‘A hellscape in all directions’: the devastating fires that ignited crisis and chaos in LA
Fires are burning one of the most iconic swathes of America, up-ending lives and destroying property.
The fire rose from the bone-dry hills, as so many others have, and then rapidly tore across the coast and hills of one of America’s most famous cities — oblivious to the demographics of the lives it disrupted. It burned mansions in Malibu and low-income housing in Pasadena.
And after more than a day of historic tragedy, the reality was setting in that it isn’t even close to over.
Paul Hirsch felt this one was different. At his home perched above the ocean, the wind gusts were so much stronger this time. He scrambled to stow his collection of paintings in a fireproof vault at his home on Las Pulgas Place, in the Pacific Palisades area of L.A.’s west side.
After an hour or so of emails and texts from others urging him to leave — as well as a ring on his doorbell — he and his wife, Jane, both 79, piled into their car Tuesday and headed down the hill toward what they thought would be an orderly evacuation route on Sunset Boulevard.
Ash rained down on their car and he could see flames next to the street as they wound their way through gridlock to the Pacific Coast Highway and on to refuge with relatives.
In the commotion, Hirsch realised he had left something important behind: a tuxedo he was to wear to accept a lifetime achievement award Jan. 18 from the American Cinema Editors for his work as an Oscar-winning film editor.
“I guess I’ll go in blue jeans or something,” Hirsch said.
The trio of Los Angeles fires burning out of control are striking one of the most iconic swathes of the nation — including the Pacific Coast Highway, Sunset Boulevard and the route of the Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena. Well-known, idyllic stretches of Malibu were decimated. Actor James Woods posted on social media that his neighbours’ houses in the Palisades were burning, Ricki Lake said on Instagram that she lost her “dream home” overlooking Malibu, and “Star Wars” star Mark Hamill said in an Instagram post that he left Malibu as small fires burned on both sides of the road.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, a hellscape in all directions,” said Stefan Simchowitz, an art dealer who returned to his vast art compound in Pasadena Wednesday after evacuating the night before. He found his Red Barns Project still standing, covered in windstrewn debris, but heard from at least five other friends and neighbours whose homes burned. He and his son hosed everything down again.
The fires accelerated at an unforgiving pace that up-ended lives, destroyed property and, as the sun rose Wednesday, raised the daunting question of just how long it will take the city to control the blaze. Burns dotting the northern contours of the city connected parts of Los Angeles that rarely meet, joining the beach-adjacent world of movie stars to neighbourhoods many miles inland where families just try to make ends meet. Nearly every corner of sprawling Los Angles was smothered by a sky of smoke and ash.
Local authorities have reported five deaths and a “high number” of injuries from the blazes. No cause or source of the fires has been identified.
The property damage toll won’t be calculated for days or weeks — and severity for residents may be exacerbated by a deepening home-insurance crisis that has already been spiralling in California for the past two years or so. Leading companies have pulled back, leaving millions of homeowners facing rate hikes and struggling to get coverage at all, particularly in fire-prone areas.
State Farm last year announced it was dropping 69%, or almost three-quarters, of its home-insurance customers in the Pacific Palisades zip code of 90272, as part of a cull of some 30,000 policies in the state. A spokesman for the insurance giant said at the time — and repeated recently — that the non-renewals were designed to “address areas where the company has an overconcentration of risk,” adding that the “decision was not made lightly.”
California regulators have gone all out in recent months to woo the companies back, agreeing to rate hikes that are far higher than the historic norm for the state. Rules passed late last year meet many of the industry’s demands, such as allowing insurers to base their rates on predicted future losses from wildfires, rather than — lower — historic losses.
There were growing concerns about the fires exacerbating California’s stark housing shortage, and also questions about how prepared the region was for this event and who or what was to blame for the unfolding disaster.
Brush management in the foothills above Los Angeles is already becoming a point of controversy, as it has in other fires. Rick Caruso, the owner of a Pacific Palisades shopping centre who ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Karen Bass last year, said in an interview with Los Angeles Fox 11 that both Los Angeles city and county failed to keep vegetation on their lands — adjoining neighbourhoods like Pacific Palisades — trimmed and maintained.
“Why didn’t you work to mitigate this? What was your brush-mitigation program,” Caruso said. “The brush up in these hills controlled by the city and county, I would bet you they haven’t been handled, mitigated, pruned or removed for probably 30 or 40 years. This was a disaster waiting to happen.”
City and county officials weren’t immediately available to comment on their brush-management program.
Jennifer Gray Thompson, CEO of After the Fire USA, a California non-profit that helps towns rebuild after disasters, said she could see the lack of brush management by L.A. County in a visit with the fire chief of Beverly Hills last year. “You could clearly see where L.A. County property began, full of chaparral,” Thompson said via email. “BH? Mitigated.”
Lack of brush management has been an issue in other big wildfires. The 2023 destruction of Lahaina on Maui was fuelled by a build-up of vegetation around the tourist town that helped lead to “catastrophic fire spread,” according to an analysis by the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, an industry research group. Maui County and Hawaii state officials failed to act on years of reports warning about the dangers of the grasses, according to a review of public records and interviews by The Wall Street Journal.
Hurst Fire
Officials Wednesday warned of devastating losses as the main fire tore through the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood and others sparked around Los Angeles County. At least two people have been killed and tens of thousands have been forced to evacuate.
The Palisades fire claimed schools and homes both immense and modest. In Malibu, coastal institutions like seafood shack Reel Inn and Rosenthal Wine Bar and Patio were destroyed. The blaze stretched as far east as Brentwood, an affluent neighbourhood further inland from the coast.
Flames lapped the grounds and burned down trees and vegetation surrounding the Getty Villa, oil tycoon J. Paul Getty’s 1976 museum built in the Pacific Palisades to evoke a Roman country home that now houses at least 40,000 antiquities. The museum averted disaster and its buildings, staff and art collections remained safe, thanks to its fire-mitigation efforts including clearing brush from its grounds, said Katherine Fleming, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
The museum maintains its own water supply in the form of enormous tanks — including a 50,000-gallon tank at the villa and a one-million-gallon tank at its main campus located a half-hour’s drive northeast.
About 15 miles south, many were anxious their homes wouldn’t fare as well. A woman sobbed in the lobby of the Renaissance Los Angeles Airport Hotel Tuesday night, where some families relocated as evacuation orders spread fast. By Wednesday morning, a manager said the hotel was at 90% capacity or above.
“This is the worst one I’ve seen,” Tim McKeon, a 24-year veteran of the Los Angeles Fire Department, who paused for a break Wednesday morning in Santa Monica. As a dozen or so firefighters downed coffee and gobbled chocolate from a nearby Ghirardelli store, McKeon recounted how a combination of wind and fire ripped through iconic residential and commercial areas.
“By the time we got to a house and put the fire out, the fire had spread to three or four other houses,” said McKeon, who had battled the blaze in the area around the Pacific Palisades since the prior morning. The wind was so strong that it blew hose streams away from their targets.
Yet at Venice Beach a few miles south of the westernmost evacuation zone, life was eerily normal Wednesday morning. Surfers pulled on wetsuits, bodybuilders stretched at the historic Muscle Beach gym ahead of their workouts and at the nearby skate park, the 1982 hit “You Dropped A Bomb on Me” blasted on a boombox as skaters chatted amid a fog of marijuana smoke.
Palisades
Before fire broke out, area fire commanders knew they were in for trouble. The National Weather Service had issued an alert for “extremely critical” fire conditions, in advance of one of the fiercest Santa Ana wind events in decades — with hurricane force gusts forecast over the parched terrain.
Hundreds of firefighters from across California and neighbouring states like Arizona deployed to the Los Angeles area this week in preparation for possible fires, said John Miller, a public information officer with the U.S. Forest Service. Even so, it’s been nearly impossible to get a handle on the massive blazes.
Typically, fire crews try to contain the perimeter of a wildfire as fast as possible, Miller said. So far, that hasn’t been doable given the intensity of the winds and vegetation that has turned into tinder due to the lack of rain. The unsafe conditions have meant helicopters aren’t able to fly over the fires to dump fire retardant, a common tactic used during wildfires.
In a meeting Tuesday morning, Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy grimly told his counterparts in Los Angeles: “It is going to be one or all of us, so we might as well be ready.”
By about 7pm that evening, with just the Palisades fire raging, Fennessy was cautiously optimistic. “If there’s any good news, it’s that this is the only fire burning so far,” he said in an interview. “If we end up with another two, three or more fires, we’re beyond what we can manage.”
Unbeknown to him, the Eaton Fire had ignited a half-hour earlier in the foothills above Pasadena, many miles inland from the Palisades blaze. Hours later, another blaze, the Hurst Fire, exploded on the northern fringe of the San Fernando Valley. Both would prompt more evacuations and threaten more homes.
The Palisades fire has so far destroyed 1,000 structures, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony C. Marrone said early Wednesday. First responders and a “high number” of residents who didn’t evacuate their homes suffered significant injuries, Marrone said.
“It was just boom, boom, boom,” said Pacific Palisades resident Lisa Deni who evacuated the area for a Red Cross shelter in Westwood Tuesday night. The explosions she believes were gas lines exploding. Deni’s neighbourhood, known as the “alphabet street” community which is the flatlands of the Palisades, is entirely gone, she said, including her home.
Matt Going, a Pacific Palisades resident, evacuated Tuesday morning, when he received an alert from his children’s school about a fire near Highlands. Fifteen minutes later, another alert said the school was evacuating. The family grabbed their passports, a few valuables and clothes and headed to the Regent Santa Monica Beach hotel.
Going said his insurer, State Farm, dropped his coverage this summer and that he replaced it with insurance from The California Fair Plan, which provides basic insurance to those who can’t get it from traditional carriers. He believes his home is still safe, but he’s not going back any time soon.
“The town is gone,” Going said.
Eaton
Across the city, smoke clogged the air in the predawn hours as ash settled on discarded Christmas trees and empty bleachers in Pasadena that a week ago housed spectators to the famous Rose Parade. Smoke and ash covered neighbourhoods across Los Angeles, even those 10 miles or more from active fires, creating an apocalyptic feeling across the city. Power outages left some pockets of the city dark next to lit-up gas stations and unaffected neighbourhoods.
In the Pasadena Convention Center, hundreds of people sprawled on cots, chairs and the floor seeking shelter. Many came with little more than a backpack and their pets. Dogs barked and howled along the carpeted hallways alongside one woman’s two caged birds.
Musician Richard Bellikoff has lived in the small city of Sierra Madre for 31 years, but said he never confronted a fire this close and has never had to flee before.
Laying on a cot in a convention centre hallway, Bellikoff worried about his car parked on the street, which was filled with whatever valuables he could grab, including his instruments and sheet music. He had evacuated around midnight, after sheriffs came through the neighbourhood, flames visible on the ridge in the near distance. An evacuation list he keeps on hand helped him pack: blankets and sleeping bags, medicine and a headlamp.
“You can buy new clothes. You can buy a new computer. You can’t buy a new life,” Bellikoff said.
Nearby, residents from the Pasadena Highlands assisted-living and retirement community described a chaotic 3am evacuation. The community of 200 relocated to the evacuation centre in any vehicles they could find, including vans and the staff’s personal cars. One resident said she was told before going to bed to fall asleep in her clothes and to pack any essential medicines.
In the Eaton fire, which has killed two people and destroyed at least 100 homes in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, more than 700 firefighters are on the scene, working on evacuations, responding to medical crises and trying to halt any structure fires from sparks and flames jumping from the main fire line. Some sparks have flown a mile, which has the potential to spread the fire even faster and into more neighbourhoods.
Rob Nelson knew there were high winds when he fell asleep early, but didn’t realise fire was headed toward his home in Altadena. He woke up after 3am and saw embers of fire landing in his yard. “I was really scared,” he said. “And I never get scared.”
Nelson then looked down the street and saw a San Dimas police car with officers telling people to leave and asked if they could take him and his two dogs to safety. They loaded into the squad car without much more than the clothes he was wearing and the dogs’ leashes.
“Blaze got to live one of his dreams, he always wanted to be a police dog,” Nelson said, pointing to his German shepherd mix. “It’s a reality check.”
Sherry Henson woke up at 2:45am to a knock on the door from officials and saw a house across the street and two houses down the road on fire. “Our house was full of smoke, they said, get out, get out now,” she said.
She came to the evacuation centre with four family members as her brother, a nurse practitioner, went to work to help patients. Her family has lived in Altadena for 55 years but “nothing like this” has ever happened and they’ve never had to evacuate, she said.
Many at the evacuation centre thought about what will come next once they learn the fates of their homes.
Stephen Hill said he’s among those deeply concerned about the future. He’s lived in Pasadena for 17 years with a Section 8 housing voucher and doesn’t know where he’d go next if his home is gone. When he received the evacuation order at 6am he called 9-1-1, unsure what was going on, then found a friend to drive him to the evacuation centre.
Looking down at his cat, Cha Cha, in her kennel, he worries about being separated from her if the new Section 8 housing he finds won’t take pets. “That’s just going to break my heart,” he said.
As smoke and an amber glow loomed over the ridge lines of Griffith Park on the horizon, Sharon Gray walked past horses lined up in white stalls at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, her dog Blue at her side.
Gray, 60, helped transport more than 30 horses from her horse boarding property, Eaton Dam Stables in Pasadena, on Tuesday evening as flames moved in. When she went back Wednesday morning, her barn was destroyed, and the trailer home where she lives was badly scorched. She had to leave for a fire in the area about 30 years ago, but was able to go home after.
“We won’t be able to go home this time,” she said.
The Wall St Journal
