Tragedy and Resilience: Fires Transform Pacific Palisades and Altadena

Yahoo

04-02-2025

Local Meteorologists were breathless in repeating the warnings for 'life-threatening winds' over and over in the days before Jan. 7.'Life-threatening?' I thought somewhat incredulously as I left my beachside studio in Venice around 7:30 a.m. that morning. But, at the boardwalk, the brute force of what marked unimaginable, imminent wind-fueled destruction hit like a bat to the chest. Palm tree branches lashed in a violent dance overhead. Sand particles whipped into furious tornadoes and darted the skin. A sandwich board guiding tourists to breakfast burritos flew into the air and fell with a thud like a heavyweight fighter taking a TKO punch. All around, an ominous energy. Unsettling. Many Angelenos believe the Santa Ana winds rattle the psyche. Some writers, like L.A.'s Raymond Chandler, argue the gales can turn mild people murderous.'There was a desert wind blowing that night,' he wrote in 1946's Red Wind, a short story. 'It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.'Anything can happen … on this day, it did.Three hours later, at 10:30 a.m., the Palisades Fire began. From the Venice Beach Boardwalk, spectators watched in horror as its ravenous flames built into a spreading wall of fire. An ugly, inky smoke began to stain the sky over the ocean. In the distance, crackling embers created a macabre fireworks show over the Palisades as a hellscape grew. In a matter of hours, famously picturesque swaths of Los Angeles would change forever.
I spoke with my literary manager that morning, a Pacific Palisades resident, about what now seems like utterly mundane nonsense. Neither of us knew that this would be the day that his house — and, as of this writing, 6,380 other homes and businesses in the tightknit seaside community and neighboring Malibu — would be reduced to ash. He is a collector of literary artifacts. All gone. His neighborhood, also gone.These enormous losses are what Jamie Lee Curtis came home to. The fervently proud born-and-bred Angelena had just boarded a flight to New York City when the texts started flying in about the fire in her neighborhood. She tells Los Angeles she felt fairly safe — even as her husband, fellow actor Christopher Guest, packed up their beloved rescue named Runi and a few belongings to hustle out of their home in a canyon on the outskirts of Pacific Palisades.She recalls, 'I never thought it would reach my house. To do that, it would have to burn across the entire area…' It did. She did not lose her home, but her community was decimated.The church where she got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous was wrecked by flames, along with the women's community center where she attended meetings. The grocery store where she did her shopping, ravaged. Palisades High School, where Curtis shot a scene for 2003's Freaky Friday, was heavily damaged. Curtis rerouted back to her beloved City of Angels within a day. Gutted by the apocalyptic scene she returned to, she immediately pledged $1 million to help her neighbors. 'This is an act of nature reminding us that nature will always win,' she says. 'We now have to live with that grim reality, make changes and use our creative community, our will and spirit to rebuild.'That sentiment is shared by art collector and West Hollywood gallery owner Ron Rivlin. His three-story home was filled with art — works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst and John Baldessari — and rare oddities, like a gumball machine from the Playboy Mansion, now dust. Desperate to find 'something, anything,' he says, he climbed into the twisted rebar and hunks of debris with a ladder to look through the remains. In a ravine behind what had been a swimming pool, he spotted a glimmer. In the scorched brush, a stainless steel 15-foot sculpture: Michael Benisty's 'Broken but Together,' an aptly named artwork found among the hundreds lost. 'I take it as a hopeful sign,' he decrees. 'One that represents the spirit of Pacific Palisades.'Fourth-generation Altadena homeowner Johnny Agnew — a teamster on the Ryan Murphy series Monsters — is also a collector of artifacts, vintage trailers, rare cars and Americana curiosities, items he kept at his home, a 1920s-era log cabin dubbed Funky Junk Farms. His art may not have caught an appraiser's eye, but it was priceless to the people lucky enough to visit his makeshift museum. As firefighters battled a hurricane of flames on the Westside on Jan. 7, the Eaton Fire began to blaze at 6:18 p.m.
Agnew and his girlfriend Yipsy watched the horizon as the flames roared through mansions in the canyon on the opposite side of town and then pushed down into the historic enclave of west Altadena, home to generations of Black families like his.
By midnight, it was chaos, he notes. The sky was pitch-dark with smoke, an orange glow enveloping their cabin. 'My heart sank. It was a mountain of fire, moving toward us,' Agnew says. The hurricane-force winds blew so ferociously that entire blocks — including theirs — were wiped out in minutes, at least 7,000 homes incinerated by fire like a book of lit matches, one after another. Mom-and-pop shops leveled; history wiped out. The delightfully eclectic Bunny Museum. Countless houses of worship. Fox's famous restaurant. Now, all part of the war zone left behind. 'It's very emotional,' the 63-year-old says. 'At my age, it's supposed to be cruise control. Now we have to start over. We have 25 close friends who lost everything.' Still, Agnew is quick to talk about the outpouring of love from friends and strangers: 'We are the lucky ones. We are alive. And we will rebuild.'
In his neighborhood, at least 17 people lost their lives. Those tragedies include Anthony Mitchell, a 67-year-old amputee, and his son, Justin, who had cerebral palsy; the two died side-by-side in a bed waiting for an ambulance that tried desperately to move through the blinding fog of black smoke and flames but wouldn't arrive on time. On another street, Victor Shaw, 66, defended his family home with a garden hose before he was overcome by smoke inhalation, dying on the lawn where he had played as a boy. Two other elderly Altadena lifers — 82-year-old Rodney Nickerson, whose father is honored at L.A.'s largest housing development in Watts, and Erliene Kelley, 83 — believed the Eaton Fire, like others before it, would spare them. This time, the wildfires would not be so forgiving.
Another 11 people perished in the Palisades Fire, where fast-moving flames rapaciously devoured celebrity compounds, demolished entire beachfront communities, destroyed the Tahitian Terrace Mobile Home Park and decimated famous businesses like the Reel Inn and Moonshadows Malibu.
Among the lost include surfer Randy 'Crawdaddy' Miod, a prolific contributor to the arts scene, who was found clutching his kitten to his chest in his Malibu bungalow. He died attempting to escape the wind-fueled flames that bobbed and weaved like a linebacker, leveling everything in their path. His mother said Miod's last words to her were: 'Pray for the Palisades. Pray for Malibu. I love you.' At a cottage nearby, one-time Australian child actor Rory Sykes, 32, who was born blind with cerebral palsy, was unable to escape his home despite a desperate attempt by his mom Shelley to douse the white-hot embers that landed on her son's roof. 'The water was shut off,' she wrote in a social media post, adding that even the 'brave firefighters had no water all day.'
That lack of water, LAFD firefighters and union officials said, coupled with the unrelenting, unprecedented Santa Ana winds, crippled their efforts to control the hurricane of fire exploding all around them. 'When you tap a hydrant and nothing comes out,' says International Association of Firefighters President Edward A. Kelly, 'it's like sending soldiers into war with tanks and guns and no ammunition.' Among the sites Kelly visited with his LAFD brethren was the devastated site of Corpus Christi Catholic Church and School in Pacific Palisades, where he paused to say a prayer at its intact granite altar. Firefighters began to buzz about what one called 'a miracle' after recovering the Holy Tabernacle in the detritus and returning it to its Monsignor; all 14 stained glass Stations of the Cross were immaculate, which defied fire logic. 'To me,' Kelly, a Boston native and lifelong firefighter says, 'it's a sign that this city is L.A. Strong.'
There were similar signs of hope across the city. Some seemed spiritual. Others resulted from brave actions by first responders and everyday Angelenos like actor Harvey Guillén, who is a series regular on FX's What We Do in the Shadows. Guillén, the son of Mexican immigrants, was the first member of his family to buy a home and he'd fallen in love with Altadena. He was at home with family when the Eaton Fire began its monstrous lurch toward his neighborhood. 'I couldn't believe what I was seeing,' he says. 'It was raining fire.' He remembers saying a quick prayer — 'please save my house' — before snatching a photo of his father and running out. When he returned the next day, he sobbed with 'survivors' guilt' that his sweet house was still standing — before noticing his neighbor's home was smoking.
Guillén and his siblings grabbed a hose and soaked his neighbor's house, saving it. It was an act that unwittingly put the family among the ranks of countless civilians who did what they could to aid exhausted, frustrated first responders from CalFire, the LAFD and nearby companies, plus 1,100 California inmates — among them juvenile detention center volunteers — who by then, had been engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to contain wildfires igniting all around them for days. They kept coming: the Hurst fire in Sylmar; the Kenneth near Woodland Hills, the Lidia in the Angeles National Forest, the Woodley in the Sepulveda Basin, then the Sunset in the Hollywood Hills. Flying embers made it as far as Ventura County, igniting the Auto Fire. Soon, help began to arrive on the line — and it was needed, as week two saw the Hughes Fire ignite in Castaic and the Laguna Fire in Ventura County.
The Navajo Nation Fire Department sent its best. So did Mexico; Canada. Then Texas and Vegas and Oregon and Utah and Tennessee. Civilian fire brigades began to fan out across the miles upon miles of ruined neighborhoods to mitigate further damage to the structures that were left as the National Guard posted up to prevent looting. Dozens of bad actors were arrested, including some dressed as firefighters who were using a lifesaving, nonprofit app most Angelenos had never heard of until the fires broke out: Watch Duty.
Across L.A. County, Watch Duty's unifying tone began to ding with real-time evacuation orders that corresponded with maps of the fast-moving fires so people knew where to go. 'When this fire lit, we knew this was going to be catastrophic,' the service's creator John Mills says. 'We started sleeping in shifts,' he recalls of his staff of 15. 'What is happening, it's on an untouchable scale we could not have foreseen.'
For all the destruction, there were endless stories of unfettered heroism. LAFD Captain Frank Lima was driving toward the Station 69 firehouse in Pacific Palisades when he spotted embers flying into the window of a house on Marquez Avenue, right next to another home fully engulfed in flames. Lima leapt from his car, grabbed his axe — along with a tiny fire extinguisher — smashed through a garden gate at the house, and forced his way inside with white-hot fire all around him. He emptied the little hydrant as Engine 19 showed up on the scene to help, and that house is one of the only ones on the once-picturesque block in the Palisades Highlands neighborhood unscathed. Lima still visits the house to make sure it's standing.
Overhead, fire pilots dazzled us with action movie-worthy shots of staggeringly accurate water drops from helicopters, planes, and super scoopers — precision dumps that erased gigantic swaths of fire, captured in videos every bit as exciting as scenes out of a Marvel superhero film. In today's world, the 'superheroes' are the countless Angelenos who immediately jumped in to help.
Social media influencers took over the Pasadena Rose Bowl to create a spontaneous evacuation center. An Altadena locksmith on Lake Avenue that survived the fires offered free house and car keys to his neighbors who weren't so lucky. Venice surf shops began collecting donated essentials. Strangers offered up rooms and guest houses to the more than 150,000 Angelenos left homeless or displaced, while hotels gave away free rooms. Countless restaurants dedicated their kitchens to those in need, delivering food (and comfort) to weary survivors and frontline workers.
The Pasadena Humane Society rescued 700 terrified animals; dogs, cats, turtles, a small dragon, motherless kittens and even, at least for one night, a pony. Rescued horses were rushed to nearby equestrian centers. Veterinarians across the city turned their hospitals into makeshift shelters. Volunteering and acts of community service have replaced red-carpet events and awards shows.
Spontaneous murals by artists across the city remind us that the real superstars in Tinseltown these days are its first responders. Graffiti artists from the Santee Public Gallery took over a wall near the Venice Beach skate park that reads on one side, framed by the Pacific Ocean: 'Thank You Firefighters.' On the other, it reads: 'Heroes in Red,' backdropped by the boardwalk where spectators watched in horror the growing red threat on that windy Jan. 7 morning.
For Curtis, the outpouring of love and support amid continuing mayhem comes as no surprise. After all, as she says: 'We are the City of Angels.'