'It Just Felt Like the Apocalypse': Sag Harbor Native Loses Family Home to Eaton Fire in California

The clock ticks toward midnight. Alex Luppi sits on the couch in his living room, looking at the Christmas tree and thinking about the new year ahead — his dreams, his goals, moments and memories yet to be created here with his young family.

It is Monday, January 6. He will never do this again, he doesn’t realize. It is the last time he will sit on this couch. The last night he will spend in this home.

In the week since, in moments of quiet, Luppi comes back to this peaceful scene, he said, one filled with hope. It quickly twists into a nightmare.

With a roar, the room is swallowed by flames, he said — a blazing inferno sweeping through the house, burning the past, the present and a future never realized.

The disturbing image lands him back in reality, where his family’s lovingly restored, circa-1912 Craftsman is now rubble, reduced to ash by the Eaton Fire, which ripped across Altadena, California, last week — where the Pierson High School graduate now calls home.

“It took right up until the moment that we saw the photos that we were getting to truly believe, and even consider, the fact that it was gone,” he said, feeding his 3-year-old son, Issac, breakfast from their temporary home in Santa Barbara.

Starting Tuesday, January 7, a series of fires burning homes and businesses across Los Angeles have leveled over 12,000 buildings, displaced thousands of people and killed at least two dozen, according to The Associated Press.

On Wednesday morning, The New York Times reported that the Eaton Fire had slowed, but had burned over 14,000 acres and was 35 percent contained. The Auto Fire was 47 percent contained, the Hurst Fire 97 percent contained and the largest of them all — the Palisades Fire, which has destroyed nearly 24,000 acres — was just 18 percent contained.

With another round of strong winds on the horizon, Southern California is still very much in danger.

“We don’t really have a plan,” Luppi said. “Our long-term plan, and our guiding North Star, is to rebuild our community.”

While Hollywood celebrities like actors Billy Crystal and Mandy Moore have lost their homes to the fires, the blazes tore through more affordable communities such as Altadena, a historically diverse and creative community — drawing in young couples and families, Luppi said.

When they saw the early 20th century “real fixer-upper” — complete with a double lot — on Las Flores Drive, Luppi said they knew it was their future home. They closed in September 2022 and spent months renovating before moving in the following February.

They recently transformed their bathroom into a little oasis, led largely by the vision of Luppi’s wife, Natalie Kotin, who is an interior designer.

“It was our favorite part of the house,” Luppi said.

With 47 original windows throughout the two-bedroom home, the family grew accustomed to the rattling and shaking that often came with windy days. But on January 6, fierce Santa Ana winds had already started to kick up, the couple recalled, and they agreed that if their house lost power, they’d go stay with Kotin’s sister in a different part of the city.

The next day, Luppi left for work — he is a server at Felix Trattoria in Venice — in the late afternoon, saying goodbye to his wife and son. But hours later, when Kotin and Isaac sat down for dinner, they heard a loud noise over the wind — and she immediately texted her friend, who lived nearby, asking if she’d heard it.

“She called me immediately and she was like, ‘You’re on speaker,’ because she has two young kids,” Kotin said. “And she’s like, ‘We’re going camping.’ And I’m like, ‘You are? What?’ And she was trying to spell, ‘There’s an F-I-R-E, we’re going camping and you need to go camping, too.’”

Kotin sprang into action, though at the time, she was more concerned about the winds — and the power being cut off — than a small brush fire miles away, she said. She packed pajamas and a change of clothes for herself, her husband and their son, who goes by “Kiki,” and a few of his upper-tier stuffed animals.

Then, they piled into the car ­— along with the family dog, Norman — and got on the road, thinking they would be gone for one night.

“As I was leaving, there was not even a thought in my mind that that would be the last time,” she said. “I don’t think anyone had any idea of the magnitude of what was going to happen, or how violent it was going to be to rip through our whole town. Even the thought that that could happen, it’s insane.”

Branches littered the highway and the strong winds blew debris as she drove, she said, just barely staving off a pair of panic attacks. And as she headed southbound on the Foothill Freeway, she looked to her left and saw it: the Eaton Fire.

“It was like a zigzag line all the way down the side of the mountain,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ It just felt like the apocalypse.”

The following morning, the family woke up to a text from their neighbor. Las Flores, it read, was gone. Hours later, photos confirmed their worst fears.

Everything — their home, their irreplaceable possessions, their sense of security — had burned.

“I just cried and cried and cried,” Kotin said. “I just kept repeating, for whatever reason, I just kept saying that my childhood teddy bear was gone.”

A sob tore through her.

“I don’t know why, because it’s not like that’s my prized possession or something like that,” she continued. “But my grandparents had given him to me and it’s the thing I’ve brought with me every place I’ve ever lived.”

In the aftermath, Luppi said he’ll find himself reliving a fragment of a memory, or picturing a belonging, “and then I’ll very quickly imagine a version of it in a violent fire, like a book of Kiki’s, or a shirt in my closet, or the bathroom.”

“It’s been hard,” he said. “It’s been hard to find those moments to grieve and to think and to try to move on. But then also, our kid’s school is closed down, so having to do that parenting and put up that stiff upper lip and trying to find a way to make sense of all this for your kid has been very emotionally difficult to navigate.”

Before barricades made the decision for them, Luppi knew he couldn’t go see their home in ruins. The drive there alone would be too much to bear, he said.

“I don’t even think I’d make it,” he said. “If there was nobody blocking us to the house, the streets that I would take to the home, all of the memories of that drive that I’ve done hundreds of times, to see it all burned down before I would even get there, I think that would have just been too much anyway.

“It’s Altadena being gone that I think we both have yet to really, fully embrace.”

For now, the family’s attention is focused on inventorying all of their items — from their favorite pair of socks to heirloom quilts and everything in between, a process that could take weeks — and staying positive for their son, Luppi said.

Then, they will return, he said, and they will rebuild.

“I think that is really the only thing that keeps anybody sane at this point, is knowing that at some point, Altadena’s going to return,” he said. “It will return to its glory one day and with everybody — with all of our work committed to that goal — it will happen.

“But it’s hard to know when.”

To support Alex Luppi, Natalie Kotin and their son, Isaac, visit gofundme.com/f/rebuild-hope-for-alex-natalie-and-kiki.