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we're at the site where ripple and Gopi chef lived in Fountain Grove and where their daughter Rhea grew up as the wall of fire board down on them. They found themselves looking for their keys in the darkness when they finally did escape. It was with almost

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nothing on when we left this entire hill was that entire. So I mean you could see this fire everywhere all the way up to here. So from here until their fire coming and the wind was blowing just right at our house. So I knew Fountain

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Grove was not going to survive. I mean it was just huge flames. I mean the entire thing he said, we pull what's going on like everybody's running outside, there's a lot of noise, cars are going back and forth. So he said like this is then like

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let's get out of here. I said the fire is on the mountain. What is going to happen to hear? There's a valley said no it's it's nothing going to survive, let's get out of here. So then I took my purse, I had some item under the

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temple like locker key. I took that, I took one idol from the temple, Ganesha. I don't know how I took that idol, I don't know. And I put it in my purse. I said God will take care of us and we just left. I was at

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school, I woke up and actually my best friend had called me from pennsylvania because somehow she had caught the news earlier and so she had called me a couple times. So I woke up and I saw I had three missed calls from her. So I called

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her back and she sort of explained everything to me. It was really confusing. I was having trouble wrapping my mind around how that could be possible. Um, I just remember being really disoriented that entire day just like, because especially if you haven't seen it and I'm

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just getting a video from a bunch of people like this is santa rosa's all on fire and I think especially being away from home is it was just really confusing the whole experience. Um, but then I did call my parents and they sort of explained that

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they were traveling to South Bay and what had happened and um, it took a couple of weeks for it to actually sink in that we had lost our home. I can tell you that the first seven months, a lot of sleepless nights we cried a lot.

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I mean it was tough because you know, I think everybody was scared. I mean, we, you know, we didn't know it was uncertain, but I think now that we've made decisions and you know, the rebuilding has started. I it's much more positive. We do have sleepless

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nights because you know, you're still, your brain is going, you know, you're working with lawyers, you're working with the insurance company or you know, your own work is going on, uh, you know, taking care of parents, taking care of your own health. I mean, there's a

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lot of things I can tell you that when I am on my uh, you know, calls, work calls, I don't think I've had any call without getting interrupted with, you know, some other call from somebody, you know, whether it's the builder or the insurance company or

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the lawyer or somebody or the other, you know, So you were always interrupted. I think my roommate was probably the most understanding of this. She said, this is not something that just goes away. It's gonna, it's a long process. It's a long journey sort of understanding

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that even maybe two years, three years this may still be affecting someone and understanding that and not judging how long it takes to sort of deal with those emotions that we had no idea what was in our insurance policy, in our home insurance policy. And I

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can tell you that most people had no clue what the insurance policy meant, what was in the insurance policy, what was covered, not covered. And you know, when we all sat around the table as friends and say, okay, well let's open our policies and see what

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we've got. Some people were like, yeah, I've got a good policy and, and people like us, we're like, oh my God, what happened? Right? Because you'll see like, oh my God, they had a house, half the size and the insurance policies double hours and the contents

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are double of ours or three times ours, What did we do or what happened here? And it was, it was a shocking just, it was like a lottery thing. Some people were just crying and some people were like, oh God, I'm good, you know, that's kind

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of how it was. So the advice to everyone is to make sure you understand not only your home insurance policy, but your life insurance, disability insurance, uh you know, I don't think most people pay too much attention to what, you know, in in case of an

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unexpected event like this, what would happen? You know, I told somebody this is like, you know, God getting angry at his own beautiful creation. You know, it was just such a beautiful place. Well it is a beautiful place and it's gonna be beautiful again, I'm sure