begin quote from:
Woman flees Las
Vegas shooting,
loses home in
wildfires
Vegas shooting,
loses home in
wildfires
Woman at Las Vegas shooting loses California home to wildfires
Story highlights
- Michella Flores was at the Las Vegas concert during the mass shooting
- The next week, she and her parents lost their California home to wildfires
(CNN)As
a former firefighter and paramedic, Michella Flores has seen her fair
share of emergency situations. But over the past couple of weeks she
became a victim herself, and began to see things from a different
perspective. She hasn't really slept in days.
Flores,
who works as a flight attendant, was in Las Vegas on October 1,
watching Jason Aldean perform at the Route 91 Harvest Festival when a
gunman, perched in a suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay, opened fire on the crowd, killing 58 and wounding hundreds.
Michella Flores and her dog, Baylee
Days later, after returning home to Santa Rosa, California, she and her parents were forced to flee their home and escape the wildfires that have devastated Northern California. The rental house is gone, along with all her parents' belongings, Flores told CNN.
"It's
just a very helpless feeling," she said of the past couple of weeks. "I
just thought, well, I've been in these situations before. It shouldn't
be a big deal.
"But when it's happening to you, it's a whole different realm."
Las Vegas: 'It drove me nuts'
Flores
had flown into Las Vegas on Sunday morning and was waiting for her next
trip, Monday night, to Boston. She was staying at the Hooters Hotel,
she said, because they offered discounted rates to airline crews. The
building is blocks away from the Mandalay Bay and the Las Vegas Village, the site of the festival that unwittingly played host to the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
"I'm
a huge country fan," Flores said, so she decided to head down to the
festival to listen to Jason Aldean from outside the fence along Las
Vegas Boulevard since she was without a ticket.
As
she was listening, she heard the first gunshots, but said she wasn't
paying much attention. It wasn't until after the gunfire resumed after a
short break that she realized that what she was hearing.
"That's
when everybody started screaming and coming out of the festival
screaming, 'Shooter!'" Flores said. "I ran down Las Vegas Boulevard."
She
managed to hide in a nearby casino's conference room with other
concertgoers. Flores waited there for hours, her only updates coming
from a coworker who was listening to a police scanner.
"It drove me nuts," Flores said of hiding in the room. "You're sitting there waiting for someone to open the door and be shot."
When she finally was able to leave, she went back to her hotel room and tried to sleep, she said, "which did not happen."
She looked out her hotel room window, toward the site of the festival.
"That night, I could see the bodies," she said.
But Flores, who has multiple jobs, worked for the next four days.
Parents' home lost to wildfires
She
finally returned home to Santa Rosa and went back to work at the
airport, where she works in the line service, fueling corporate and
private jets -- including those used by the California Department of
Forestry and Fire Protection, so she was aware that there was a fire
nearby.
When she got off work, she
headed to her parents' house, where she was staying during the process
of moving to another house. As she was driving, she said, "I looked up
and I could see the glow" of the fires. As a former firefighter, she
knew it meant the fire was close, and the wind direction told her it
could be coming right for them.
The charred remains of the Flores' Santa Rosa home is shown in photograph from October 14, 2017.
She
told her parents they should probably start packing their things and
left to take her dog to a park. Five minutes later, listening to a local
fire dispatch, Flores heard crews mention the name of the road below
her parents' home.
"I called my
mom," Flores said, "and my mom screamed in the phone and said, 'It's at
the bottom of our driveway.'" She turned back, arriving at the house
right behind a fire engine.
Flores
stayed on the scene to help firefighters protect the home, even as the
wildfire devoured the neighbor's house. At 4 or 5 a.m., she said, the
house was mostly intact, so she drove to Oakland to attend training for
work while her parents went to an evacuation center. When she got off
that evening, Flores said, "I went back and the house was gone.
Completely."
Thankfully, she and
her parents were able to move into the rental Flores was preparing. They
don't have a lot, she said, but she's thankful.
'I don't sleep'
"Unfortunately,
you'd like the whole world to stop and pay attention and say, 'Here,
we'll help,'" Flores said. "But the rest of the world keeps going on."
She said she felt unlucky, but recognizes there are others even more less fortunate than she is.
"Puerto Rico," she said. "Well, gosh, they're worse off than we are."
Flores
said she still hasn't fully come to terms with what she's faced this
month, and knows she'll have to grapple with it eventually.
"I
don't sleep. I haven't had any time to process any of this," Flores
told CNN. And it'll hit at some point when it calms down, and that's
when I'll have to deal with it all."
CNN's Paige Levin contributed to this report.
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