How it feels to watch your city burn from the other side of the planet

As the Los Angeles fires developed overnight, I was left with a strange sense of disconnection and removal watching events unfold from afar. The pictures were dramatic, but the experiences seemed distant, and the people fleeing their homes were inevitably strangers, reduced to characters in a TV news drama.

That is, until the observed experiences went suddenly from remote to very real, the people fleeing were my friends, and the mandatory evacuation order for an unanticipated and frightening nearby inferno drew its line at the end of my street.

Suddenly, there is a strange cocktail of emotions: paralysis from the 12,000 kilometres between me and the world I know, fear for the safety of my friends and colleagues, and also, an unexpected sense of relief that I am a long way away, in Australia.

Fire raging in the Hollywood Hills area.Credit: AP

Los Angeles, currently grappling with the worst fires in its history, is my adopted home. It’s an ugly, unforgiving and often unfriendly city, which constantly tests your love for it. It has brutalistic architecture, and an industry full of brutal personalities. It is hard and unyielding.

But it is also Disneyland and Hollywood all rolled into one, an often nonsensical party town turned into an overpopulated citadel of culture, thought and creative ambition. LA is a kind of addiction. A kind of if-you-know-you-know town. That’s why it draws strangers, with big ideas, from everywhere.

Tonight, however, LA is a city learning the hard lesson that whether you’re an Oscar winner or a valet parking attendant, you are powerless in the face of Mother Nature’s tempest. Our homes, not much more than paper and string. And our souls brittle, especially when what matters to us is placed at risk.

As a young reporter, I covered the 1994 east coast bushfires in Australia. Thousands were evacuated, four died, 225 homes were destroyed and 800,000 hectares of bushland was incinerated. I learnt valuable lessons there: about the power and indiscriminate rage of a fire, and about the resilience of communities touched by it.

As a more experienced journalist, watching from Australia creates a strange sense of disappointment at the distance between me and the story. Every instinct tells me I should be there, covering the fires. My first thoughts are not even for my house in LA, or any danger to it. That is just a temple dedicated to the accumulation of stuff. And none of it matters, truly, in the end.

Watching the Palisades fire burn a deep scar across the city I love so much is discomforting. Even then, I am left with a sense that whatever happened, it was not happening in my street. But then came the inevitable text: Runyon Canyon, where I live, was burning, and an evacuation order was imminent.

This, perhaps, is the darkest hour. Where paralysis and fear take over. Where I quickly list the things that matter – my passport, the personal possessions I travel with – to make sure they are safe. And whether my friends, who are evacuating as I write this, will stay out of harm’s way.

And the realisation that I am on the other side of the world and unable to change the outcome, whatever it may be.

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