“Last Sunday, I was running from bullets. This Sunday, I was running from fire,” Michella Flores said.
A California woman lost her home to a fire days after she survived the Las Vegas shooting.
Michella Flores, 51, was in Las Vegas watching Jason Aldean perform at the Route 91 Harvest Festival when bullets rained down on the crowd on Oct. 1.
In recent days, Flores was back at home in Santa Rosa, Calif., when a fire destroyed her family’s house.
“Last Sunday, I was running from bullets,” Flores told KTVU . “This Sunday, I was running from fire.”
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Flores returned to her parent’s rental home Sunday night after leaving the airport where she works part-time as a flight attendant and customer service representative for Kaiser Air. As she approached her parents’ home, she noticed an orange glow coming from the hillside.
As a former firefighter, she knew that was not a good sign, but figured it was far enough away that she shouldn’t worry, KTVU reported.
The former firefighter took her dog Baylee for a walk and tuned in to a local emergency dispatch service. She heard her street name mentioned and called her mother to tell them the fire was there.
By the time Flores returned from the walk, her parents had been evacuated from the house and she began fighting the flames alongside firefighters.
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Flores fought to keep flames away from the house with a garden hose until around 4:30 a.m.
“I was really shook up after Vegas,” Flores told KTVU . “I was shaking and I couldn’t calm down. When I was fighting the fire at my house, I was more in a ‘task’ mode and so I compartmentalized it.”
Later that day, the flames overtook the house. Flores and her parents lost most of their belongings in the fire.
“Almost everything I own is gone,” Flores told KTVU. “My bed, my bike, my clothes, my flight attendant uniforms.”
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The flight attendant uniforms she lost were the same ones she had worn the prior week on her flight to Las Vegas.
A GoFundMe page was set up to raise money for the Flores family’s fire recovery. It has raised over $18,000, surpassing the initial goal of $10,000.
