Las Vegas Shooting Survivor Loses Her Home To California Wildfires A Week Later

It’s been two weeks since the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas, and while many survivors are doing their best to grieve and move forward, one survivor is dealing with a whole other kind of hell. Michella Flores was at the Route 91 Festival when it began to rain bullets and was lucky to leave with her life, and was unharmed altogether. When she arrived home in Santa Rosa, California this past Sunday, she saw the orange glow so many others had described creeping on her home she shared with her parents.

“Last Sunday, I was running from bullets. This Sunday, I was running from fire.”

Michella spoke with local station KTVU as she detailed her horrific past week. She has lost almost all of her belongings and she and her parents are without a home. For the time being, they plan to move to Idaho to figure everything out.

She was a fighter and immediately grabbed a hose and tried her hardest to stop the flames but it was too powerful for her to overcome. Her quick response and fearlessness can be attributed to her profession. Michella has been a firefighter, paramedic, and now serves as a flight attendant for Kaiser Air. High-stress situations are something that is natural to her, and it’s helped her cope with all that’s happened.

When she returned back to Santa Rosa from Las Vegas, Michella saw the glow from afar but assumed it was far enough away and didn’t worry too much. She took her dog for a walk and told her parents to pack some bags just in case. She decided to listen to Redcom, a dispatch service she used when she was a firefighter and paramedic. She heard her street name over the radio and immediately called her parents. It was only moments after she left with her dog that the fire rapidly reached their home.

Her mom yelled “The fire’s here!” and she got home as soon as she could. This is when she attempted to put out the fire that was building with two firemen but it proved too strong. By 4:30 a.m. the house was fairly damaged when the fire went out, but the frame was left standing.

Her parents went to the Finely Community Center to sleep, but Michaella wasn’t able to shut her eyes. She decided to drive to Oakland where she had been doing customer service training for work. When she arrived home that evening, she went to check on her house. She panicked at the sight of a fire truck and saw that the house was now completely gone. The trees behind the house had caught on fire while she was away in Oakland, and now everything was destroyed.

Despite the terrible two weeks she’s undergone, Michella still hasn’t missed a day of work and is doing what she can to help others and those continuing to fight the fires.

“Believe me. This will hit me. And it will hit me hard. Right now, I’m in this space where things need to get done. And I’ll deal with the rest later on.”

If you’d like to help those suffering from the Northern California wildfires, you can visit the resilience fund for Sonoma County here.

[Featured Image by Jae C. Hong/AP Images]