Author’s Note: Imagine trying to overcome unprecedented wildfires in which entire California communities are destroyed even as the Trump administration trashes all vital safety nets and shrugs off climate change, the ultimate cause of the disasters. Welcome to the future in MAGA America.
If you’re looking for the worst possible place to mount an emergency evacuation under crisis conditions, Pacific Palisades, California would rank near the top of the list.
I speak from experience. I was one of the last CIA officers to be airlifted out of war-ravaged Saigon on April 29, 1975. And I beat a hasty retreat from the Palisades with my family in tow during the first hours of the inferno of January 7.
Both escapes were more harrowing than I care to remember – and often for the same reasons, a lack of sufficient evacuation planning and early warning bells and a shortage of ground-level personnel to handle simple traffic control.
In case you don’t know the area first-hand, the Palisades, in its pre-fire prime, was an ultra-upscale community of 20,000, nestling comfortably up against the Santa Monica Mountains like a reclusive dowager with a well-developed superiority complex.
It was home to my own very down-to-earth 22-year-old daughter Paige and her valiant 63-year-old mom, who prefers to be identified simply as June.
Thanks to overly protective town planners dating back to the 1920’s there had never been an easy way to get into and out of the Palisades unless you owned a helicopter or wind glider. The one main artery, the last leg of storied Sunset Boulevard, arrives out of a tony LA neighborhood to the east, meanders through Palisades Village proper, and dead ends at Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) next to the beach nearly three miles to the west.
Even in the best of times, traffic along sections of Sunset in either direction could suddenly become spasmodic and accordion-like for no good reason. The jam-ups were particularly acute in the Village itself, a patch of good taste and bad, high-end retail stores intermingled with struggling mom-and-pop operations, two massive groceries, three gas stations, a Tesla recharging center and a car wash. On any given day, maddened minivans and adrenalized muscle cars dueled for running room amid these staples of suburban living — and never so frenziedly as during the daily rush-hour periods, eight-to-ten and four-to-six.
God help you if you ever got caught out in one of these free-for-alls and needed to get somewhere fast, like an ER unit. Your best hope was just to jump out of your car and run.
If you were willing to endure eccentric traffic lights and merciless intersections, there were ways to avoid Sunset altogether and jump down to PCH in less time than a fatal heart attack.
One of these, a still viable little two-laner, splits off from Sunset just east of the Village, creeps past gated mega-mansions typically flush with pretense and flammable foliage, and slides into a terrifying four-way intersection at PCH.
Its parallel westside counterpart, Temescal Canyon Road, spills out of a parking lot next to a mountainous recreation area dear to hikers, cuts across Sunset, morphs into four-lanes, sideswipes Palisades High School, which my daughter once attended, and finally dumps into PCH about a mile away.
During the first day of the fires, Temescal served briefly as an escape route for evacuees, then became a roam zone for wind-swept embers and burning debris looking for something to incinerate.
My daughter’s alma mater was an early casualty, part of its campus quickly reduced to a hellscape of gnarled, flame-savaged girders,
As an integral part of LA (not a separate incorporated town), the pre-fire Palisades imported cops from an LAPD station seven miles away via Sunset, with only one patrol car assigned permanently to the community.
In normal times, the shortage of local law enforcement brought out a certain libertarian bravado among many locals – and served as a beckoning finger to bank-robbers, looters and anyone who might want to make a quick getaway without being noticed. On Day One of the inferno, this mindset gave way to a more singularly focused one. I wouldn’t label it “every-man-for-himself,” but it was close: an obsessive determination to get your very own family to the head of the evacuation lines.
As per long-standing protocols, two on-site fire stations serviced the community, one of them located inside the Village itself, the other plunked on a corner far down Sunset, near its outlet to PCH.
The equipment and fire trucks at each station were always spit-shined and ostensibly up to date.
But they were only as deployable as traffic on Sunset allowed.
And that, dear reader, is why everything went to hell in a hand basket once the flames arrived.
Theoretically, in any fire emergency, the LAFD can summon helicopters and modified aircraft to drop water and chemical suppressants onto the blaze. But in this firestorm, ferocious Santa Ana winds grounded many such flights, especially during the predawn hours of the second day.
There was another major handicap, this one involving topography. Since much of the Palisades sits atop an elevated plateau, with many of the priciest homes clinging to lofty hillsides, it takes highly pressured water to keep fire hydrants fully primed and functioning.
Guess what happens when every building in sight requires full-volume hose-downs amidst hurricane-force winds?
Hydrants lose pressure and dribble dry, and heavily engaged firefighters must draw directly from the trunk lines running from three locally dedicated water basins, thus further diminishing supply and pressure readings.
As backup, to supplement the flow, firefighters can bring in mobile water tankers as happened in the Palisades and four other fire-ravaged communities in the far-flung LA area.
But maneuvering such equipment into position can become ever more arduous as the flames approach, and the crews’ own exposure increases exponentially until retreat is the only alternative to being burned alive.
What happens then?
What happens is emblemized by the Palisades fire.
Call it Nature’s vengeance, the deadly upshot of climate change. Its hallmark is rapidly intensifying multi-front wildfires fed by unprecedented winds whipping through multiple sections of a community all at once, then quickly engulfing other communities, each new extension further straining resources designed to handle individual structural fires only, not entire regions going up in flames.
During the Vietnam war Peter Paul and Mary immortalized a mournful lament about lives lost and those who bore responsibility. It ended with the aching refrain: When will they ever learn?
Those words ring as true today about the climate crisis and those enabling it, fact-averse billionaires whose devotion to fossil fuels is driving global temperatures to the point of instant combustion.
When will they ever learn?
Escape – January 7
On the night of January 6 or perhaps in the wee hours of the next morning, the first major sparks of the Palisades fire dropped somewhere on a sparsely populated hillside east of Malibu, possibly behind a private residence on Piedra Morada Drive, which overlooks a heavily wooded arroyo.
At the time I was snoozing peacefully in June’s downstairs guest room as she and my daughter, Paige, chased post-holiday dreams in newly renovated quarters upstairs.
A few hours later, at about 8:15 am, a hiker detected a smoky odor near Skull Rock on Temescal Ridge Trail only a quarter of a mile, as the crow flies, from where we were.
By then we were dawdling over breakfast – under clear skies.
But by mid-morning, from June’s front window we could make out a sickly yellow pall congealing above the Pacific. On Marquez Avenue, the side street just below the hillside cul de sac where June’s elegant home had aged gracefully for seventy years, traffic was thickening.
Shortly after 10 am, while I was thumbing my Samsung searching for news, a spry 89-year-old neighbor banged on June’s front door to ask if we’d heard the advisories about an approaching firestorm and the need to prepare for an evacuation.
Since experience and age have made me a slow-burn alarmist, I brushed aside the old guy’s queries as an addled imagination getting ahead of itself. But an hour later my mood and the facts changed dramatically. Paige and her mom returned from a reconnaissance of a nearby cross street and reported roiling flames and smoke closing in on a neighbor’s house just one small hillside away. A short while later, at 12:07, a mandatory evacuation order from fire and police authorities pinged on June’s iPhone.
That did it. Paige ducked into the backyard to say a prayer over the grave of my cherished shih tzu Maltese, Peanut, who had succumbed to cancer last summer. Clearly visible above the flanking hedgerow, another wedge of flame was slicing into the middle distance.
The three of us then headed for the curb out front, and after trying unsuccessfully to persuade our aging neighbors to join us, piled into my old Highlander, June sliding into the backseat and Paige assuming the co-pilot’s position, with her GPS app at the ready.
I then grabbed the wheel and launched us towards the only available exit, the small cross street at the end of the block where the two of them had spotted the approaching fires. Pausing only briefly at the turn, I swung a hard left, away from the flames, blew past some kids who were using their iPhones to preserve memories of the spectacle, and then hung left again onto now traffic-choked Marquez Avenue.
Two blocks ahead lay a feeder lane into Sunset. I figured our best bet was to bear east at the adjacent intersection and follow Sunset all the way to Temescal Canyon Road, the nearest and fastest access route to PCH.
But twenty minutes later we had barely moved a car’s length, and not a cop anywhere in sight to break the logjam. Paige, checking her GPS, reported traffic movement on lower Sunset. Praying she had it right, I wheeled the car around, sped west on Marquez, miraculously finding an open lane. It carried me all the way to an alternate exit, a three-way crossroads feeding into lower Sunset.
Edging past a Tesla truck whose bulk partially concealed what lay ahead, I slid into the outer westbound lane, hoping to ride it straight down to Sunset’s own terminus at PCH. But barely had I traveled a few yards before I realized, to my horror, that traffic in both directions was fusing into a solid mass.
Fearful of being hemmed in, I nudged towards the center divider so I could swing around and head back the other way if and when the crush loosened. Outraged motorists honked, howled and showed me the finger.
A short distance ahead, Sunset tipped into a gentle incline, a meandering stretch of roadway that led past the second Palisades fire station and the single turnoff from the Highlands, an affluent mountainside community where smoke was already crawling along the ridgeline
As I inched towards the slope, Paige, whose instincts and eyesight are better than mine, suddenly cried out that fire had just leapt ahead of us. June gasped in alarm. In the same instant, a wave of flame rose up out of the Highlands and broke towards the fire station a half mile ahead.
Jerking the wheel, I swerved left through the opposing lanes, bounced off the curb, and pulled into a U-Turn — only to find us again stuck in place.
A fire truck trapped somewhere in the mire wailed incessantly, but no one had any room to give space.
For a moment I had the overwhelming impulse just to ditch the car and launch us into a desperate sprint. But in the same instant I noticed a tiny road off to my right with a “No Outlet” sign posted at the entrance.
June saw it too and urged me to take it. It so happened that her eight-year-old grandson had recently speculated to her that this was a shortcut to the beach.
Paige, keying off her GPS, insisted it was.
I hesitated, not wanting to get us sandbagged in some flame-ridden back alley.
But then abruptly, as if by a miracle, four police cars with sirens screaming loomed up out nowhere, cut across Sunset in front of us and zipped into the little roadway.
I hit the gas and followed.
In a breath, we were barreling down a deserted two-laner so shrouded in foliage there was no telling where we were headed. On a count of fifteen, even as I was about to jam the brakes, we shot into a clearing.
It looked, at first glimpse, like some wildcat developer’s dream gone bust, abandoned vehicles in various states of repair sitting at odd angles to seemingly distressed bungalows. But just a few yards in, the road abruptly slipped into a downhill turn, and I eased into it. Seconds later a police cruiser lunged up from the opposite direction –the cop at the wheel wearing a thousand-yard stare — and swept past without breaking speed. I felt a prickle of dread, expecting to see flames leaping after him. But just as abruptly, the concourse flattened out, emptying us into the parking lot of a swanky private beach club.
Catch your breath, let your heart settle, I kept telling myself. I had once crashed a dance party here, and though the clubhouse was now deserted, I remembered that a little connector lane extended to the beachfront. Paige’s GPS confirmed this.
Scanning the parking area, I found the outlet and beelined for it. In moments I was coaxing my Highlander into an intersection on PCH.
Across the way, rollers undulated along the break-line amidst drifting smoke.
Paige and her mom were, in Paige’s words, “freaking out” from frayed nerves. I felt positively ill.
PCH was nearly deserted, at least in this particular section, perhaps because barricades had been thrown up further north near Topanga Canyon or Malibu.
I slipped into a southbound lane and made for the 10 Freeway into Los Angeles where I had an apartment.
A half mile on, I passed through an intersection manned by the first traffic control personnel I’d seen all day. It was the junction of Temescal Canyon Road and PCH, my original destination at the start of this hellish odyssey.
Lines of idling vehicles extended all the way up Temescal towards Sunset and Paige’s former High School, each car or minivan packed with evacuees, each driver waiting to be beckoned forward.
Part of this corridor and the school itself would soon be stalked by flames. So too, the “private” little escape route we had followed to safety.
Meanwhile at various other choke points, including the lower section of Sunset where we had nearly stalled out, people who had waited too long were abandoning their vehicles and running for their lives, with fire licking at their heels and too few police or traffic controllers to provide help.
Once we’d cleared the McClure Tunnel, June phoned our aging neighbors and, finding them still at home, begged them to head for our “No Outlet” escape route without delay. They would flee much later that afternoon, via Temescal and PCH.
Waiting for Word – January 7–25
After the mass evacuation of the Palisades on January 7, it took firefighters three days to bring the mega-blaze under control, and another two weeks before the area was deemed safe enough for sustained civilian visits.
In the meantime, time lost all shape for those of us who had fled. Sleep became a stranger. From January 7 to the 25th, my family and I lived in a kind of purgatory, delivered from the flames but never free of them.
The first several nights, Paige and her mom sheltered in my cramped one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. Paige was battling a worsening kidney infection. June teetered on the edge of exhaustion. From the foyer of my building, we could see a fiery glow above the Hollywood Hills and wondered if we might soon be on the run again.
Disaster coverage was nonstop, but the reporting was muddled, offering little clarity about what was happening along the fire lines. The earliest images from the devastated communities evoked Dresden after the firebombing or Hiroshima at ground zero. But overwhelmed reporters misidentified neighborhoods and mislabeled ruins, lumping the Palisades together with Altadena, Pasadena, and Malibu, offering no distinctions. The jumble of footage made it impossible to know what had survived.
On three separate occasions Paige called the LA Department begging for help in saving June’s home. Each time she was assured that an advisory had been relayed to fire crews in the area.
Our first real smattering of news about June’s house came from a neighbor’s blurry online photo, which seemed to show an intact roofline. But this was only the second or third day, while the neighborhood was still burning, so any judgment seemed premature.
A more promising sign came from June’s little Tesla, which she’d left parked just across the street from her home. Throughout the firestorm and for many days after, its sensors kept sending temperature readings to her phone. Only once—briefly on the second day—did the temperature spike above the mid-seventies. In the vacuum of reliable information, this tiny signal dared us to hope.
On the third day, we visited a FEMA relief center in a Westside municipal building, looking for donated clothes. All we could find for the diminutive June was a pile of tattered T-shirts and shorts that looked like teenage fashion statements. In another time we might have laughed. Not now. June shook her head sadly and vowed to keep wearing, for as long as possible, the clothes she had escaped in. At least there was dignity in that.
Almost every staffer and volunteer we encountered at FEMA locations in the area seemed well-intentioned. But many were clearly overwhelmed, undertrained, and unfamiliar with their own protocols. Their generosity, hastily mass-produced, had a take-it-or-leave-it quality that reminded us constantly we were beggars at the trough. Congenitally upscale Palisadians, who had never waited in line for anything, now patiently fell into step with the rest of us and gratefully accepted second-hand blankets and flip-flops and any help they could get in filling out disaster forms.
On the fifth day, our own fortunes brightened. Satellite maps confirmed what the Tesla signals suggested: the worst of the fire had leapfrogged June’s two-story L-frame. Grainy images revealed enough structure to cast shadows. Nine other houses on her street seemed intact too.
But as the satellite imagery filled in, it also became clear that much of Marquez Terrace had been torched. Seventeen neighboring homes, including one just two doors away, were just blackened outlines. A cluster near the lone intersection had collapsed into smudges, along with many estates on the flanking hillside.
Finally, amidst this jumble of mixed signals, a neighbor three doors down showed up online to provide some clarity. By his account he and his son, joined by friends, had stayed behind the first two days and tried to save their own homes and nearby one with garden hoses and urgent appeals to passing fire crews. In other neighborhoods too, similar volunteer brigades had backstopped overextended professional firefighters.
The neighbor sent us photos of June’s house—or parts of it. One showed water leaking from under her garage door, proof the front still stood. Another featured someone, likely from the neighbor’s group, hosing down the rear hedge. Yet another revealed the back wall of June’s house looking relatively unscathed.
But the pictures, like the satellite images, were inconclusive—fragmentary snippets with imperfect timestamps. Missing were wide angles of the front or sides of the house. In one sequence, the rear shrubbery, which had appeared intact in the “hosing-down” photo, looked badly singed, suggesting that subsequent events had overtaken that more hopeful moment. The ambiguities were maddening.
At the end of the first week, we were heartened to learn that authorities had decided to allow for brief escorted visits to the fire zone by residents with proof of address. But the hurdles were daunting. You had to rise before dawn, hike miles to a checkpoint, negotiate with security, then—if cleared—catch a police ride for a five-minute glimpse of your home, or its ashes.
Every time we tried, we were turned back. On January 11 the visitation policy was abruptly terminated. Officials cited lingering hotspots, downed lines, and toxic debris. But it’s also possible they wanted to head off any public reckoning over what had been left undone before, during, and after the fires.
So, we kept waiting, obsessing over every revised FEMA advisory, every vague LAFD handout, every blurry satellite image, every scrap of information from online support networks.
By the third week, FEMA had agreed to cover a hotel room for June near my apartment. But no one at the agency could tell her whether her stay would last a day or a week. The uncertainty was torture. Thousands of other fire survivors found themselves similarly adrift.
Meanwhile, Paige’s compassionate leave expired. On January 23 she flew back to New York to resume work. Sad though I was to see her go, I hoped distance might bring her some relief. Her reserves were spent. More than once, she’d told me the fire had stolen her childhood, and I knew what she meant. The landmarks were gone—her kindergarten around the corner, much of Marquez Elementary, a large swath of Pali High. Even if her mother’s house had survived, the home it had represented as a source of comfort, safety, and identity was hopelessly violated.
Paige shed few tears when she left. She just withdrew into a remoteness that was becoming all too familiar.
My own grief had its own undertow. I had lived this before in Saigon, 1975, watching a country collapse into fire and oblivion, people clawing at helicopter skids to escape.
Age helps, of course. At nearly eighty-three, I’d learned how to metabolize disaster, or at least hold it at arm’s length. Still, Paige’s losses were mine too.
So were her mother’s. During those first three weeks, I agonized constantly about her. But June refused to dwell on her own hardships. As she later told me, she was already struggling with “survivor’s remorse”—a nagging guilt that some part of her home might be salvageable while so many neighbors had lost everything.
Bearing eyewitness – January 25
For some time, I put off writing this section of the essay because of the emotions attached. But after much agonizing, here’s what I wrenched from memory: an admittedly gut-driven narrative of what happened on the day June and I made our first visit to the Palisades after the fire.
Paige had hoped to accompany us, but, as mentioned above, job responsibilities had drawn her back to New York on the 23rd.
Two days later, just like that, the lockdown lifted. Fate can be perverse that way. June and I were suddenly cleared to visit what was left of the ruins, under escort and strict conditions.
I had assured Paige that I would report all back to her. I should have thought better of offering to channel the unthinkable.
Per instructions, June and I were to enter the Palisades from PCH, a mile to the west. Armed guards, police vans and National Guard Humvees had sealed off every other approach, both from the beachfront and from Sunset Boulevard to the east.
Contemplating the visit, I was inevitably reminded of the circumstances in Saigon at the close of the war. Three weeks before my own escape by helicopter, the city had been barricaded. The echoes were resonant, my spirits about as bleak.
Now as then, nothing went according to plan. For more than thirty minutes, I drove up and down a heavily barricaded section of PCH, frantically searching for the designated turnoff.
June’s older daughter, her husband, and their precocious eight-year-old son followed in a separate SUV. This was the very lad whose hunch about the “No Outlet” road had helped us escape the inferno on Day One. I was hoping he would bring us good luck again.
Just when I was about to give up, a flak-jacketed Guardsman flagged me down and pointed me towards a barely conspicuous assembly area, part of the Santa Monica Pier parking lot. By the time I found the entry gate, competing traffic was lined up bumper to bumper, and it took twenty minutes to get through.
Inside was barely contained chaos. Volunteers and security officers, armed, stoic, and visibly drained, pawed through IDs, shoved hazmat gear and bottled water at anyone who wanted them, and hurriedly inspected each vehicle before tying a yellow ribbon to the mirror or door handle. They then wrangled every cleared car, truck or motorcycle into police-led caravans.
Everyone seemed braced for violence. Rumors of looting no longer felt overdrawn.
As we prepared to exit the inspection zone, June became visibly agitated and I worried for her. But once we were back on PCH and headed north, she seemed to calm – a little.
I didn’t.
On every side, heavily armed troops, hulking tanks and armored vehicles bore in on us, as if we were on the outskirts of Beirut on Mogadishu. Choppers screamed overhead. What had once been a welcoming neighborhood was now a free-fire zone, though with the threat coming from within.
Only after we passed the sealed turnoff into Channel Road, which runs up the east side of the Palisades, did the olive drab and desert camouflage give way to open vistas, though the mood scarcely improved.
To our left, the sea rolled on untouched beneath a slate-gray sky. But inland, the hills that had once framed this coast with a lush wild dignity looked like a playground for the walking dead. Trees and shrubs had been scalded into gnarled black skeletons. A skein of gray ash lay across the slopes like a burial shroud pulled tight.
Whole mansions stood gutted, roofs seared off, their frames tilting on unstable foundations. A breath, a shift — and they might have tumbled into oblivion. A trailer park just off the highway, long considered an eyesore by wealthier neighbors, now resembled a napalmed village I remembered from central Vietnam. Twisted scraps of metal lay in heaps. Jagged hoists and melted spikes jutted from the wreckage like battle-worn weapons abandoned by a fleeing army.
I kept murmuring, again and again: Oh my God, oh my God.
Not in prayer. Just in disbelief.
Halfway up Sunset, National Guardsmen in battle gear waved us off our planned route. A sudden flare-up had closed the entrance to Marquez Terrace from that direction. Our caravan doubled back to Temescal Canyon Road, and from there headed east on Sunset.
That’s when the randomness of the fire truly struck me.
All along the route, the flames had played a kind of sick hopscotch, one house obliterated, the next one left untouched. It was as though a half-blind arsonist with one hand tied behind his back had torched homes at random. The spared ones looked almost smug alongside their skeletal neighbors, and I found myself chafing irrationally at their survival. I had always questioned any theology promising divine mercy, but here my skepticism was confirmed in spades.
The turnoff onto Marquez Avenue bore us into more consistent devastation. Every one of the little shops that had once lent this area a scruffy charm had been fire-bombed off the map. One block away, Marquez Elementary, where Paige had spent happy childhood years, lay in charred ruins, its playground a pit of ash.
Then we turned into June’s cul-de-sac.
The first three homes were gone — just foundations and melted appliances. No surprise there. The satellite images had forewarned us. But seeing the carnage up close and personal was a singular experience. There was no steeling yourself for it, no easing of the shock. The hedgerow to our right, once dense and green, was a tangle of charred limbs and a few live sprigs to mock fate.
Halfway down the block, we glimpsed the house.
My heart skipped a beat. I felt it, however melodramatic that may sound.
The outer structure was still intact, just as the online photos and sat images had suggested, just as the Tesla signals had hinted.
Scarred, yes. But upright.
Four nearby houses had likewise survived, again matching the spy-in-the-sky images.
But alas, as the images had also foretold, another house just two doors down from June’s had been completely eviscerated, and the rest of the seventeen homes on the street, were total losses.
June’s older daughter arrived just behind us. She, her husband and little boy picked their way across the debris-strewn front lawn and marveled. Truth be told, the kid seemed vaguely disappointed that things seemed so normal.
But they weren’t. Far from it.
Inside the house: soot lay everywhere. Paige’s old bedroom—recently renovated—was blanketed in it, possibly from a leaky roof vent. The attic bore layer upon layer of ash. So too the interior ventilation and air conditioning system, thanks to the utility department’s failure to shut down electricity the moment the firestorm erupted. Smoke clung to every surface, the air barely breathable. Downstairs in the rec room and garage, there were musty signs of smoke and water damage.
And yet, impossibly, everything else – every dish, bookcase or wardrobe item – was where we’d left it on evacuation day, each one a frozen, if disfigured memory.
As for the exterior of the house and the immediate environs, the story was similarly ambiguous — further proof of fate’s capriciousness.
Flames had eradicated the massive three-story home directly behind June’s lot as well as countless other structures extending up the hillside. Flying embers had ignited foliage overlooking her rear retaining wall and spilled into the backyard, gnawing their way into plants and other combustible items. Scorched cushions lay scattered everywhere. Burn marks pocked lawn rugs and gazebo canopies, and a wooden windbreak sitting atop a side fence was charred on its outer surface, the side facing a neighbor’s heavily fire-damaged property.
The rear of the house seemed to have sustained only superficial damage based on cursory first glance, though there was no telling what lay hidden beneath eaves or cracked surfaces. And we all took comfort from discovering that two sacred backyard shrines, my dog Peanut’s grave and that of my cherished cat Saki lay unspoiled.
And yet everywhere you looked, on every tile, tabletop or stairway, flakes of gray soot clung like a pall, with God knows what substances baked into it.
In the front yard the lemon tree still stood and some of the trellised bougainvillea held its color. But the side edges were extensively burnt and the omnipresent soot, had seeped into the fake grass and every exposed crevice.
Across the street, June’s Tesla sat rimed with it. A rear window, which was slightly ajar, had let soot and the stench of charred debris inside. The car’s skin was slightly blemished, perhaps by embers, but the electrical system still worked.
Miraculously, the Tesla’s onboard cameras, forgotten during the fire, had remained active throughout the initial three days, recording nearly everything within a three-hundred-sixty-degree radius. The footage, which we were able to view until it mysteriously vanished a week or so later, showed embers raining down on the front yard and the hedgerow next to the car. The cameras had also captured firefighters—two of them the neighbor and his son —dousing hedges with hoses.
The impressions I carried away with me should have left me heartened. At least the semblance of a home had indeed survived. But as an investigative journalist well versed in chemical spills and environmental disasters, I knew, as Nathaniel Rich wrote recently in The New York Times, that the soot wasn’t just an inconvenience.
“Any home built before 1980 is most likely coated with lead paint and insulated with asbestos.” Rich noted in reference to debris scattered across the Palisades.
“Nearly every residence in the United States can be safely assumed to contain batteries, cleaning solvents, computers and plastics. Even compounds naturally found in soil, like trivalent chromium, can be transformed by wildfires into the highly carcinogenic hexavalent chromium — the contaminant made famous by the movie ‘Erin Brockovich.’
“Because of these assumptions,” Rich concluded, “it is standard practice, after a fire, to clear structures, remove six inches of soil and conduct tests to ensure that no hazardous compounds remain.”
As June prepared to leave with her older daughter and her family, I mentioned none of this. Instead, I suggested we focus on the positive and be thankful. Clearly passing firefighters, along with the neighbor and his volunteer crew, had helped save June’s home. The hedgerows along three sides of her property had doubtless blunted winds, and two nearby swimming pools, one behind June’s property, a second next door, had inevitably absorbed sparks.
Another factor had likely helped ward off damage. Unlike other parts of the neighborhood, June’s little section of Marquez Terrace dated back to the 1950’s when developers were not obsessed with crowding as much real estate as possible onto each lot. Her house and the ones immediately surrounding it had spacious back and front yards and thus natural buffer zones against house-leaping wildfires.
That, more than anything else, may have made all the difference, or at least given June an edge.
Once alone, I climbed back into my car, and in defiance of common sense turned east onto Sunset and headed into the Village itself. The satellite photos and media coverage had warned me what to expect, but I felt numbed enough to risk eyewitness confirmation.
Foolish me.
Ugly Truth
Eons before, on a youthful camping trip in the Great Smokies, I had stumbled on the carcass of a large animal, probably a black bear, which had burned to death in a forest fire. Annihilating heat had fused pieces of flesh to the bones, leaving thin leathery patches. The eye sockets leaked ash. Random claws gripped the earth, as if groveling for purchase. A detached jawbone, bleached a desiccated gray, lay to one side like a piece of broken pottery. I’d had difficulty imagining that this thing had ever been alive.
I had the same feeling when I caught my first glimpse of the center of the Palisades, the once vibrant Village. Yes, published imagery had prepared me to a certain extent. But now I had difficulty breathing and could scarcely imagine that what remained had ever been alive.
The Alphabet Streets, those tight, proud gridlines just north of Sunset, had always been the soul of the community. On a typical morning, you’d find dogs tugging leashes, kids flipping scooters along cracked sidewalks, neighbors catching up from shaded porches. Now all the neat geometries lay moldering in charr.
Where houses had once stood, there were only scorched pads, tilting chimneys, bent and broken piping, refrigerators sprung open, spewing rot. Ash blanketed everything, asbestos warning signs poked up here and there. Windows had blown outward, embedding shards in blackened shrubbery. Shorn roofing tiles lay strewn about like shattered petals. Patio furniture had fused to the cobbles. Lawns were burned to the root, sprinkler heads melted down like candle stubs. Palm trees had shrunk to blackened stalks, their crowns dismembered, their fronds, now crumpled papier mâché.
Minivans, SUVs, and BMWs had melted in place, their frames slumped forward, tires vaporized, glass turned to pebbled slag. In some places, only engine blocks remained, hulking and cracked like fossilized beasts.
Tesla sedans, super-heated by their fast-burning lithium batteries, had shriveled to crumpled Tinker Toys.
Many of the streets had been so completely scoured that the horizon was visible from corner to corner—a clarity that felt apocalyptic. You could see straight through what had once been thick with fences, hedges, porches, and family lives.
As I surveyed the wreckage, I spotted parts of it that seemed eerily balanced between then and now: an orange tree rife with newly blossomed fruit, but each one now withered and peeling; a child’s teddy bear dressed in what look like a fireman’s tunic but with its face scorched; and — at the end of a now orphaned driveway — an undamaged mailbox, clinging to broken hinges with a letter miraculously preserved inside.
Two blocks away, our central commercial area — home to banks, pharmacies, a hardware store, and the twin mainstays of community life, Ralphs and Gelson’s — was a fire-blasted ruin.
Gelson’s roof had imploded, the interior reduced to a tangle of twisted metal, scorched signage, and melted shopping carts. At Ralphs the roof was gone, and the. floor tiles had been seared off right down to concrete veins. The wine section had exploded; the meat cases were vaporized.
What remained of the gas station to the north of the Sunset-Swarthmore intersection looked like a sound stage for an End-of Days movie, its convenience store pancaked, its pumps drooping like Dali sculptures. Bits of roasted rubber clung to the curbing like congealed blood.
The banks, once anchors of the town, had been hollowed out, their interiors plundered by flame. The Bank of America’s historic facade had shrunk to a sick joke: charred beams, twisted ATM frames, and spider-webbed safety glass.
Nearby, the newly landmarked business-block building had shed its newly renovated facade like scalded skin.
The town’s fiscal backbone was no more. Power poles lay splintered, water mains ruptured. Sunset and Temescal Canyon Road had been warped by heat and scabbed over by debris. Even side streets bore scars from unaccustomed six-wheeler traffic or the bulldozing of abandoned cars.
Sidewalks had buckled and fractured. Threads of ash lay along the seams like detached gray tentacles, and unidentifiable animal parts clotted the gutters. The air was a noxious stew of melted plastic, charred insulation and the appalling sweetness of things putrefying. Every breath made my throat sting.
You could walk block to block and never find a single business left standing. Every restaurant, every storefront, every café — devoured.
With one exception.
Palisades Village: Rick Caruso’s luxury shopping complex. For all the surrounding devastation, it stood pristine, even aloof, its manicured hedges still green, the storefronts glistening like showrooms along Rodeo. Not a pane of glass had shattered. Not a roof tile was missing. As everybody knew by now, the property had been preemptively protected: soaked in retardant, encircled by private firefighters in branded rigs.
So, it stood there, sparkling and unscathed like a mirage — or a sneer.
Beyond the town’s commercial core, the contrast only deepened.
Palisades Charter Elementary, just three blocks away, had suffered severe damage to its campus. St. Matthew’s School, further to the west had been leveled, the adjoining church partially destroyed. Corpus Christi, a Catholic landmark on upper Sunset, had collapsed in on itself, its parabolic shell crumpling, its stained-glass windows shattering into muddied debris.
To the east, the village library, much cherished by my daughter, was barely recognizable. Fire had savaged the roof and upper floor, and high-pressure hoses and flame retardant had reduced the stacks below to a sodden pulp. A community built on books, shared inspirations and old friendships had lost part of its soul.
Further uphill, on Alma Real and Toyopa, streets synonymous with wealth and privilege, the fire had played no favorites. Mansions that had once lorded it over canyons, their floor-to-ceiling windows catching sunsets, were now slag heaps or glaring absences. Several had slipped over the side, leaving only kindling. Others teetered on the edge, their walls tilting precariously over forty-foot drops.
A millionaire’s grand “bungalow” had collapsed in on itself, its marble columns shorn off. A sleek glass-walled home had cracked straight down its spine.
One mansion’s winding driveway was a burn scar curving out into space. Another had only its entry gate left, flanked by incinerated hedges and collapsed iron fencing. Many pampered homes had dissolved into mismatched fragments; an opulent master bathroom lying shattered on the front stoop, a splintered piano wallowing in a Jacuzzi, a backyard pool drooling black water into a hillside flower garden.
I passed the once lavish home where the Doors’ guitarist had composed the lyrics and melody of “Light My Fire.” Nothing left but twisted metal. The Neutra house, gone. A Keeler classic, gutted. Mid-century jewels ravaged.
There had been a mythology about the Palisades, a perception that it was a paradise tucked between the mountains and the sea, immune from the rest of LA’s chaos. That illusion was dead, leaving only silence, not a stillness born of peace and serenity, but the hush that follows a massacre, an absence I had experienced from time to time in Vietnam.
Wandering amidst the remains, I kept wondering how long it would take for anyone to acknowledge that the real, lived-in, everyday Palisades, had died. Not just the architectural treasures and dazzling parks and the best Hamburger joint anywhere. But the place that had conferred a sense of rootedness, of belonging.
There was nothing left of that. Not even a place to buy a loaf of bread or beg for answers.
The Palisades had been the map of the world for so many who lived here. But the only thing left standing, untouched and polished, was a shopping village built for tourists.
If that’s not a metaphor, I don’t know what is.
Open Questions
The Palisades–Eaton fire was the first truly urban wildfire disaster in modern California, setting a precedent for how the state may confront cleanup and insurance challenges after the next big one.
Measured by lives lost and structures destroyed, it ranked alongside the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, which killed eighty-five people and leveled nearly nineteen thousand buildings, compared with Los Angeles’s twenty-nine deaths and sixteen thousand structures destroyed. It also surpassed the severity of the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Malibu, which killed three people and obliterated about sixteen thousand structures.
What makes the Los Angeles event distinct is not just its scale but its context: the devastation struck within the city itself, producing an unprecedented housing loss, spreading toxic ash across dense neighborhoods, and triggering an insurance crisis of unusual complexity.
Ordinarily, after such disasters, the best and brightest from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers test affected soil for hazardous materials while clearing the wreckage. This time, they refused. Instead, they scraped away six inches of topsoil from select burned properties in the Palisades and Eton and declared the sites safe without testing to see what was left.
Why such a break with precedent?
Think: money, logistics, politics — and the overwhelming pressure on community leaders to complete the clean-up before the 2028 LA Olympics.
Existing Federal and state law require that any material officially designated “hazardous” be trucked to a licensed hazardous-waste facility. In this instance, with the Palisades as a key reference point, the closest approved dump lies hours north in the San Joaquin Valley.
The Corps estimated that at least 110,000 truckloads would be needed to clear LA County fire debris. Ergo: any thorough testing and cleanup operation would be dizzyingly expensive and time-consuming.
Faced with this prospect, someone in authority—no one has fessed up, according to The New York Times —settled on a simple expedient: don’t test the ash at all. If there were no test results, there would be no proof of toxicity, and the ash could be legally dumped at a much closer site, the Calabasas Landfill, which is authorized to accept “fire debris,” but not hazardous waste.
In other words, the decision to skip testing was mostly about cost and convenience. As the Times reported, Calabasas was cleared to accept up to 5,000 tons of Palisades ash per day for at least six months, to be trucked out whether it was toxic or not.
In fact, there was never any question about the toxicity. Appearing before the Calabasas City Council in February, Colonel Brian Sawser of the Army Corps acknowledged that debris from the Palisades was “as hazardous as any ash product can be,” while stressing that he was “not a scientist.” He added that his workers wore respirators and hazmat suits while clearing properties—an unspoken admission of the danger.
Once it became apparent that state and Federal agencies would not do standard testing, exasperated LA County officials acted on their own, hiring outside consultants to take samples from burned lots in both the Palisades and Eton-Altadena.
But contrary to what some residents may have assumed, the county program did not test every property. Instead, it sampled just 30 sites —15 in each community—and extrapolated the results to estimate risk across entire neighborhoods.
The study, conducted by Roux Associates, found troubling hotspots. In Eaton’s fire zone, more than a quarter of cleared properties tested above California’s lead safety standard, while nearly half of uncleared sites exceeded the threshold. In the Palisades burn area, the overall rate of elevated lead was lower, under 3 percent, but isolated sites showed dangerous concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, and other chemicals.
On that basis, the county issued April advisories, warning homeowners in both fire zones that lead, arsenic, and related toxins had been detected at levels exceeding state cleanup requirements. These notices, distributed widely, did not reflect property-specific test results but rather a public health caution drawn from the sample pool.
Health experts emphasize that even low levels of contamination carry serious risks. No level of lead exposure is considered safe, especially for children, where it can cause irreversible brain and developmental harm. Arsenic is a known carcinogen, and cadmium exposure is linked to kidney and lung disease.
Scientists also warn that environmental conditions may worsen the danger. Wind, rain, and even routine construction work can dislodge toxic ash from one site and spread it to others that have already been cleared, creating unpredictable new hotspots of contamination.
Independent checks have reinforced the initial threat picture. A Los Angeles Times investigation found unsafe levels of heavy metals on some remediated and standing homes in both communities. Caltech researchers reported that about a third of properties in the burn scars showed lead contamination in surface soil. And a USC program has offered free, voluntary soil testing for residents who want individual confirmation.
County health officials stress that the sampling was never meant to give every homeowner certainty, but only to flag a serious regional hazard. Residents who want definitive answers are left to arrange their own testing. In the meantime, the county is offering free blood screening for children and adults in affected neighborhoods to check for signs of lead exposure.
Bottom line: while the notices were real and the risks confirmed, not every property has been tested. And because toxic ash can migrate, the danger may linger even in homes that appear safe.
Coda
Eight months after the wildfires, June is still sparring with insurance adjusters and leaning on friends and depleted public agencies for help. The details of her situation must give way to privacy, but what she faces is hardly unique. Across Pacific Palisades and Eaton–Altadena, thousands of survivors remain trapped in a slow-motion recovery.
Even by the most conservative estimates, the Palisades and Eaton fires together left many thousands homeless. On paper, the insurance industry appears to have rallied. More than six billion dollars have already been disbursed across nearly 34,000 claims, with the California FAIR Plan alone paying out more than two billion on over 5,000 cases. Yet behind these figures lies a harsher truth: only about half of the claims have been meaningfully settled, while the rest are mired in delay, dispute, or denial.
For homeowners whose property still stands, survival often feels worse than total loss. Jill Lawrence, a Palisades resident, recently told a reporter: “It’s just weird to me six months later that my house is still standing in soot and ash, and it’s really because of the insurance companies,” she lamented. Though her home is technically intact, ash clings to the walls, and her life has been reduced to endless bargaining sessions with adjusters.
Total-loss claims, easier to quantify, haven’t guaranteed fair outcomes either. Underinsurance has left many unable to rebuild, and lawsuits accusing insurers of bad faith are piling up. State Farm is now under investigation for allegedly slow-walking or rejecting smoke-related claims. The courtroom has become the new battleground.
Even for those who manage to settle, contamination remains a specter. After LA County confirmed in April that lead, barium, and other poisons lurk in every burn zone, insurers began tap-dancing as fast as they could, stalling or negotiating away massive unanticipated claims. Officials retreated into half-truths, and survivors have been obliged to cobble together facts from scattered reports and private contractors in lieu of comprehensive risk assessments.
Some older homeowners, weary of limbo, have moved back into damaged, potentially toxic properties on the fatalistic assumption that age will kill them before the poison particles do. Younger families, more cautious, have turned to remediation specialists—only to receive conflicting verdicts about what counts as safe.
Many survivors have required emergency FEMA housing. As of January 27, nearly 112,000 FEMA applications had been filed, with only 19,000 approved. Roughly $100 million have been disbursed, but FEMA officials release only statewide totals—citing privacy, shifting survivor status, and ingrained practices—so the extent of reliance on Federal aid in the Palisades and Eaton remains largely invisible.
This invisibility masks a deeper crisis. FEMA itself is shrinking, gutted by Trump budget cuts, sweeping staff reductions, and leadership turmoil. A recent Government Accountability Office report warns that between January and June 2025, about 2,500 FEMA employees—including 24 senior officials—left the agency, many through “voluntary incentive” programs. FEMA’s volunteer corps has been slashed: only about 600 are expected to be available this season, compared to nearly 1,300 in 2024. Mass departures, leadership instability, politicization, and contract-based outsourcing have hollowed out the agency’s capacity.
As a result, fire survivors face longer waits for case management, smaller checks, and the constant threat of abrupt cutoff. Instead of a dependable Federal partner, they are left with a patchwork of nonprofits, overstretched state offices, and private consultants whose mandate is contract fulfillment, not public trust. For communities still reeling from January’s destruction, FEMA’s retreat has turned what should have been a bridge to recovery into yet another obstacle.
Public confidence in a quick rebound is fading. Few Palisadians are rushing to rebuild fire-gutted homes. Some developers have stepped in, offering to buy up the charred footprints—at bargain prices and with plans for multifamily complexes. Such “grand designs” would alter the character of the Palisades without addressing the overbuilding and overcrowding that made the fires so devastating in the first place.
Many of us doubt a real cleanup will ever come, given the recent studies showing that toxic dust lingers even after “sanitization” and can be scattered again by wind, rain, or construction activity (see “Open Questions” above).
This is not a subject easily broached with fire survivors—it’s a ticket to despair. But as a journalist, with all the acquired cynicism, I find it telling that official surveys that might clarify the contamination profile have been slow to appear and that Federal agencies remain missing in action. There are fragments of clarity scattered about, but no authoritative study that pulls the data together.
Conspiracy theorists may suspect collusion among developers and city officials determined not to scare the public. I suspect the larger problem is lack of precedent. The January fires, as noted above, were unique in scale and destructiveness. Climate change has reshuffled the deck, leaving us with remediation challenges that exceed known models.
And while we’re on the subject of climate change, here’s the latest bad news: ignoring the scientific consensus that the planet is heating, the Trump administration is moving to repeal the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding”—the foundation for regulating greenhouse gases. This would strip regulators of authority to limit emissions from cars, power plants, and other polluters, undoing existing rules and making it much harder for future administrations to prevent the kind of calamity my family barely survived.
If this is the future, my advice is simple: steer clear of loose ash heaps, cancel backyard barbecues, and brush up on your best Howard Beale imitation. Then make it your battle cry where it counts—in the streets and at the ballot box.