As of Thursday noon, the Palisades and Eaton Fires are both 0% contained, and they’ve burned over 17,000 and 10,000 acres, respectively. The Hurst Fire is at 800 acres burned with 10% containment. The Sunset Fire that broke out Wednesday night has been stopped and the evacuation orders lifted. The death toll remains at five, with scores more suffering what authorities are calling “significant injuries.” Thousands of homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship have burned to the ground. Many neighborhoods and commercial areas in the Palisades and Altadena are rubble.
Sue Kohl leads the Community Council of Pacific Palisades, where she’s lived for some 30 years. She tells KCRW that the area has had fires and evacuations before, but they were much smaller and briefer.
“I don't think anyone could have imagined the … apocalyptic destruction that's gone on in the Palisades. … I've talked to so many people over the last two days, and I don't think I've talked to anyone whose house didn't go down. Maybe one person. Everyone's lost their homes. Our entire village burned to the ground,” she says.
LA City Councilmember Traci Park has been very communicative, Kohl notes. Residents have received lots of alerts telling them that wind is coming and they need to leave.
She commends the LA Fire Department, pointing out that two great stations are in the Palisades (one almost burned). However, she says, “I don't care how many firefighters you get out there, our water pressure was really low out of the hydrants. And you couple that with 80 mph winds, there's just no chance. I mean, the fire went everywhere so fast. There was no way to hold it back. And it's still raging.”
Some people are attempting to return to the Palisades, and LAPD has tried stopping them because emergency crews must be able to quickly access the streets, Kohl says. “That was the problem with all the people evacuating out of the west side of town, one way in and one way out. And the road was blocked. And it was just chaos.”
After losing everything, Kohl is now staying at her son’s house in Westchester. After a few more days there, she’ll move to another friend’s house for a few weeks, then look for a rental.
Meanwhile, Altadena resident Jamie Woolner's story is still unfolding. “I still have no idea what the status is of my place. My roof blew off and folded over on itself from the windstorm.”
He also co-owns the 11-year-old restaurant, Pizza of Venice in Altadena. Only its floor is left after blazes tore through.
Fires engulf Pizza of Venice (left). Courtesy of Jamie Woolner.
Customers stand outside Pizza of Venice — long before the fires came. Courtesy of Jamie Woolner.
Woolner says that on Tuesday, he looked at the fire in Eaton Canyon before it spread to the neighborhood, and when he felt the winds, he knew the fire would be “unfightable.”
“What I'm shocked about is — I live close to Woodbury, which is essentially the dividing line of Altadena and Pasadena, and I never imagined that the fire would get all the way over there. So even as I'm sleeping and I'm listening to the evacuation loudspeaker blaring, I'm like, ‘They're being overly, overly cautious here.’ But I was dead wrong. When I woke up, I walked out into an absolute apocalypse. … I'm lucky that I didn't just burn up alive at night with no roof and just plywood over my head. I'm very fortunate that I messed around with Mother Nature and lived to tell the tale.”
He continues, “And I came out, I drove up to see if the restaurant was standing, so I was told that it probably wasn't. And I'm driving up Fair Oaks and … a 25-foot tall flaming tornado passes by my car. And I nearly swerved and hit another car just to get out of its way. And it was traveling into my restaurant.”
He notes that the Masonic Lodge across the street was completely on fire, as well as the homes behind his restaurant.
As Pizza of Venice started to catch fire, Woolner considered trying to save it. “I thought to myself … even if I got the hose and started spraying, the risk-to-reward profile on this is not panning out, and this is way too dangerous. And I helped put out a fire next to my grandparents’ house during the Woolsey Fire in Malibu. And the level of danger here just seemed orders of magnitude higher. I knew I couldn't do anything about it, so I just had to leave.”
Woolner expresses appreciation for everyone who’s contacted him about the loss of his business, but he says the people who’ve lost their homes are going through worse, and he’s extremely sad for them.
How is Kohl thinking about her home now and what it’ll take to rebuild?
“It looks like an atomic bomb went off. … Everything's gone. So we're going to have to figure out how to do all this together. We're going to have to deal with the city, the county, insurance companies. … We're surrounded by, on three sides … hills and canyons, and on the fourth side by the ocean. And you get these fires burning all the way to the ocean. There's no way to avoid it. So we're going to have to build a little smarter than what's been there in the past.”
Woolner plans to rebuild his restaurant too.
“Once things open up, it's going to be very interesting to go there and see what is left of the community. Because I'm getting photos of a six-block radius just leveled. Not one house standing. Is that a pattern? Is that just one bad area? I have no idea, really don't know yet,” he says.