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The trash cans blew over on West Mariposa Street. It was Tuesday morning, January 7, and the Santa Ana winds had picked up. A 69-year-old woman named Jerri Flowers was outside her house on a corner lot in Altadena. She had bought it for $100,000 decades earlier, but it was now worth ten times that, with a roof topped with solar panels and an unruly Chinese elm tree in the yard.
Flowers is one of the many residents of Los Angeles I spoke to over the past few weeks, people with markedly different lives in a sprawling city. But in the days following the fires that started on January 7, they shared an understanding of what it was to fear losing everything. Flowers and the others walked me through what they had lost — and what they hoped to rebuild.
For Flowers, her home was where she raised her family. She worked for the county health-services department and was one of many Black Angelenos who had found an affordable place to live in West Altadena. The decades had taken from her — she had buried one son and then her husband. But she had maintained the place, and the house’s increasing value allowed her to take out loans for payments on her car. One son still lived with her, while a daughter had moved to Kansas City. In a room she called “the library,” she kept bookshelves full of Bibles.
As Flowers retrieved the trash cans, she saw a neighbor doing the same thing. The woman walked into the street, extended her arms, and exclaimed, “Remember when you were a little girl, the wind was blowing, and you would act like you were flying?”
An Altadena photographer and director named Joseph Kindred, who is 35, always looked forward to the arrival of the Santa Ana winds. As a boy, he would stand in the street with his arms out, feeling free. “My favorite time of year,” he said. Though he’d spent his childhood on the west side of town, near Flowers, his growing success allowed him to move with his family to the more affluent and heavily wooded eastern part of the neighborhood. His new home was nearly hidden behind brush and a tall pine that sometimes dripped sap on his fiancée’s Tesla. He liked hearing owls in the night and seeing palm trees in the fog.
Another Altadena resident, Greg Sliwinski, a 50-year-old firefighter who was born in Poland, told me he loved the winds because they signaled that it was time to go curl up on his custom couch, which his wife, a Taiwanese immigrant named Hsinyi “Annie” Su, had bought for him. They had moved into their house in 2018, a few years before Sliwinski became a rookie with the Kern County Fire Department, 80 miles north. It was simple: 1,200 square feet with whitewashed walls, a neat lawn, and a sun room, which they gave over to their two cats. “We had an American Dream,” Sliwinski said. Though their yard didn’t contain much vegetation, one of their immediate neighbors had lush trees hanging over their fence and would object when Sliwinski and Su trimmed the foliage back.
The Santa Ana winds come from the eastern deserts, picking up speed as they descend from Nevada toward the San Gabriel Mountains before turning toward the sea, where they reach Santa Monica, the Pacific Palisades, and Malibu. Indigenous inhabitants of this region lit fires to lessen its natural fuel load. Experts often say that, in landscapes like this, a fire put out is a fire put off. But prescribed burning around Malibu had since been impeded by colonization and the establishment of permanent and lavish homes where, as the author Mike Davis put it, “hyperbole meets the surf.”
On January 7, about when the wind knocked over the trash cans outside Flowers’s house, a small fire started in the hills just northeast of the Pacific Palisades. The Palisades once symbolized a halcyon era of Los Angeles: Middle-class residents who were savvy about real estate had been able to buy here, building a close-knit neighborhood perched between the mountains and the sea. “It is such an incredible place to live,” said Jill Lipsky, a schoolteacher and third-generation Palisades resident whose grandparents helped develop the community. She had grown up on a narrow road ending in a cul-de-sac abutting the hills. Her parents had lived on one corner, her grandmother across the street. With her husband, the photographer Jeff Lipsky, she’d moved into her grandmother’s place and later inherited her parents’ home, which she rented out. The income from that property helped the couple and their three children to live in a neighborhood that was increasingly sought after by L.A.’s elite.
The actor Martin Short moved here in 1984, renting a home right before he started working on Saturday Night Live. He bought a house in the neighborhood three years later. “Right away I knew this is where I wanted to live,” he told me. “You’re five minutes from the ocean or five minutes from the greatest hiking in the mountains imaginable.” Beyond that, he said, the Palisades offered a sense of safety: “There was only one way in and one way out.”
Over the years, the Palisades drew other residents seeking privacy — among them Tom Hanks, Jamie Lee Curtis, Larry Ellison, and JJ Redick, the Lakers’ current coach, who moved in prior to this NBA season. Although it became harder for the middle class to live here, the community remained close: Jill Lipsky remembered congratulating Curtis at a grocery store following her 2023 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Short, who grew up outside Toronto, was broadly aware of the fire danger. In 1993, a large wildfire had destroyed more than 270 homes in the Malibu area; from Short’s balcony, he’d seen it approaching the Palisades and prepared to evacuate his young children, until firefighters had contained it. But in the years since, the community had continued to grow into the fire-prone hills. While the Lipskys trimmed their yards — Jill didn’t like the look of overgrown brush — such efforts were not universally adopted. “That whole place is so tightly compact, with winding streets, and a community that loves the brush,” said Steven Gutierrez, a former wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service.
This winter, the land abutting the Palisades was overgrown with dry chaparral. On January 7, Short was on a balcony outside his bedroom when he first saw the flames. The years since the 1993 fire had taken from him, too — his wife had died in 2010 — but he was now a grandfather, and his two sons lived in the neighborhood. One of them called to say it was time to evacuate, and Short began retrieving family photo albums. This time, the firefighters couldn’t contain the blaze. Short drove down toward the Pacific Coast Highway, only to find the exits from his neighborhood were clogged. He remained in his car, where it took him more than an hour to cover a distance that would normally take five minutes. Others abandoned their vehicles and began to walk. The skies darkened, turning day into night.
In December, a German magazine published an essay called “Hollywood in Flammen,” by Stephen Pyne, an expert in the history of wildfire and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. “Southern California has the mightiest firefighting force in the world,” wrote Pyne, “yet under the worst conditions — and global warming ensures even these will get worse and multiply — it is helpless against the flames.” It was not widely circulated.
Together, the city and county fire departments employ about 8,000 people. Their efforts are supplemented by wildland firefighters with the U.S. Forest Service and Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency, which has 6,000 full-time firefighters from San Diego to the Oregon border.
Since the fires started, many residents have looked back on what happened, wondering what might have been saved and seeking to assign responsibility. It is as though, if a single culprit could be identified, the city might return to normal. Some events, however, are beyond human control.
On the morning of January 7, Mike Park, a 55-year-old captain with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, had just finished a 24-hour shift. Because of the wind warnings, he was sent back to work, manning a patrol vehicle out of Diamond Bar, 50 miles east of the Pacific Palisades. Once the fire ignited, around 10:30 a.m., he was dispatched to a staging area in the San Fernando Valley, where he was assigned to a strike team consisting of five patrol vehicles.
Patrol vehicles, or Type 6 engines, are the size of a large pickup. Park told me his carried just 150 gallons of water. Given their limitations, Park assumed he’d be assigned to look for hot spots — places where burned materials continue to smolder. But on the way to the Palisades, he was told he’d be protecting houses on the Pacific Coast Highway. “There were just no fire engines left,” he told me. His instructions, he said, were simple: “Try to do what we can.”
Los Angeles Wildfires
Pictures of a Ruined City
Large wildfires rely on fuel and wind. In the woods, wildland firefighters contain and redirect them by cutting firebreaks down to mineral soil. Once a fire reaches an urban street, it warrants a different approach, with engines, fire hoses, and lots of water. In both settings, aerial drops of fire retardant can help, but high winds make flying perilous, and arranging a drop in blustery conditions amounts to a $50,000 roll of the dice.
During the Santa Anas, embers can fly for miles, soaring and wriggling like fireworks. They can ignite lawns, hedges, or trees, and they are particularly dangerous when they enter an unprotected structure — say, by slipping underneath the Spanish-style tile roofing that is so adored in California. An hour after the Palisades fire started, it was no longer a wildland fire but a 200-acre urban one that was moving through billions of dollars’ worth of homes.
Park was sent to the fire’s western front in Malibu. Along the Pacific Coast Highway, he and 15 colleagues prepared to defend oceanfront homes. He chose two houses that were near a hydrant so he could refill the tank on his truck. After clearing debris from the front of the homes, he directed his team to move flammable material to back decks overlooking the sea. The smoke cloud drifted overhead, blocking the sun, and flames appeared on a ridge. The fire announced itself with a sound like a jet engine. Embers began to rain down — “Just tens of thousands of tiny little embers,” Park said. “It’s the most beautiful and most terrifying thing.”
Park lost one house and saved another; he permitted one of his colleagues to try to extinguish a fire in the upper story of an apartment building, then thought better of it and ran into the black smoke, retrieving the man. Then Park got word that some people might not have evacuated from a road called Rambla Pacifico, which is notorious among firefighters. The road runs up an overgrown canyon where homes are built into the vegetation. It lacks escape routes, and many homes don’t have adequate defensible space — the clearance around a building that allows firefighters to do their work.
When I asked Park how he felt about risking his life to save houses that had been built into thick brush, he paused, then said, “If that’s how people choose to live their life, I respect their choice to live that way. But also, keep your expectations tempered. You gotta accept the consequences of your own decisions.” He and his crew drove along Rambla Pacifico. “It was just fire 360 degrees all around,” he said. “It was above. It was below. The duff on the ground. There were power lines down that were on fire. The poles were on fire.”
By this time, Lipsky had evacuated from her house in the Palisades. She was at work when an administrator told her about the fire; before lunch, a friend sent her a photo of smoke near her house. She raced down Sunset Boulevard to retrieve her two dogs. She called her husband, who was out of town with their three children on a ski trip, reaching him when he was on a chairlift. “I’ve got the dogs!” he heard her yell.
In the days that followed, the Lipskys tried to understand why the firefighters were so outmatched. It’s true that in 100-mph winds, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft can’t fly. But some firefighters in the Palisades found that the hydrants they attached their hoses to ran dry. The Palisades are supplied by gravity-fed water infrastructure, and pumps that refill storage tanks above the community could not keep up. According to Janisse Quiñones, the chief executive of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the system was not designed for this kind of disaster. Preparing for it would have required foresight and significant investment long ago.
But the firefighters’ initial attack was also limited by decisions made by the Los Angeles Fire Department. The Palisades occupy city land, meaning the LAFD, rather than the county department, was initially responsible for fire suppression there. According to reporting in the Los Angeles Times, once forecasters predicted severe weather in the days before January 7, Kristin Crowley, the chief of the department, mobilized only nine additional fire engines across the city — the kind of resources that would normally deploy to one or two house fires.
As the fires continued to grow, state and county agencies rushed to send additional crews to L.A., and wildland firefighters from as far away as Montana began heading to California. (Though the city fire department has a $900 million budget, it has limited wildland firefighting capabilities, often relying on other agencies for work in rugged terrain.) The federal government employs about 18,000 wildland firefighters, many of them seasonal firefighters — meaning they’re laid off in the winter. The government is trying to shift to a year-round workforce, but progress has been slow, and in the past three years, many of the best-trained wildland firefighters have departed owing to poor pay and the hazards of the job, which range from elevated cancer risks to high rates of PTSD and suicidality. The departures have been particularly acute in California.
On January 8, Mike Garl, an engine captain on a Forest Service crew in Washington State and a union representative for wildland firefighters, started calling colleagues, trying to assemble a crew. According to Garl, his immediate supervisor gave him a green light, but officials in the regional office said there wasn’t adequate funding to rehire his crew. Garl was eventually able to find full-time firefighters to join him, but the delays prevented his engine from leaving the Seattle area until Friday, January 10. “The frustration for me is just that I couldn’t bring guys on and be here sooner,” he said. (The Forest Service did not respond to a request for comment.)
Since then, I’ve asked firefighters from multiple agencies what might have happened had the city, state, and federal governments blanketed L.A. in fire engines, at an astronomical expense to taxpayers, in advance of the fire. Not one has suggested that the fires of January 7 could have been prevented. In those winds, in drought conditions, fire cannot be stopped. But foresight — by both homeowners and government bodies — could likely have mitigated the damage and saved more houses and lives.
By the time fire broke out in Eaton Canyon, northeast of Altadena, on the evening of January 7, many of the neighborhood’s residents had been watching the disaster unfolding 30 miles away in the Palisades. When the utilities cut power in much of the area, Jerri Flowers decided to leave. She went to stay with her friend in Inglewood — but her son Lionel stayed behind.
Josh Block, a music producer, had boarded his dogs on Monday in anticipation of the winds. He’d grown up in Tornado Alley, in Texas, and the Santa Anas brought back bad memories. He and his wife had moved to Altadena the previous year, saving to buy a two-bedroom home set back from the road with a large garden. “It was really a dream that we were able to be there,” he said. “I had worked my whole life, and we said we will never spend this much money again; we’ll never be able to do this again.” They were expecting twins but were determined to stay put.
The actor Haley Joel Osment, who moved to an area near Eaton Canyon five years ago, had just returned home from shooting a film. He went for a walk in his yard and looked back at his house, a 1951 post-and-beam structure with large glass windows and skylights. “It had been built around and between about a dozen big oaks descending down a hillside,” he said. Bears sometimes rambled through the yard, and he often heard owls at night; it felt like he lived in the forest. After he let his dogs out into the yard, he saw a large plume of black smoke and a glow coming from the canyon. So he loaded up his dogs, passport, and family photos and went to his parents’ house, which was nearby.
Joseph Kindred, meanwhile, ate dinner and watched Netflix even as others were leaving. When the fire broke out, he’d seen it moving north — away from his place, it seemed — and figured he had a few hours before any urgent decisions were necessary. He’d seen wildfires before, watching them from his parents’ house on West Sacramento Street. But his new house was just a few miles from Eaton Canyon, at the foot of Mount Wilson, where the fire was running up the ridges. His fiancée, Rhiana, began packing go bags for their two daughters.
Kindred had moved to West Altadena with his parents as a child. The area had been a haven for Black families since the 1960s, a place where the redlining common in the rest of the city didn’t seem to apply. The community he found there “was basically like The Sandlot with a lot more Black children running around,” he said. When he was about 20, he started making videos. An older friend helped Kindred get an internship at an agency that had a relationship with Snoop Dogg, and he began working with the rapper. He learned to edit video and started his own production company, focusing on still photography and videos from tours; he traveled the world with Nas and Busta Rhymes and started going by his directing moniker, Jo Lenz.
By last year, he’d earned enough to buy a house with an accessory dwelling unit on Wapello Street. He and Rhiana, a manicurist, lived in the back unit with their daughters and got a tenant for the one out front. The house represented a generational kind of triumph: He had moved to an upscale part of town, even as the neighborhood he had grown up in rapidly gentrified. “You started seeing these hipster shops pop up,” he told me. Some friends in the Black community had inherited homes from parents and relatives, but they couldn’t afford the rising maintenance and insurance costs and were forced to sell. Increasingly, the buyers were white.
After Kindred’s family went to bed on January 7, he went for a walk around the block. The fire would turn away, he thought. He ran into a neighbor who suggested, hopefully, that it would not clear a city park. Around 3 a.m., he decided to take a 20-minute nap, then reassess. When he woke up, he stepped outside and was hit with burning embers mixed with the mulch he’d recently put down. He screamed to rouse Rhiana and their children, and the family walked outside into the storm. “Make sure you hold my hand,” he said. “We don’t have time to pack anything.” When they reached his truck, he saw Rhiana’s face was covered in ash and grime. They fled toward Pasadena, steering between embers and power lines.
Sliwinski’s unit with the Kern County Fire Department was not mobilized until January 8, so on the night the fire started, he and Su were at home with their 17-month-old baby. Like many people in Altadena, they did not receive an evacuation warning from the city; of the nearly 20 residents I interviewed, only three reported receiving one that first evening. Sliwinski took an electric scooter and rode toward Eaton Canyon, where he found a police officer and an L.A. County fire engine hooked up to a hydrant, waiting for the blaze to arrive. He returned to his block and climbed onto a neighbor’s roof to get a better look at the flames. By that point, Su had packed most of their essentials and gathered their two dogs. Together, the couple agreed that she would leave with the baby and he would try to save their house. “Don’t worry about me,” he said.
He hooked up a garden hose and began spraying down the roof and lawn. The streets were eerily empty, save for the occasional police siren and a couple of passing fire engines. By 11 p.m., embers had begun falling onto his lawn; soon afterward, he saw thick black smoke nearby. “That meant a house was on fire,” he told me. He dropped the hose and drove off, passing people running and cars abandoned in the street.
Amid the chaos, something seemed to be absent: a brigade of fire engines. Residents saw individual units, but with many resources exhausted, the county fire department and other agencies struggled to mount a defense in Altadena. In a recent community meeting, L.A. County’s fire chief, Anthony C. Marrone, said it would have taken 2,200 engines to put two on every block and acknowledged that firefighters were “competing with the Palisades fire.” By the morning of January 8, there were just 79 engines in the area. An assistant chief said the department had to choose between saving lives and homes, and it prioritized the former: “Fire and law enforcement were quickly overwhelmed and outgunned.”
One L.A. County firefighter who responded on January 7, Arby Fields, 33, was deployed along with a strike team near Lake Avenue, Altadena’s main thoroughfare, to protect condominiums and houses. Fields and about 12 colleagues arrived around 8 p.m. and, in his account, saved a few buildings while everything around them burned. But by about 11 p.m., his hose had gone slack. The fire hydrant had run dry.
The water eventually returned but with meager pressure. As the fire consumed more structures, Fields was directed to protect a house by himself. (Normally, departments send 30 people to fight a single house fire.) “Everybody was picking a house,” he said. “It was really a helpless feeling.” He sprayed water, but fierce winds blew the stream apart. “Everything I had been taught to suppress fire wasn’t working,” he said. The winds picked up, and he watched the two-story house in front of him burn to the ground in minutes. “I felt terrible,” he told me. “I lost it.” His captain instructed him not to let the next house burn. He stayed on the scene for 36 hours straight.
Later, when I asked an L.A. County firefighter if he’d seen other engines in the neighborhood, he said they hadn’t showed up in force until the third day. “I don’t even understand that,” he said. “I was wondering the same thing. I can’t answer that for you.”
Osment, who lost his home, as did his parents, voiced a concern I heard throughout Altadena: What accounted for the slow response? “Not to cast blame or anything, but I just want to know, when this is all investigated — was there a decision to just let the whole neighborhood go?”
Among Black residents, there was a familiar sense of being abandoned by the city. “I do have a lot of pride about home, but I don’t have a lot of trust in our officials,” said a 27-year-old artist named Barrington Darius. His aunt and uncle, Brenda and Donald Wright, had lost their house. Even as everything burned, Donald spent the night driving back and forth to Altadena, ferrying evacuees to safety.
On Wednesday morning, tens of thousands of Angelenos awoke not knowing whether they had homes to return to. Not only were the fires still burning; the winds continued to rip, and a new fire had started 25 miles from Altadena in Sylmar, in the San Fernando Valley. The Eaton fire in Altadena was now 2,000 acres; the Palisades was approaching 3,000 acres. Crowley, the city fire chief, assumed a defensive crouch, citing the overwhelming number of calls her department had responded to and saying, “These fires are stretching the capacity of emergency services to their maximum limits.”
Evacuation mandates were sent across the city. My aunt Meryl Streep received an order to evacuate on January 8, but when she tried to leave, she discovered that a large tree had fallen over in her driveway, blocking her only exit. Determined to make it out, she borrowed wire cutters from a neighbor, cut a car-size hole in the fence she shared with the neighbors on the other side, and drove through their yard to escape.
Nearly 200,000 people would receive evacuation orders as, in the coming days, new fires started near the Hollywood Hills and Calabasas. The whole city felt the threat of imminent displacement. Schools closed, traffic lights went dark amid power outages, and companies that provide water in Altadena and adjacent neighborhoods warned against drinking it. L.A.’s highways, normally full of traffic, became vast empty speedways.
The day after she left her home, Jerri Flowers awakened to a call from her daughter in Kansas City, who was concerned Lionel was not answering his phone. Lionel had been scheduled to work at FedEx the previous night, but his shift had been canceled. So Flowers took off, driving back home to check on her son. She tried a main entrance but was stopped by a police checkpoint. But she knew how to navigate backstreets, and before long she was pulling up to the corner lot on West Mariposa Street. She was astonished to find that, while a nearby block had been leveled, her home was still standing — as were three churches between her place and the carnage. “God stopped it,” she told me. Lionel was inside, sleeping; Flowers retrieved him and drove out as, around the corner, a house burned down.
Sliwinski made a similar drive. He hadn’t slept the night before, after reaching Su and their baby, and now he wanted to see his home. “It was the longest drive I’ve ever had,” he told me. “ Just driving there, I know all the homes half a mile before: ‘Oh, I know this house. This house is on fire, this house is gone. I know who lives here. This house is gone. This house is burning. This car is on fire. There’s a boat in the middle of the street.’”
At last, he arrived at his address, but there was nothing left. Their family home was gone, as was their neighbor’s house with the lush foliage. (She was uninsured, so Sliwinski and several others started a GoFundMe for her.) He didn’t immediately call Su or even stop his car. Instead, he drove around the block, his mind blank. Soon he found himself at a neighbor’s house, where he discovered a small fire. So he grabbed a bucket, got some water from a nearby swimming pool, and started putting out spot fires.
Joseph Kindred, meanwhile, got a text from a friend. His home, he learned, was gone. He quickly began helping friends with a food-and-clothing giveaway for his neighbors. Later, he set up a donation center at a Pasadena production studio owned by a relative. “Eventually, a cup is going to get half-empty no matter what,” he told me. “I assume it’s going to be half-empty, and the other half is up to me.”
Still, Kindred foresaw a larger struggle in store for the community once homeowners realized how small their insurance payments would be and predatory developers started showing up. “It’s not cheap, even when it’s not a crisis,” he said. “ We’re hoping that the government does something to allow people to stay here and give it a chance to rebuild.”
Law-enforcement officers cordoned off Altadena, looking for looters. On social media, Mandy Moore shared a GoFundMe page to support her brother-in-law, the Dawes drummer Griffin Goldsmith, and his pregnant wife after they lost their house in Altadena. But Moore’s effort drew accusations that she was exploiting her celebrity. (The GoFundMe for Goldsmith quickly raised more than $200,000, while similar campaigns for Kindred and Sliwinski pulled in about a tenth that much each.)
The fires took Kindred’s cameras and hard drives — a life’s work, including unseen footage of Nipsey Hussle — all gone. Haley Joel Osment lost 500 records and a piano his parents had given him when he turned 18; he told me his father was struggling with the loss of his home, having spent a decade sanding and refinishing the wood floors and painstakingly varnishing metal surfaces.
Annie Su regretted that, during the initial flight, she had neglected to grab a photo of Sliwinsky courageously fighting a fire after being hired as a 40-plus-year-old rookie. Su told me, “I took all the important documents,” but she wishes she had saved that memento: “his accomplishment to become a firefighter.”
Josh Block tried several times to get into Altadena, but he kept being stopped by police blockades. He eventually reached his place on January 11. When he walked up, all he saw was rubble and a chimney.
In the Palisades, the Lipskys were barred from returning home. Eventually, Jeff and his son rented electric bikes in Santa Monica and, in his words, “Mad Max–ed it in there,” sneaking past checkpoints. His block was ravaged. The home Jill had been raised in, and which they relied on for rental income, was gone. But across the street, one house was standing: their home. Jeff noticed that his garden hose had been stretched across the front patio. A neighbor, the Lipskys later learned, had used it to extinguish spot fires. He thinks that effort, along with Jill’s careful trimming of vegetation around the house, spared the place.
Inside, Jeff was able to retrieve his hard drives and cameras. But after leaving, he told me, “I don’t ever want to see my house again. It’s a toxic-waste dump.” A third property they owned — a Malibu rental they’d inherited from Jill’s father, a shoe salesman — also burned. The Lipskys fled north with their possessions in two cars as their kids tracked the destruction of their friends’ homes on social media. In that moment, Jeff said he had no desire to return to the Palisades: “My community is gone. It’s just a curse that my house is there.”
On January 12, medical examiners reported that a body had been found on Rambla Pacifico Street in Malibu, the overgrown road where Mike Park and his colleagues had gone to try to rescue people on the fire’s first night. The body is still unidentified. At least 11 people died in the Palisades fire; in the Eaton fire around Altadena, where evacuation warnings were sparse, the figure was 17. Citywide, more than 20 people remain unaccounted for.
So far, the fires have burned an area three times the size of Manhattan. It will take years to determine what they mean for a city that symbolizes, for so many, the apotheosis of national ambition. But if the spiritual impacts are difficult to predict, the economic ones seem more straightforward. Despite a regionwide price-gouging ban instituted by Governor Gavin Newsom, rental prices have gone up drastically — sometimes more than 40 percent for housing. A radio commercial advertised cash for homes.
Citizens often band together after a crisis, and that’s certainly been true in Los Angeles since January 7. But the collective goodwill inevitably fades as people and neighborhoods take divergent paths when reestablishing their lives. This period, after the loss but before the rebuilding, may be the one in which the lives sketched out here were brought closest together.
Following the fires, Block found a home to rent from musician friends. Kindred stayed with family, while Brenda and Donald Wright stayed with friends at the Pasadena Convention Center, which had been turned into a temporary shelter. Sliwinski and Su found a rental in Monrovia. And the Lipskys eventually secured a rental in Santa Monica — a place not far from the beach that, Jeff said, had a bare minimum of trees surrounding it. “It’s cramped, too small, and I feel very safe,” he said.
Martin Short’s home was spared, though one of his sons lost his house nearby. Short told me, with resolve, “I will definitely stay in my home.” Haley Joel Osment planned to rebuild on the same plot he’d fallen in love with in Altadena. Block’s home was insured, and he hoped to rebuild as well. “I have a bit of a fighter’s instinct,” he said.
The Wrights’ future was less certain. They had been dropped by their insurer last year, and since then, they’d been covered by lender-placed insurance, which provides significantly less coverage. Flowers wanted to arrange a prayer gathering among her neighbors to offer thanks for being spared.
The recovery had its absurdities: One man who lost his home wrote about canceling his internet service, only to have Spectrum demand his (vaporized) modem back. A few days after the fire, Kindred made it back to his house to find nothing except a new metal gate he’d installed and Rhiana’s Tesla, which sat intact under the unburned pine tree. Jeff Lipsky received a call from the laundry company that owned the machines in the family’s rental in Malibu and wanted to discuss a contract. “I’m like, ‘Your washer-dryer melted into a rock,’” he told me.
Immediately following the fire, Jill Lipsky had started to entertain thoughts of the Pacific Northwest — “It rains, you know?” But she now found her mind returning to the place where she’d been raised: “The Palisades will always be my home.” But like Sliwinski and Su, the Lipskys were underinsured. Both couples began monitoring news of developing class-action lawsuits in case litigation might offer a route to reclaiming what they had lost.
Marissa Christiansen, the executive director of the Climate and Wildfire Institute, who lives in L.A., told me that the city has an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild in a more resilient manner with denser urban housing and wide firebreaks abutting the mountains. “I do not think we should be building back in the same way and with the same footprint we did previously,” she said. “I think what we can learn here is that we are guests in this landscape.”
It is possible that environmentally minded leaders might convene citizen groups in the Palisades and Altadena to discuss how to avoid repeating the cycle of destruction. But doing so would require persuading the Palisades’s wealthiest to live differently — to not just purchase what the novelist Bob Shacochis once called “the soothing blindness of happiness.” It would require difficult conversations with members of the Black community who have fought, over generations, for a place to flourish. And it would require upending the animating economic urge of a city built on real-estate speculation and ever-outward growth.
There is, of course, a darker path: Developers buy from fire-displaced families and sell the land to the wealthy, who can afford to build fire-hardened homes, pay close attention to the vegetation in their yards, and, perhaps, form private firefighting armies by hiring away underpaid government employees. In the Palisades, one area was conspicuously preserved: a high-end shopping center, developed by the former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, that included Yves Saint Laurent and Erewhon stores. As the fire bore down, Caruso had hired a team of private firefighters to protect it.
“The default setting is more air tankers, helicopters, and fire engines,” Stephen Pyne told me. “The alternative requires changing how we organize communities and what we build with. It’s a huge investment in not just money but social and political capital, and no one has been willing to make that yet. It’s like school shootings: You think, Okay, this time, everyone quit shouting and let’s have a real conversation about how to deal with it. This one does seem different. People are starting to talk about this as California’s 9/11. And it may be. It could be an example for other communities.” But, he said, he wasn’t holding his breath.
A few days ago, Kindred took a drive to see the wreckage of his home. Many people I’ve talked to compared seeing the ruins of their houses to seeing the bodies of the dead at wakes — though horrible, it offered closure. Kindred’s view was slightly different. Being back home was strangely invigorating. “The things are gone,” he said, “but my resources aren’t. It’s the weirdest reassurance I’ve ever had.”
Like many in his community, he harbored suspicions about the motivations of both developers eyeing Altadena and anyone who wanted to change its fundamental nature. “This is my home forever,” he said. His emotions, he said, were a strange mix: “It’s total devastation, but I’m 100 percent confident in the future. I gotta wear it like a shield.”
He still owns land up against the mountain, he said, and he would rebuild. A few days later, a new fire started northwest of the San Gabriels. Within hours, it was 5,000 acres and growing.
This story has been updated to correct a Mike Davis quote.
More on the Los Angeles Wildfires
- Pictures of a Ruined City
- How Is Hollywood Impacted by the L.A. Wildfires?
- Will the L.A. Fires Sink Bass, Newsom – and the Olympics?
