Living through two fires: Redwood City woman just getting settled after fire, when another displaces her

In the early-morning hours of Oct. 17, Mager, 38, said she heard screams and people running in the hallway of her new unit at Terrace Apartments on 926 Woodside Road. That fire displaced about 60 residents.

“I went to open the door and I saw smoke and fire. I realized the nightmare was happening again,” Mager said.

Mager spent months staying with her sister before she found the nearby Terrace Apartments with a layout similar to her previous home, Mager said.

“The reason I chose the [Terrace] Apartments is because this apartment was exactly a mirror image reflection of the one I lived in at Hallmark. I bought the same furniture from the same store and tried to put things back together. Mentally, I wanted to feel like nothing had changed after the first fire,” Mager said.

The similarities between the two fires that occurred less than a mile from each other are astonishing, Mager said. Both fires originated in the early-morning hours on the fourth floor of buildings that didn’t have sprinkler systems, Mager said.

After the Hallmark fire, she was depressed, couldn’t sleep and spent long nights obsessing over what she would do in another disaster, Mager said. As the Terrace Apartments building filled with smoke, she remembered survival techniques a firefighter had told her in July. She grabbed an apron from her kitchen, submersed it in water and stuffed it under the door. She gathered her phone, some clothing, money and century-old family photos she had yet to unpack, then rushed onto the balcony, Mager said.

She was the second to last person to escape Terrace Apartments after a firefighter kicked down a dividing wall between an adjacent balcony, Mager said.

She was visiting her sister nearby when she saw the Hallmark building she lived in on fire. In a state of shock, she rushed to the building but was unable to get into her apartment. Five days later, she was able to return and gather some of her valuables, Mager said. The Hallmark management refunded her deposit, one month’s rent and gave them $1,000, Mager said. Charities like the Red Cross and the international Tzu Chi Foundation provided Hallmark residents with gift cards and she had started to rebuild her life, Mager said.

The Terrace Apartments management is not assisting those affected by the disaster as well, Mager said. During a meeting at the Red Morton Community Center last week, a representative from the property management company Sequoia Realty Services informed the victims they would receive their deposits back as well as the remainder of the month’s rent. But in bad taste, Mager said the company ended up charging Terrace residents rent for the day of the fire and still hasn’t said when she’ll be able to gather her belongings.

Due to an unfortunate car accident last month, her insurance agent convinced her to buy renters insurance, Mager said. Her Terrace Apartments unit had a television she bought the day before the fire, new furniture she’d had for less than a week and many items still in boxes or with tags, Mager said. But regardless of refunded money, certain belongings are irreplaceable, she said.

Her beloved grandfather’s oil paintings are gone and the only reason she has any sentimental items left is because she hadn’t had time to fully unpack what was left from the Hallmark fire.

“Firefighters told me to drop my stuff; items that survived the Cold War and the Soviet Union, all of my family pictures, passed down centuries to centuries. Thank goodness I didn’t have time to unpack them and I just grabbed the bag and threw it outside to keep them,” said Mager, who is from Ukraine.

A meeting at the Fair Oaks Community Center on 2600 Middlefield Road in Redwood City will be held 7 p.m. tonight for the victims of the Terrace Apartments fire. Hopefully, residents will be given some answers as to when or if they’ll be able to return and retrieve anything salvageable, Mager said.

The Red Cross is taking donations and can be contacted through its hotline at 650-259-1765

samantha@smdailyjournal.com

(650) 344-5200 ext. 106