Peter Savodnik: ‘Everything Is Gone’

In the wake of the disaster that will be known collectively as the Los Angeles Fire but was really three or four or even five big fires pressing in on the city from the north and east, we can now start taking stock of the size of this catastrophe.

Some 36,000 acres have burned, or 56 square miles, more than the footprint of Miami.

Nearly 10,000 structures, both homes and businesses, were destroyed by the two biggest fires, the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire. The final figure will undoubtedly be higher.

Over 100,000 people have been evacuated.

AccuWeather estimates that the economic damage will likely be between $52 billion and $57 billion, making it the costliest fire in U.S. history.

Although only 11 people are known to have died, President Joe Biden said on Friday that “There are a lot of people still unaccounted for. We don’t know where they are.”

Behind the numbers, of course, are the people who lived in the neighborhoods that burned to the ground. Most of them have lost everything, but none have given up hope. Here are four stories of the fire from Angelenos who lived through it.

Meghan Daum, 54, Altadena

There were no phone alerts. This seems hard to believe, since the phone lets out a screeching alarm for anything these days, including when an elderly person wanders away from home—a “Silver Alert.” But there was nothing, at least nothing that I received. On Tuesday when the winds picked up, I took some videos of my enormous Newfoundland dog, Hugo, sitting in the front yard, his fur blowing dramatically and his body standing firm even in 60 mph winds. A few hours later I saw there were deadly fires in the Palisades, some 25 miles away, and felt badly for posting fun videos on Twitter, though not badly enough to take them down, since they were getting a lot of likes. Around 6:30 I learned of a fire in Eaton Canyon, a few miles to my east. I learned of it on Twitter.

There were still no phone alerts so I didn’t think too much of anything until I walked into the front yard around 7:15. On the other side of my across-the-street neighbor’s house, I could see flames at the top of the canyon. Another neighbor told me they were still far enough away and not to worry about it too much. We just don’t get fires over here. By now, I was following the chat in a WhatsApp group for people who use the dog park in the neighborhood. The winds seem to be blowing in the other direction, someone wrote. So that’s good.

I live in Altadena (it seems strange to put that in the present tense but even stranger not to, so we’ll stay in the present). It’s a foresty enclave at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Pasadena. The elevation is about 1,500 feet, the population is about 42,000, the racial makeup is relatively diverse. There’s always been a significant black population. Altadena has many beautiful homes, but even more modest bungalows. Coyotes and owls and flocks of green parrots and even wild peacocks roam and fly about, even in the daytime. Last spring, a pair of red-tailed hawks built a nest in the giant pine tree in front of my house, and I often found the soft baby feathers of their chicks in my yard. It’s not unusual for bears to come down from the mountains and nose around in yards or even dip into swimming pools. The area is equestrian zoned, and at least once a week I heard a clop-clop and looked outside and saw my neighbor riding by on his horse, which he kept in his backyard.

My house was less than 1,000 square feet, an unfancy two-bedroom, one-bath cottage that I rented from a woman who was renting a place across the canyon on the other side of the city. She’d raised her two kids in that house and was now putting the youngest through college. My favorite thing about the house was the woodburning fireplace. It gets cold in Altadena in the winter—I awoke one morning last year to see snow all the way down to the bottom of the mountains—and building a fire at night was an activity I classified under genuinely simple joy, which I’m sorry to say I probably haven’t had enough of these past few years.

Another thing I loved about the house was that despite all the wildlife and the whole enchanted ambience of it, I could still walk to a coffee shop and to a strip of family-owned businesses in under ten minutes. This neighborhood is not a far-flung precinct of wealth in a high-risk fire zone. It’s a place with probably as many working-class people as affluent people. The walk into town took me down a block lined with rickety apartment complexes emanating with the smell of cigarette smoke and general life chaos.

What I am saying is that this is not a neighborhood made up entirely of people who’ve gotten lucky in life. It is made up of ordinary people who’ve been lucky enough to find their way to this neighborhood.

When I decided to leave on Tuesday night, I took barely anything with me. There were still no alerts, so grabbing a bunch of stuff felt like overkill. It felt dramatic and even insulting, as if I were cosplaying an emergency while so many others were in an actual emergency. I have since learned that this is how just about everyone in the neighborhood felt when they were packing up. We just don’t get fires around here. So I grabbed an extra pair of pants and an extra sweater and some dog food and loaded Hugo into the car. At the last moment, I grabbed a black and white cowhide totebag that a friend had made just for me. Plus a pair of pointy dress shoes that I happened to know had been discontinued by the designer. Around 8:30 p.m. I backed out of the driveway and headed to a friend’s house about ten miles away in the city. The flames were visible in the canyon as I drove through Pasadena, and there was some traffic but nothing crazy. After all, there were no alerts.

Sometime later that night, or probably very early the next morning, most of the neighborhood burned to the ground. I learned this when my landlady called around 9 a.m. from the site, which I’m amazed she’d been able to get to. The house she’d been renting in the other canyon had been lost in the Palisades fire. Later she sent me this photo, which, like all the photos from these fires, looks like it was generated by AI. Every single house on the block, on both sides of the street, had burned to rubble. The only thing left standing are the chimneys.

Rebecca Diamond, 28, Pacific Palisades

Until this week, my whole family lived within a five-minute drive from each other in Pacific Palisades: my grandparents’ home, my aunt’s home, and my mother’s home. On Tuesday, everyone was instructed to evacuate.

We had done this before multiple times, including in 2019, when I was working in the mail room at United Talent Agency. Back then, we packed up everything and, ultimately, there was no fire.

This time, none of us packed anything, figuring no conflagration would make it past the highlands. My mom could not find Hank, one of our cats, and had to leave him behind. It took her hours in the panicked traffic to drive the short distance to my apartment in Santa Monica.

We went to bed on Tuesday with hope that everything would be fine. But on Wednesday morning, a neighbor called my grandmother to let her know that my grandparents’ house was no longer there. I dropped to my knees. By the end of the day, we learned that my mother and aunt’s houses were both gone too.

In 1968, my grandparents moved into their house at the very end of Via De La Paz, overlooking the ocean. It was so beautiful that someone would knock on their door every week to ask if they were interested in selling.

That’s the house my mom and aunt were raised in. They went to Pali Elementary, just down the road, which is also gone now.

It’s where my aunt got married, where my sister Noa and I hosted our pre-proms, and where I threw my 16th and 18th birthday parties. I lived in that house when I was in college at USC. My diploma was there, hanging on the wall.

Every Thursday, my cousin Aaron and I would have dinner with our grandparents. We’d usually order sushi from our favorite spot, Pearl Dragon. I heard from a friend that it’s visibly intact. I hope it hasn’t been damaged by the flames.

My grandparents’ house was everything to all of us at different points of our lives. Now, nothing remains.

On Thursday, Aaron and I went to examine the ruins. We couldn’t access the area by car, so a friend in Santa Monica loaned us bikes and we donned masks and brought trash bags.

We biked past the beloved restaurant where my grandmother and I have brunch every Sunday, Cafe Vida. My grandparents probably ordered from there three times a week. Now, it’s just debris.

What remains of my family’s homes is rubble. Pieces of art from all over the world, cherished heirlooms, every piece of clothing and jewelry, all of it is gone. We’re still hoping that we’ll find the safe somewhere.

At the pile of debris where my aunt and uncle’s house stood before, we spent time trying to salvage anything. I found a tiny cup that they used to put olive oil or soy sauce into.

Biking around the devastation, I breathed in so much smoke that I still felt dizzy hours after leaving. Days later, I’m still coughing.

My family and I are in shock. But we love our tight-knit community in the Palisades. We want to stay and rebuild.

—as told to Isaac Grafstein

Emily Miller, 42, Pacific Palisades

It started at 10:34 on Tuesday morning. I have the time-stamped photo of the cloud of smoke that seemed far away. I took it from our house and sent it to Nate, my husband. “Should I not go to this meeting?” I asked him. It’ll be fine, he replied.

I was worried about the baby, who’s 16 months old, and was with the nanny. The meeting was in Santa Monica, but 15 minutes into it, I was getting tons of WhatsApps messages about the fire. I decided to go home.

I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, and tried to make a right on Temescal Canyon Road, my normal route, but it was blocked. Sunset Boulevard was blocked too. There hadn’t been any emergency warnings or mandatory evacuations at this point. I told a cop, “I have to get to my son, you have to let me get to my son.” And he said, “You can’t go to Sunset.”

So I went back down the PCH and decided to park the car by the side of the road and then walk up the highway. My plan was to hike up to a trail that led to our house, which is on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

I started walking up PCH—the trail was less than a mile away. The beach was on the other side of the highway, to my left; the cliffs, to my right. But there was a lot of traffic, and people were all looking at their phones, racing to get home or get away. A woman almost hit me, and I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to die getting hit by a car.

So I hitchhiked, which I’d never done. Ten cars went by, but then this lovely, older man pulled over, and I explained I literally needed to go just a few hundred feet to avoid getting killed.

He deposited me at the base of the trail, and I hiked my way up the cliff, and I finally got to our street. Everything was fine—the fire hadn’t gotten there yet.

When I saw the nanny, she said, “The baby is taking a nap, we should let him finish taking his nap. I replied, “The baby is not finishing his nap.”

Then I got the keys to our car, which was in the driveway, and the baby and I got in my car, and the nanny followed us in hers. Saving our house wasn’t something I was thinking about. It was crazy to me that anything could happen to it. It was a wonderful neighborhood, and the fire seemed far away.

We started to head down to PCH. Traffic was bad now—just this endless line of cars. You could see smoke everywhere. But no one appeared to be trying to save our neighborhood.

It took us two and a half hours to get down to PCH, but we got there.

After that, we couldn’t go back to the house.

By Wednesday morning, our house was gone. It was 2,100 square feet, and it had been built in 1947, and it was split-level. We loved it. Almost every house on the block is gone.

People always say you never know what you have until you don’t have it, but we knew what we had. A week before, we had 80 people over for our Hanukkah party, and everyone was in the house and in the backyard, around the fire pit. There was pizza, and the kids from the neighborhood were playing, and we showed movies on a projector, and it was perfect. It was the kind of place where my daughter could walk two houses down and play with her friend. It was like going back in time. It was perfect.

—as told to Peter Savodnik

Carrie Jordan, 52, Altadena

My husband and I were in Denver on a work trip—we recently started a business training dogs—and we heard about it via text. My mom was staying with our two daughters at the house. My sister was reaching out to her, my brother was reaching out, and they were telling my mom, “You have to get out.” This was Tuesday night.

By about 11:30 p.m., the wind was so strong, the girls, our daughters, were starting to get really freaked out, so they all just decided, “Okay, let’s just leave,” and they went to my mom’s house. She’s in Highland Park, about twenty minutes to the south. We cut our work trip short.

Anyway, they grabbed their stuff—my 12-year-old left without her shoes, but she brought an outfit or two. Our seven-year-old wore her shoes, but brought not one stitch of clothing. When I opened the bag she had packed, it was just 100 percent stuffed animals. I thought, Okay, you have no underwear, but you have all your stuffies.

My daughters thought they might get some of their stuff back. My husband, too. He wants to find his grandfather’s ring. It was really two rings fused together—his grandfather’s ring and his grandmother’s, after she passed away. It was my husband’s wedding ring. He’s hoping to find it. It has an inscription on it. But the house is gone. Every house on our block is gone. Everything was just flattened.

I’m generally an optimistic person, and I’m not super attached to stuff. But we had already renovated the house twice. It was from the 1940s, and it had a lot of charm, and by charm I mean it wasn’t functional for a family of four. It was a two-bedroom, one-bathroom when my husband bought it in 2008.

We were married in 2012. Then we had our first daughter, and we could still make it work. And then we had our second daughter. So, five years ago, we gutted the house down to the studs and redid the inside. But we stayed inside the existing footprint. Then, as our daughters got a little older, we added a room in our garage. We finished that a year ago.

The whole thing, the two renovations, cost a little more than a half-million dollars, and we were happily living there and planned on living there indefinitely. We love the area. We both grew up in Altadena.

I am sad about my diaries. I started my diaries when I was 12—I’m 52 now. Anyway, I used to keep the diaries, and they were filled with all the BS that a kid goes through about crushes and life and whatever. I was hoping to share them with my daughters, and every time they would yell at me, “You don’t know what I’m going through,” I’d say, “Hmm—let’s look at page 63, paragraph 2, and explore all my inner thoughts from that time, which are really funny and horrible and cool to have and be able to look through.”

But they’re gone. Everything is gone.

—as told to Peter Savodnik

Peter Savodnik is a journalist, author and senior editor at The Free Press. This article was sourced from The Free Press HERE.