UPDATED with new GoFundMe page that can be found here.
Barbara Olesen was just sleeping in her Castaic living room and was feeling under the weather until she woke up and saw a glow that she “would never forget.” Olesen immediately got up from the couch and began to panic.
“I’ll never forget it coming from the back porch, which I can’t even see. It was, and I, I, I got up and I, my whole porch was in flames. And I am, I tried to put it out, and then it came in the house, and then I have a 15-year-old cat that I love named Kibbles,” Olesen said.
Olesen added that she was not going to let her cat die in the fire and heard him crying.
“I grabbed him, and I went out with him and my phone, and the rest of my house is gone. You can see the outside, but the inside is just ashes. I lost everything, everything.”
She said she lost all her father’s carving pieces, travel mementos, and all of her twin sons’ memories in just a blink of an eye.
“I want to be honest, I wouldn’t, if my cat hadn’t cried, I would have died in there with him because I love animals and I wouldn’t have let him die,” Olesen said, crying about Kibbles. “And so, he saved my life by crying because I got out in the nick of time. And, um, I fell, so I got burned, but I don’t care. I got my cat.”
Olesen said if there was one thing that she would want to take from this is that people need to avoid unsafe behavior: She believes the fire was caused by someone using fireworks in the neighborhood.
“That people think before they do things, because it was such a careless act that ruined my life, and it could have killed me,” Olesen added.
The structure fire broke out on the 31900 block of Quartz Lane in Castaic on Sunday evening, according to an official with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Firefighters were dispatched at 7:50 p.m., arriving four minutes later, according to Saadullah Sheikh, spokesman with the Fire Department.
A working fire was confirmed at 7:56 p.m., Sheikh said.
Knockdown was at 8:32 p.m., with firefighters closing the call at 11:40 p.m., Sheikh added.
Sheikh said there were no transports.
The cause of the fire has not been officially determined and is still under investigation, according to Keith Navarre, spokesman with the Fire Department.
To support Barbara Olesen, the GoFundMe page can be found here.
