Tuesday afternoon, my phone lit up with a text from the Los Angeles Fire Department: “Those in the Palisades area are evacuating now.”
While I work in New York City, I have a home in the Pacific Palisades in the city of LA. It is where I raised my children and where some of my best family memories were made. For me it is the most special place on earth.
I immediately called my neighbor Andrew and asked him to get my ‘Go Box’ (important documents, a few religious icons and paintings) from the house.
Natural disasters are a fact of life in Southern California. We are always ready to run. But we always went back to our sweet grid of a neighborhood. These were the Palisades! Nothing bad could happen here.
Then I called Kathy, one of my best friends, who lives nearby. We met in the Palisades Bluffs when we were big and pregnant twenty years ago.
We heard that nearby buildings and shops had already been consumed by flames. Her home is high on a cliff above a caravan park that was reportedly on fire. Her house has alarms on the windows, so she knows immediately if they are broken by the heat.
Another friend said Palisades High School was flooded. Pali High is just two blocks from my house.
Another friend, Trish, was told by her neighbor to expect the worst. He had just clambered up a sandy embankment, dodging police and firefighters, hoping to catch a glimpse of his house. But it was no more – consumed by vicious orange flames and smoke.
Tuesday evening, my phone lit up with a text from the Los Angeles Fire Department: “Those in the Palisades area are evacuating now.”
Natural disasters are a fact of life in Southern California. We are always ready to run. But we always went back to our sweet grid of a neighborhood.
On Tuesday night, billionaire developer Rick Caruso cleaned out Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (who he ran against in 2022 and lost) and all the idiots in charge of the city who failed to diffuse the ticking time bomb that caused this inferno caused.
“It’s a disaster to the hundredth degree… it’s devastating,” Caruso raged. “There’s no water coming out of the hydrants… we have a city on fire and we have no resources to put out fires. This is a disaster waiting to happen. What is predictable can be prevented.’
Overgrown dry brush, empty fire hydrants, congested evacuation routes and no plans for the ‘what if?’ catastrophe became a ‘what now?’ nightmare.
Kathy and I downloaded a few different fire tracking apps: Watch Duty, Firespot, Cal Fire. The apps showed a circle of fire that surrounded our street like a noose. Gruesome videos flooded social media showing abandoned cars along evacuation routes and beloved landmarks reduced to unrecognizable ash.
Neighbor John, a builder, who decades ago founded a nice craftsman for his young children, was the first to realize that his house had burned down. His life’s work fell apart within minutes.
Kathy was next. A friend crept down the street on a bicycle and took a video of her house, reduced to a chimney and two Mongolian trees. She was once assured that the succulents her husband had so carefully planted in their garden over the years would act as nature’s firewall and that she would be safe. The heat was too intense.
“It’s all gone,” she told me. “All the footprints and art projects, Eagle Scout medals and baby blankets. Everything from my father. It’s burned. It’s ash. It’s nothing.’
She broke the news to her son, who flew back to college the day before the fires. “I’m so sorry,” she told him through tears, “all I got from your room was the sweater your coach crocheted for you and two stuffed animals from your bed.”
“That’s okay, Mom. That’s all I would have taken,” he said. That absolutely broke my heart.
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso took out Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (pictured above with California Governor Newsom) and all the idiots in charge of the city who failed to diffuse the ticking time bomb that caused this inferno .
My girls, 15 and 19, and I sat transfixed in front of the TV – switching back and forth between weather and news channels – desperate for a glimpse of our neighborhood. We made chocolate chip cookies, something familiar and soothing, while the world they knew burned. Local reporters on the street, with gas masks on and annoyance in their eyes, begged, “Where are the firefighters?”
I lay awake most of the night checking the apps for everything, good or bad, texting neighbors, praying for a miracle and watching. And by morning there was still no word – and the fires still raged unabated.
I kicked myself for not taking more baby photos, my grandmother’s cross, my grandfather’s army saber from World War I. Why didn’t I think to pack those irreplaceable things?
I contacted Fox News colleague Jonathan Hunt, who lived just a few blocks from my house, and asked him to check the house and save my souvenirs. He and his producer Nikki bravely raced there and got everything on my shortlist within two minutes.
I prayed all day that Trish’s house would somehow make it. She is a single mother who works as a photographer and takes pictures at the local schools to make ends meet. Her house is all she had.
The app said it was spared, but said the same about her neighbor’s house which was in ruins. I called her, hoping that God would smile on one of my friends. But again, not today.
“It’s gone,” she said. ‘I can’t breathe because I don’t know how to rebuild this, I don’t even know where to start. My daughter doesn’t have a school, the Palisades simply doesn’t exist.”
From this moment on my house is safe. But it’s a sickening feeling to be so relieved and so heartbroken at the same time.
People come back. New memories can be made. But as long as we are led by incompetent cowards who cannot predict or prevent tragedies, we will have no choice but to start over… far, far away.