Evacuees of Woolsey fire still struggling over how to rebuild their lives
LOS ANGELES_From the ashes of his Malibu home, Wolter Mehring salvaged a coin collection that still gleamed in its blackened box. He and his son had been searching the wreckage with a metal detector on Saturday, looking for jewelry.
Little remained of the house where Mehring and his wife, Patti, had raised their four children. A bit of the brick chimney stood, heaped with a white mess that Mehring said was once an amethyst crystal from Brazil. Their chickens had not survived.
He was still watering an avocado tree that his father-in-law, now deceased, had once planted, hoping it would make it through.
When the Mehrings left, they took little with them. Some passports. A laptop. They had been through fire in Malibu before.
"We always left. We always came back," Wolter Mehring said. "We didn't think about not coming back."
Hundreds of Malibu,
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