"When we pulled up we couldn't believe everything was gone," said Altadena resident Claudine Eng.
Hours after evacuating, Eng and her children went back to see if their home was still standing.
Fire had engulfed the garages and living quarters next to the main house. The family picked up garden hoses to fight the flames.
It was an all-day battle.
"Just all the excitement of wanting to put this fire out. That kind of took over. We kind of didn't think about our safety," said Eng.
Now new research reveals that resident don't have to be that close to the fires for very long to experience health effects.
"We found that visits to the ER for respiratory illness increased by 24% after the wildfire started," said Susan Cheng, M.D., M.P.H., Director of Public Health Research at Cedars-Sinai's Smidt Heart Institute.
And for 90 days after the fires, researchers tracked a 118% increase in visits for general illness and also found that heart attacks rose 46%. But Cheng said what scientists found next was peculiar and surprising.
"Here, we've never seen anything like this before," she said.
Scientists found that abnormal blood test results related to general illness more than doubled in the 90-day period in 2025 as compared with that period in previous years. This is a finding not previously reported after major wildfires, according to the researchers.
"We could see these were patients who came in with coughs, but their chest x-rays were clear. They came in with dizziness, but there weren't signs of dehydration. They came with chest pain, but they weren't having a heart attack," Cheng said.
What did these abnormal lab results mean, and what was the link to all these different, unexplained symptoms?
"The January wildfire exposures seem to have led to some kind of a biochemical metabolic stress on the body that likely affected more than just one organ system," she said.
The medical center is located 10 miles from the Palisades Fire and 20 miles from the Eaton Fire. But Cheng said the results she got at Cedar-Sinai's ER can probably be replicated at any other emergency room in L.A. County and even as far south as Orange County.
"We know that even beyond L.A., many, many people were affected," she said.
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Cheng said most healthy people with this abnormal blood work appear to have recovered. But what are the potential long term effects?
That needs more study. In the meantime, especially on poor air quality days, her advice is to wear a mask and take advantage of air filtration.
"Those are two now tried-and-true proven strategies for mitigating and minimizing risk," she said.
"With all these health concerns it's really scary," Eng said.
Eng said she wants to return home, but the findings give her mixed feelings.
"Happy, but worried at the same time, especially for my kids," she said.