hausman said, “[But] we just cannot afford to stay in LA, and we will be forced out during this rebuild.”

The Hausmans received a loss of use payout from their insurance policy that totaled $5,760, equating to $480 a month for the first year of assistance, the family said.

Across the city, the Ubungens said they feel so fortunate to have found a place to temporarily call home. Their rental is just over 10 miles away from the once-idyllic Altadena suburb, left unrecognizable by the Eaton Fire’s wrath.

But while processing the loss of their home and the devastation of their community, the Ubungens, parents to a 7- and 2-year-old, have now been thrust into a world of insurance claims.

“I didn’t anticipate the amount of life admin work that would come with a disaster,” Marcus Ubungen said.

“Dealing with everything you’ve lost and all the memories and treasures that you can never get back — and then layer on the added stress of ‘you need to fill out this paperwork, you need to speak to this person’ — it’s just a lot, and if you don’t understand what you’re actually covered for, it could be really stressful,” Marcus Ubungen added.

Fabiola Sammartino, 62, originally from Rome, moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and had lived in a rented apartment in the Pacific Palisades since 2022. The building burned down in the Palisades Fire.

Sammartino said she wanted to see her old building but couldn’t bring herself to go back for many weeks. She went with a former neighbor fort the first time during the last weekend of February.

“Because I was at the bottom … everything fell on my apartment. So everything crashed on me,” she told ABC News. “I had to see my home, what had happened to my home. Going back to my neighborhood for the first time after January 7, just getting there was painful. Knowing I will never drive those beautiful streets again to go home, and seeing my neighborhood totally destroyed, was something I never thought would have happened to me.”

“But I had to see my home with my own eyes to understand what had happened, if it was true what I had been told,” Sammartino continued. “They call it ‘closure,’ I guess. But I didn’t get that.”

Sammartino said she has since found a small studio apartment in Brentwood — a suburban neighborhood — in western Los Angeles that she can afford, but she’s not happy and misses her old apartment.

“I went to the supermarket, and it was so different, so different,” she said. “Just another demography, another genre of people that I just wasn’t used to anymore, and the traffic, my God, I can’t stand traffic. I just can’t.”

She has not yet returned to her work as a paralegal and said she is currently in therapy dealing with the physical and mental health impacts of losing her home.

“My memory retention is basically zero,” Sammartino said. “I forget things, and very easily I lose things. I just don’t have any focus. Usually, I’m very concentrated because of my job but my memory is just not even there. I walk around and I can — it’s like I’m not here. I’m not here.”

She went on, “I’m always thinking about my [old] place. I see my things. I think about my coffee table. I think about the photos that I left in my bedroom or having to buy things that I already had, like a coffee machine, or like dishes again. Starting from scratch. It may sound exciting, maybe if you’re moving to a place because you want to move, but I was forced to move. And it’s very, very painful every day. And although I’m trying to, and I want to, I’m grieving, and it’s going to take a while.”

Hope on the horizon

Dale Fielder and his wife stayed in a shelter for a few days until FEMA put them up at a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. A mix of a payout from their renter’s insurance and a GoFundMe set up by their friends put them in good financial shape, according to Dale Fielder.

He said his landlord is planning to rebuild but the couple isn’t sure if they plan to stay in Los Angeles or move to Texas to be closer to family.

In the meantime, Dale Fielder said he is focusing on his music and using it to help himself heal. He and his band recently recorded a CD, including cover art of him playing a saxophone among the ruins of his house.

“Man, that helped me more than anything,” he said. “Because I thought about it, I planned it, I chose tunes that really spoke to the moment…This is a time of great testing. And who knows, but it’s a time of really learning how to reinvent yourself.”

“I think we’re very lucky that we have each other because we’re super positive people, you can be angry, upset, get into the blame, but we’re choosing to really focus on the positives,” Katia Hausman told ABC News.

“If we have to go, let’s think like it’s an adventure. When else would we go and spend couple years in a different state? It was not in the plans, but let’s make the best out of it.”

Despite all of the uncertainty the Ubungens said has clouded the month since losing their home, they reflected on a symbol of hope they discovered on their property while walking through the wreckage.

“We had a really full, beautiful garden with lots of flowers and fruit trees and the entire rose garden was decimated [but] there were two tiny roses that survived — a medium-sized flower, and one tiny, little rosebud,” Ursula Ubungen said.

“I remember looking at that and… I saw it as a sign of hope, like amidst this destruction, there is still something that is resilient and I can make it,” she added.