Latest news with #L.A.FireDepartment
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Diddy trial week 3 recap: Ex-assistant alleges rape, mistrial bid fails
Sean 'Diddy' Combs' federal sex trafficking trial wrapped its third week on Friday, following a failed mistrial bid and additional testimony detailing the rapper's alleged abuse, including that of a former assistant who accused him of raping her at his Los Angeles home. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and racketeering charges stemming from allegations that he used his fame — while also relying on fear and violence — to coerce women into having sex with male escorts while subjecting them to ongoing physical and mental abuse. At the center of the federal case is Combs' infamous 'freak-offs,' which allegedly involved degrading acts that were often recorded without consent. Prosecutors claim he covered up his crimes through a well-paid network that resorted to bribery, kidnapping and arson. Here's a recap of what happened during the trial this past week: Capricorn Clark, through tears, testified on Tuesday about alleged instances of kidnappings, blackmail and threats that she that was subjected to during the 14 years she worked on and off for Combs. She specifically recalled how Diddy flew into a rage one night in December 2011, after he learned R&B singer Cassie Ventura, his on-and-off girlfriend at the time, was in a relationship with fellow rapper Kid Cudi. Clark claimed an armed Combs 'kidnapped her' in the dead of night to help him 'kill Cudi,' describing how the rapper ordered her to get dressed despite her protests, then forced her into an Escalade driven by a security guard, who in turn took them to Cudi's home. 'I'd never seen anything like it,' she said of his rage. Clark grew increasingly emotional as she described how the rap mogul busted into Cudi's residence and her subsequent efforts to warn Ventura. When Ventura returned to Combs' Los Angeles mansion the following day, Clark said he immediately began kicking' her with '100% full force, in her legs to begin with.' It was one of several disturbing acts of abuse she witnessed the rapper inflict on Ventura. She said she later called Ventura's mother, telling her Combs had been 'beating the s–t' out of her daughter. She added: 'I can't call the police but you can.' Lance Jimenez, an arson investigator with the L.A. Fire Department, recalled for jurors an investigation into a 2012 explosion that saw Cudi's Porsche burst into flames. He said a subsequent search of the vehicle turned up a Molotov cocktail, fashioned out of a 40-ounce bottle of Old English malt liquor and a designer handkerchief. 'In my opinion, it was targeted,' Jimenez said of the fire, adding that the damage could have been significantly worse had the bottle shattered as intended. Instead, it remained intact, forcing the flames to flicker out rather than spread. Jimenez on Wednesday also alleged that evidence, specifically fingerprint cards, linked to the arson investigation were destroyed in 2012 by 'somebody in the LAPD.' It prompted Diddy's legal team to call for a mistrial, a request that was quickly denied by Judge Arun Subramanian. The defense argued the prosecution's line of questioning and Jimenez's answers unfairly implied Combs was somehow involved in the destruction of evidence. Subramanian disagreed, concluding 'there was absolutely no testimony from the witness that was prejudicial in any way, shape or form.' Kid Cudi testified last week that he believed Diddy was the one behind the Porsche fire. Federal prosecutors also contended Combs was responsible and included the incident among several acts of alleged wrongdoing supporting the racketeering charge against him Deonte Nash was hired by Combs as an intern in 2008 after responding to an ad he found on Craigslist. He went on serve as Ventura's stylist from 2009 to 2018, during which time he said they became close friends. On Wednesday, Nash corroborated Ventura's devastating testimony from the start of Diddy's trial, but noted that he didn't 'hate' Combs, despite the violence he witnessed. In one incident, on Ventura's 29th birthday, Nash said Diddy abruptly ended his then-girlfriend's karaoke party because he wanted to engage in one of his marathon sex romps. 'I don't want to freak-off,' she allegedly told Nash, but admitted she gave in because Combs had threatened to ruin her reputation and release the sex tapes if she didn't comply with his demands. The stylist said it was one of several conversations he had with Ventura during which she said she was being forced to participate in the freak-offs. An ex-assistant who used the pseudonym Mia said Combs sexually assaulted her at his 40th birthday party at The Plaza hotel in Manhattan in 2009, and then raped her at his L.A. home shortly thereafter. He also allegedly forced her to perform oral sex at another one of his California properties, and targeted her on other occasions that she said she struggled to recall. Seeking to cast doubt on Mia's accounts during cross examination on Friday, Combs' defense team pulled up several social media posts in which she had heaped praise on the rapper. Mia said the social media site was a place to make it appear as if her life was perfect, even if that was far from the truth. When asked why she continued to work for Diddy if she feared for her safety any time he was upset, as she claimed on the stand, she said the dynamic was complicated. 'He was vulnerable with me quite a bit, so I would feel responsible for helping him, and then I would feel bad for him,' she explained. 'I mean, I can describe it, but I'm not a psychologist or a therapist.' As the trial continues, the jury is expected to hear testimony from a third woman, using the pseudonym Jane, who was also allegedly coerced into the freak-offs and filmed against her will.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Arellano: In a turbulent time, LAFD union head isn't who you think he is
With piercing brown eyes, a biker mustache, a gravelly voice and the build of an NFL defensive end, Freddy Escobar has long cut an imposing figure in Los Angeles' political conflagrations as head of the city firefighters union. He was in my face during a Rick Caruso campaign stop in 2022, complaining about what he felt was my overly negative coverage of the mega-developer's run for mayor. Most recently, Escobar blasted Mayor Karen Bass for firing L.A. Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley in the wake of the Palisades fire. 'Management and labor, together. We were unstoppable," the 55-year-old told me during an hourlong interview at union headquarters in Westlake. "And [Crowley] was used as a scapegoat. We removed a big, big champion for us.' Read more: Firefighter union rallies behind LAFD chief, denounces unsigned attack on her performance President of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City since 2018, Escobar is serving a final two-year term before he retires. During his tenure, L.A. firefighters have weathered some tough times: COVID. The Palisades inferno. Fewer fire stations than there were in 1960, when the population was much lower than today's nearly 4 million. Scandals involving past union leaders. 'The members in the field are doing well,' Escobar responded when I asked how the firefighters are, after all that. He sat in an armchair, thick glasses and a long-sleeved shirt softening his look. Mementos from his 35-year firefighting career surrounded us: Family photos. Helmets and hats. Lanyards. Liquor bottles. Santa Claus dressed as a firefighter. Dozens of binders filled with reports. 'You will never hear them complain," he said of his colleagues in the field — the complaining is left to him. 'What we're doing every single day is not sustainable in the field — I don't care how young you are,' Escobar said a few seconds later, more weary than angry. 'It's a Band-Aid that's been on for years and years. And we need to fix it.' Since the Palisades fire, Escobar has been everywhere: On CNN touring the devastation. Claiming in USA Today that the LAFD is "woefully, dangerously understaffed." Appearing at City Hall alongside Crowley in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the City Council to reinstate her. "She was the first chief that has actually taken our advice. And I said, 'Hey, I'll be with you all the way to the end of this,'" he said. Born in Ecuador to a Ecuadorean mother and a Colombian father, Escobar moved to Pico-Union when he was 4, then to Lynwood as 'the gangs were coming in.' During fourth grade at Roosevelt Elementary, firefighters responded to a blaze at his school. Soon after, his class visited a fire station for career day. 'You're just a kid,' Escobar remembered. 'You're in awe — they're your heroes, you know. You're like, 'Oh, these guys are bigger than the man upstairs.'' He participated in a firefighting Explorers program at Downey High, then joined the LAFD after a stint with the Marines. His first assignment: Station 11 in Pico-Union. Escobar became a shop steward but didn't think of getting more involved in labor leadership until the early 2000s, when drivers twice crashed into his idling fire truck. "The chaps there, we call them," he said, a term I had never heard for chapines — Guatemalans. Escobar didn't blink as he began to channel his inner Nury Martinez, the former City Council president who resigned after her racist ramblings were caught on a recording. "They love to drink during the day and night. They just drink a lot. They get behind cars, they drive. So I got hit ... twice by chaps." His casual insults against an important part of L.A.'s fabric were so out of nowhere that I just stared ahead and let him go on. He said he complained to a colleague that his union rep wasn't defending him enough during the investigation into the crashes, which ultimately cleared him of wrongdoing. The colleague encouraged him: "Six months later, it's election time and he says, 'Hey, big mouth. Here you go. You want to make a difference? Make a difference.'" Escobar followed through, winning a position on the union's 10-member executive board. After years of experiencing what he described as "a crybaby arena' that was more "about the usual keeping your own power" than helping the rank and file, he took on an incumbent for the top spot and won. Read more: COVID-19 has cost LAFD $22.5 million in overtime, much of it to cover for sick firefighters During the pandemic, the union made national news for refusing to sign off on a mandate that city employees be vaccinated or risk losing their jobs. Escobar got the COVID vaccine but felt he had to respect the wishes of his members who didn't want the shot. That battle "separated us a lot" politically, he said, but lingering internal enmity largely dissipated after the ordeal of fighting the Palisades fire. Escobar's eyes glistened when I brought up his warning a month before the fire that 'someone will die' if LAFD resources were further cut. The Palisades fire, which ignited Jan. 7 after forecasters warned of catastrophically high winds, destroyed nearly 7,000 structures and killed 12 people. A Times investigation found that LAFD officials chose to not order roughly 1,000 firefighters to remain on duty for a second shift as the winds were building — which would have doubled the personnel on hand. Bass cited the failure to keep those firefighters on duty as one of her reasons for firing Crowley. Escobar dismissed The Times' findings as too reliant on former LAFD employees "who have their own agenda." He didn't directly answer my question about whether he thought Crowley did everything she could, asserting that she was scapegoated without an official investigation. He argued instead that the Palisades disaster could have been better confronted if LAFD wasn't so underfunded — he wants to put a bond measure for the Fire department on the 2026 ballot. He declined to speculate about why Bass fired Crowley, who publicly criticized the mayor days after the Palisades fire began for supposedly shortchanging her department. The two used to be 'thick as thieves," he said. "Bass was wearing Crowley's brush jacket and helmet and all the fire stuff. They were locked arms, then they had one little breakup. Imagine if you were married — have one breakup, you're gonna get divorced?' He made no apologies for his combative public persona: 'They want to call it being abrasive, being a bully. No, it's standing up for what's right.' Then the conversation turned to diversity within the LAFD. Earlier, Escobar acknowledged he had benefited from a 1974 consent decree requiring that half of LAFD hires be from a minority group (the decree ended in 2002). Now, he criticized the fire commission — the civilian board that oversees LAFD — for supposedly 'want[ing] to have a no-fail academy' in the name of reflecting the city's demographics. "We have plenty of people of color [and] gender that could — that should represent the city of Los Angeles without lowering the standards," Escobar said. "The females in the fire service ... we'd love to have them all. But if you're a female and you want, you could go to Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and still have a great career and not do the call load we do." He thinks white and Black firefighters are 'overrepresented, whatever that means' in the LAFD, with whites the beneficiaries of what was once 'an all-white department' and Black representation reflecting "how many Blacks are in the community." Whites make up 28% of L.A.'s population and 43% of city firefighters, while Blacks account for 9% of the population and 11% of firefighters. The LAFD is only 7% female. The other big disparity is Latinos — 47% of the population but just 31% of LAFD. 'It's not for everybody,' Escobar said, before cracking, 'They all want to be soccer players!' Earlier, he said he had failed a tryout with the L.A. Galaxy because "I wasn't a professional soccer player. Same with firefighting. Firefighting is not for everybody." I laughed at his joke but reminded him of his own trajectory. He replied that LAFD has 'good' recruitment programs, but ultimately 'you've got to love to work with your hands.... The new generation's interesting. They all want to be Instagram-famous. They'll want to make a lot of money and not wake up." Escobar was tender at times during our chat, confessing that it "breaks his heart" that he hasn't been more present for his wife and children. He thinks he "failed" at not pushing for more resources. But his evasive explanation about why there aren't more Latino firefighters in L.A., coupled with his anti-Guatemalan thoughts, cast him as a type of Angeleno I know too well: The powerful Latino who dismisses their own kind the moment they get theirs. We eventually headed to one of Escobar's old haunts: Station 26, motto 'Anytime Anyplace,' where he had climbed through the ranks, all the way to captain. Station Capt. Al Ballestra praised Escobar for still covering holiday firefighting shifts. Escobar picks up about four shifts a month, even though his job as union president is full time. 'It's what any membership would want to have in their union leader,' the 18-year veteran said. 'Someone with boots-on-the-ground experience who keeps that connection with us." Escobar then checked in on a rookie training session in the rec room. I asked the group what they thought of their union head. Engineer Gordon Wilson raised his hand, and the room got quiet. He rattled off all the levels of bureaucracy — internal, the fire commission, the City Council, the mayor — that intersect with L.A. firefighters. He pointed at Escobar. 'This gentleman here,' Wilson said loudly, 'has an uncanny ability to communicate with them all." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
21-03-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
In a turbulent time, LAFD union head isn't who you think he is
With piercing brown eyes, a biker mustache, a gravelly voice and the build of an NFL defensive end, Freddy Escobar has long cut an imposing figure in Los Angeles' political conflagrations as head of the city firefighters union. He was in my face during a Rick Caruso campaign stop in 2022, complaining about what he felt was my overly negative coverage of the mega-developer's run for mayor. Most recently, Escobar blasted Mayor Karen Bass for firing L.A. Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley in the wake of the Palisades fire. 'Management and labor, together. We were unstoppable,' the 55-year-old told me during an hourlong interview at union headquarters in Westlake. 'And [Crowley] was used as a scapegoat. We removed a big, big champion for us.' President of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City since 2018, Escobar is serving a final two-year term before he retires. During his tenure, L.A. firefighters have weathered some tough times: COVID. The Palisades inferno. Fewer fire stations than there were in 1960, when the population was much lower than today's nearly 4 million. Scandals involving past union leaders. 'The members in the field are doing well,' Escobar responded when I asked how the firefighters are, after all that. He sat in an armchair, thick glasses and a long-sleeved shirt softening his look. Mementos from his 35-year firefighting career surrounded us: Family photos. Helmets and hats. Lanyards. Liquor bottles. Santa Claus dressed as a firefighter. Dozens of binders filled with reports. 'You will never hear them complain,' he said of his colleagues in the field — the complaining is left to him. 'What we're doing every single day is not sustainable in the field — I don't care how young you are,' Escobar said a few seconds later, more weary than angry. 'It's a Band-Aid that's been on for years and years. And we need to fix it.' Since the Palisades fire, Escobar has been everywhere: On CNN touring the devastation. Claiming in USA Today that the LAFD is 'woefully, dangerously understaffed.' Appearing at City Hall alongside Crowley in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the City Council to reinstate her. 'She was the first chief that has actually taken our advice. And I said, 'Hey, I'll be with you all the way to the end of this,'' he said. Born in Ecuador to a Ecuadorean mother and a Colombian father, Escobar moved to Pico-Union when he was 4, then to Lynwood as 'the gangs were coming in.' During fourth grade at Roosevelt Elementary, firefighters responded to a blaze at his school. Soon after, his class visited a fire station for career day. 'You're just a kid,' Escobar remembered. 'You're in awe — they're your heroes, you know. You're like, 'Oh, these guys are bigger than the man upstairs.'' He participated in a firefighting Explorers program at Downey High, then joined the LAFD after a stint with the Marines. His first assignment: Station 11 in Pico-Union. Escobar became a shop steward but didn't think of getting more involved in labor leadership until the early 2000s, when drivers twice crashed into his idling fire truck. 'The chaps there, we call them,' he said, a term I had never heard for chapines — Guatemalans. Escobar didn't blink as he began to channel his inner Nury Martinez, the former City Council president who resigned after her racist ramblings were caught on a recording. 'They love to drink during the day and night. They just drink a lot. They get behind cars, they drive. So I got hit ... twice by chaps.' His casual insults against an important part of L.A.'s fabric were so out of nowhere that I just stared ahead and let him go on. He said he complained to a colleague that his union rep wasn't defending him enough during the investigation into the crashes, which ultimately cleared him of wrongdoing. The colleague encouraged him: 'Six months later, it's election time and he says, 'Hey, big mouth. Here you go. You want to make a difference? Make a difference.'' Escobar followed through, winning a position on the union's 10-member executive board. After years of experiencing what he described as 'a crybaby arena' that was more 'about the usual keeping your own power' than helping the rank and file, he took on an incumbent for the top spot and won. During the pandemic, the union made national news for refusing to sign off on a mandate that city employees be vaccinated or risk losing their jobs. Escobar got the COVID vaccine but felt he had to respect the wishes of his members who didn't want the shot. That battle 'separated us a lot' politically, he said, but lingering internal enmity largely dissipated after the ordeal of fighting the Palisades fire. Escobar's eyes glistened when I brought up his warning a month before the fire that 'someone will die' if LAFD resources were further cut. The Palisades fire, which ignited Jan. 7 after forecasters warned of catastrophically high winds, destroyed nearly 7,000 structures and killed 12 people. A Times investigation found that LAFD officials chose to not order roughly 1,000 firefighters to remain on duty for a second shift as the winds were building — which would have doubled the personnel on hand. Bass cited the failure to keep those firefighters on duty as one of her reasons for firing Crowley. Escobar dismissed The Times' findings as too reliant on former LAFD employees 'who have their own agenda.' He didn't directly answer my question about whether he thought Crowley did everything she could, asserting that she was scapegoated without an official investigation. He argued instead that the Palisades disaster could have been better confronted if LAFD wasn't so underfunded — he wants to put a bond measure for the Fire department on the 2026 ballot. He declined to speculate about why Bass fired Crowley, who publicly criticized the mayor days after the Palisades fire began for supposedly shortchanging her department. The two used to be 'thick as thieves,' he said. 'Bass was wearing Crowley's brush jacket and helmet and all the fire stuff. They were locked arms, then they had one little breakup. Imagine if you were married — have one breakup, you're gonna get divorced?' He made no apologies for his combative public persona: 'They want to call it being abrasive, being a bully. No, it's standing up for what's right.' Then the conversation turned to diversity within the LAFD. Earlier, Escobar acknowledged he had benefited from a 1974 consent decree requiring that half of LAFD hires be from a minority group (the decree ended in 2002). Now, he criticized the fire commission — the civilian board that oversees LAFD — for supposedly 'want[ing] to have a no-fail academy' in the name of reflecting the city's demographics. 'We have plenty of people of color [and] gender that could — that should represent the city of Los Angeles without lowering the standards,' Escobar said. 'The females in the fire service ... we'd love to have them all. But if you're a female and you want, you could go to Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and still have a great career and not do the call load we do.' He thinks white and Black firefighters are 'overrepresented, whatever that means' in the LAFD, with whites the beneficiaries of what was once 'an all-white department' and Black representation reflecting 'how many Blacks are in the community.' Whites make up 28% of L.A.'s population and 43% of city firefighters, while Blacks account for 9% of the population and 11% of firefighters. The LAFD is only 7% female. The other big disparity is Latinos — 47% of the population but just 31% of LAFD. 'It's not for everybody,' Escobar said, before cracking, 'They all want to be soccer players!' Earlier, he said he had failed a tryout with the L.A. Galaxy because 'I wasn't a professional soccer player. Same with firefighting. Firefighting is not for everybody.' I laughed at his joke but reminded him of his own trajectory. He replied that LAFD has 'good' recruitment programs, but ultimately 'you've got to love to work with your hands.... The new generation's interesting. They all want to be Instagram-famous. They'll want to make a lot of money and not wake up.' Escobar was tender at times during our chat, confessing that it 'breaks his heart' that he hasn't been more present for his wife and children. He thinks he 'failed' at not pushing for more resources. But his evasive explanation about why there aren't more Latino firefighters in L.A., coupled with his anti-Guatemalan thoughts, cast him as a type of Angeleno I know too well: The powerful Latino who dismisses their own kind the moment they get theirs. We eventually headed to one of Escobar's old haunts: Station 26, motto 'Anytime Anyplace,' where he had climbed through the ranks, all the way to captain. Station Capt. Al Ballestra praised Escobar for still covering holiday firefighting shifts. Escobar picks up about four shifts a month, even though his job as union president is full time. 'It's what any membership would want to have in their union leader,' the 18-year veteran said. 'Someone with boots-on-the-ground experience who keeps that connection with us.' Escobar then checked in on a rookie training session in the rec room. I asked the group what they thought of their union head. Engineer Gordon Wilson raised his hand, and the room got quiet. He rattled off all the levels of bureaucracy — internal, the fire commission, the City Council, the mayor — that intersect with L.A. firefighters. He pointed at Escobar. 'This gentleman here,' Wilson said loudly, 'has an uncanny ability to communicate with them all.'
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
How Many Fires Does It Take to Give Up?
The Palisades Fire burned its way through Jennifer Champion's life. It started in the hills where her family liked to hike and moved along the roads she took with her daughters to Elysse's high school (burned), Annabelle's middle school (partially burned), and Charlise's day care (too damaged to use). Nearby, her husband owned three sober-living facilities (one burned; the other two are now uninhabitable, surrounded by rubble). The roof and front wall collapsed at the grocery store where Charlise would get free sprinkle cookies; the one down the street is a pile of warped steel. Champion's family had lived in the Palisades for about 16 years and, two years ago, leased a house they'd hoped to stay in long-term. That home burned. So did most of the other ones on their street. Now they are living about 45 minutes away, in Manhattan Beach, where some other Palisades friends relocated too. 'Is it convenient for all of us? None of us,' Champion told me, but they wanted to stay together. Elysse transferred to a high school in Santa Monica, about an hour away in traffic, with Palisades friends; Annabelle's school found a temporary location there too. Champion's job at Pepperdine University can be nearly two hours away. But she isn't sure she will be able to keep it anyway, especially now that they don't have child care for Charlise. They are past the first days of the fire—evacuating, securing temporary housing—and the first few weeks—finding a long-term rental, furnishing it with donations from a friend, buying pillows and cutlery. But 'none of us know what to do next,' Champion said. Her Palisades friends talk: Do they stay where they are and make Manhattan Beach their home? Rebuilding the Palisades will take years. But right now, they all want to go back if they can. In January, I drove through Altadena, the other neighborhood destroyed by that month's fires, with Frank Bigelow, Cal Fire's deputy director of wildfire preparedness. At lot after lot after lot, the only bit of house still standing was the chimney. The air was acrid and quiet. To Bigelow, the scene recalled an image from a 1961 fire that razed Bel Air, about five miles from the Palisades. (Local legend in Malibu holds that the town's flock of colorful parrots is descended from pets that escaped Bel Air's burning homes.) The L.A. Fire Department produced a documentary postmortem a year later about all the ways the city had built itself flammable. That old film, he told me, 'speaks to every one of the issues we saw' in January—a brush fire that quickly became an urban one; clogged evacuation routes; hydrants running dry; houses built on steep hillsides, where flames travel fastest. Bigelow rewatches it every few years. At the end, over black-and-white footage of a rubble neighborhood, the narrator intones: 'Now fireplaces stand as tombstones over row upon row of dead homes on dead streets.' As we drove, Bigelow pointed to the chimneys. 'Tombstones,' he said. After the 1961 fire, people kept building in Bel Air and into the hills. My father grew up one neighborhood over and, in the 1970s, bought a plot of land in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, overlooking Malibu, where I grew up. And all of the ignition points that humans brought in—power lines, heavy equipment, cars, cigarette butts—started more fires than the land was adapted to handle. Southern California's chaparral needs fire to regenerate, but historically, it burned only every 30 to 100 years, Alexandra Syphard, a senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute, told me. More frequent fires meant it no longer had enough time to recover between burns, so non-native grasses—far more flammable—filled the gaps. Over time, the landscape has become more and more fit to burn. When a wildfire came through my neighborhood in 1993, it traced a similar path to a fire from 1970, and traveled through burn scars from seven other fires. That 1993 conflagration lapped at the windows of my childhood home; the Palisades Fire finally burned it down. [Read: The place where I grew up is gone] California has tried to build for the inevitable. After the Bel Air fire, Los Angeles updated its building codes, outlawing wood-shingled roofs and mandating that homeowners clear the brush around their house. Since 2008, the state has required that new homes in extremely fire-prone areas—such as my childhood neighborhood and much of the Palisades—have fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, and ember-resistant eves and vents. Many homes in the Palisades were constructed long before 2008 and, when they're rebuilt, will be brought up to those standards. Fire can consume even the most defensible house, but if everyone designs less flammably, the whole neighborhood is less likely to go, Emily Schlickman, a fire-resiliency researcher at UC Davis, told me. In her ideal world, high-risk communities would have a ring of cleared land around them as a firebreak, robbing the flames of fuel. The local government in Paradise, California, which was destroyed by the 2018 Camp Fire, is trying to buy up land around the community to do precisely that. But many vulnerable places forgo such measures because they could do everything right and burn anyway. Los Angeles is still trying to decide how to remake its destroyed neighborhoods. A commission of volunteer experts will give the county recommendations on reconstructing (and retrofitting) the area for future disasters. Steve Soboroff, the real-estate developer whom Mayor Karen Bass appointed chief recovery officer, has promised that the Palisades will be rebuilt resiliently (and, also, somehow have their Fourth of July parade this year). And the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently pledged to put all of the Palisades' power lines underground. In the days after the fire, some Angelenos and experts also advocated for dramatically remaking the Palisades—to be denser, for instance, with firebreaks around the community—but those notions may already be more or less moot. Many residents simply want to get home as quickly as possible, and the city and state have waived certain permitting requirements for those who want to rebuild essentially their same house on the same lot. Every time these fires wreak this level of damage, people look at the melted cars, curled stucco, and thousands of displaced residents and ask: Should human beings return to these places at all? 'When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade,' Mike Davis wrote in his famous essay 'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.' (You can tell what he thought of our whole shrubland coastal-living experiment.) Taxpayer dollars helped rebuild these areas, many occupied by rich people, again and again and again. Why not just accept that this coastline is kindling and move on? But abandoning these landscapes altogether just isn't realistic, researchers told me. Almost a third of all housing in the continental U.S. is already in places where settlements and wilderness intermix. All those people can't just move. And abandonment isn't always the best way to manage fires, either. Move everyone out of these half-wild places, and you may have taken away the people who were clearing brush and otherwise reducing the fire risk for the city nearby, Miriam Greenberg, a disaster researcher at UC Santa Cruz who studies the wildland-urban interface, told me. Leaving these areas untouched, Greenberg said, means 'the potential for future disasters increases significantly for those adjacent urban areas, which is most of California.' People have chosen to live here, with fire, for generations. My classmate and her father attended the same middle school; my friends' parents and grandparents have been in Malibu for decades. A friend recently walked me through his home, which was severely smoke-damaged in the Palisades Fire and which, he told me, was a rebuild: The house had burned down in the 1993 fire. I asked if he'd ever leave, and he laughed: 'When I die, I guess.' Most displaced residents I spoke with want to come home. Ginny Wiley, now in her 80s, grew up in her grandfather's store, a wooden shack called Wiley's Bait and Tackle, and took it over decades later. She used to live behind the shop, in what had once been a cottage-style motel for the construction workers who built the Pacific Coast Highway. When the state bought the bungalows to preserve as a historic site, Wiley moved into an apartment in the Pacific Palisades. The fire leveled Wiley's Bait, the bungalows, and her apartment; she lived in her car for a month and then in a temporary Airbnb. She told me she hopes to rebuild: 'I'm going to stay with the store as long as I can.' Insurance helps. But in my community, the difference between 'good' and 'okay' coverage is already determining people's futures. Lisa Machenberg and her husband are going to rent nearby while building a home with enough room for future grandchildren; the Amirani family, whose daughter I used to play softball with, hope to live in a trailer on their burned lot, if they can afford to rebuild. Their private insurer dropped them a few years ago—one of the many companies that stopped writing policies in California—and the Amiranis estimate that their coverage will foot only about half the cost of construction. Renters like Jennifer Champion and her family have no guarantee that they can return to the neighborhood. The Champions asked their landlord if they could purchase his burned lot, but he doesn't plan to sell. Jennifer's eldest daughter reminds her that, by the time the Palisades take form again, she will be away at college. Still, the Champions have added themselves to a directory, Protect Pali, that matches people looking to live in the Palisades with residents who want to sell their land. [Read: How to rebuild from the ashes] Because not everyone wants to come back. Jane Warden refuses to rebuild. In 2018, when the Woolsey Fire came through the western half of Malibu (spared by the Palisades Fire this year), it burned down the home where she'd raised her children and spent 10 years growing a garden of eucalyptus, palm trees, and pine trees—highly flammable plants that are everywhere in this part of California. Nick Tinoco, a sociologist at UCLA, followed people in Woolsey's aftermath and told me that most people he'd spoken with had initially planned to rebuild. But only about 40 percent of the homes lost in that fire have been. The reality, Tinoco found, 'was two-plus years of them trying to rebuild and then reaching a point where it was either better for them financially or psychically to let go and move on,' even if only to the next town over. (Trees in the canyons are still black from Woolsey; my prom date's house is now an overgrown lot of mustard and jimson weed.) People tend to think climate migration is driven by the desire to flee a hazardous place, Tinoco said, but really, it is a by-product of 'the long process of trying to stay.' Warden had originally planned to rebuild too, but she got so fed up with permitting that she sold her lot; the buyer quickly built a giant house, and sold it for four times what Warden had paid for the original, she told me. She moved to a neighborhood on the other side of Malibu so her kids could stay in the same school. She started a new garden of less flammable native plants and made a five-foot hardscape perimeter of sand and gravel around her home. The Palisades Fire burned down her house again anyway, and most of her neighborhood. Her HOA is talking about using factory-built homes when their community rebuilds. 'It makes sense, right? Because then you can replace your house easily, if we start thinking of housing as more semipermanent,' she told me. But she personally plans never to live in Malibu again. Losing a house to fire 'twice is okay, but three times starts to feel like carelessness,' she said. She will replace her Christmas ornaments for the second time, but she has given up on keeping a personal library and has been leaving books wherever she finishes them. She and her husband are considering moving to the East Coast or to nearby Santa Monica, where the fire risk is generally lower (although portions of it were evacuated in January). Fire is a brutal sorting mechanism, deciding who can actually afford to live in a place and who can't. More money generally enters an area after a fire, because they tend to happen in coveted landscapes, Kathryn McConnell, a disaster sociologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. Five years after Northern California's Camp Fire, home prices in Paradise have gone up, and so has the number of houses sold that were built on spec, according to a study published last month. Only about five of the area's 30 mobile-home parks have been rebuilt. The Palisades and Malibu are already extraordinarily expensive places to live; the fires will likely make them more so. The median home price in the Palisades is north of $4 million, and the median income is a little less than $200,000. Some people have been living in the homes their grandparents bought years ago or, like my parents, in mobile-home parks (two of which burned in the Palisades). But after a fire, rebuilding an old house can be financially impossible, especially if it was underinsured, and mobile-home parks might never reopen if the owners decide to sell and move on. So far, investors have been the earliest buyers of the burnt lots that people have put on the market. The first one sold in the Palisades belonged to an art teacher, who asked for $999,000 and got about $1.2 million. Richard Schulman, the real-estate agent who brokered the deal, told me that the buyer is a real-estate investor who plans to either build a spec home to sell or just sit on the land for a few years until more people move back and the property values rise. Schulman is bullish on the Palisades. 'This is very valuable land to be on,' he said—secluded yet convenient, with ocean views and a sea breeze. Last month, I stood with him in a leveled townhouse complex along the road where, during the fire, evacuating residents abandoned their vehicles and ran. A mudslide had since closed the lower half of it. 'I'm 99 percent sure this is the unit here,' Schulman said, indicating some undulating stucco indistinguishable from the other undulating stucco. He told me that this particular pile was a condo he'd recently listed—a great buy, he said, for a highly speculative investor. A small patch of grass on the burnt hillside was still alive. Schulman pointed at the unburnt bit: 'If you look at it the right way, it's like, This is beautiful. There's trees; there's green.' The air smelled of eucalyptus and dead fish, which were lying on the walkway beside us. They had survived the fire, only for the recent rains to wash them out of the community pond. Schulman made a picture frame out of his thumbs and forefingers and held it toward the hill. 'If you ignore the burnt hillside back there,' he said, 'this is a great place to live.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
18-03-2025
- General
- Atlantic
How Many Fires Does It Take to Give Up?
The Palisades Fire burned its way through Jennifer Champion's life. It started in the hills where her family liked to hike and moved along the roads she took with her daughters to Elysse's high school (burned), Annabelle's middle school (partially burned), and Charlise's day care (too damaged to use). Nearby, her husband owned three sober-living facilities (one burned; the other two are now uninhabitable, surrounded by rubble). The roof and front wall collapsed at the grocery store where Charlise would get free sprinkle cookies; the one down the street is a pile of warped steel. Champion's family had lived in the Palisades for about 16 years and, two years ago, leased a house they'd hoped to stay in long-term. That home burned. So did most of the other ones on their street. Now they are living about 45 minutes away, in Manhattan Beach, where some other Palisades friends relocated too. 'Is it convenient for all of us? None of us,' Champion told me, but they wanted to stay together. Elysse transferred to a high school in Santa Monica, about an hour away in traffic, with Palisades friends; Annabelle's school found a temporary location there too. Champion's job at Pepperdine University can be nearly two hours away. But she isn't sure she will be able to keep it anyway, especially now that they don't have child care for Charlise. They are past the first days of the fire—evacuating, securing temporary housing — and the first few weeks—finding a long-term rental, furnishing it with donations from a friend, buying pillows and cutlery. But 'none of us know what to do next,' Champion said. Her Palisades friends talk: Do they stay where they are and make Manhattan Beach their home? Rebuilding the Palisades will take years. But right now, they all want to go back if they can. In January, I drove through Altadena, the other neighborhood destroyed by that month's fires, with Frank Bigelow, Cal Fire's deputy director of wildfire preparedness. At lot after lot after lot, the only bit of house still standing was the chimney. The air was acrid and quiet. To Bigelow, the scene recalled an image from a 1961 fire that razed Bel Air, about five miles from the Palisades. (Local legend in Malibu holds that the town's flock of colorful parrots is descended from pets that escaped Bel Air's burning homes.) The L.A. Fire Department produced a documentary postmortem a year later about all the ways the city had built itself flammable. That old film, he told me, 'speaks to every one of the issues we saw' in January—a brush fire that quickly became an urban one; clogged evacuation routes; hydrants running dry; houses built on steep hillsides, where flames travel fastest. Bigelow rewatches it every few years. At the end, over black-and-white footage of a rubble neighborhood, the narrator intones: 'Now fireplaces stand as tombstones over row upon row of dead homes on dead streets.' As we drove, Bigelow pointed to the chimneys. 'Tombstones,' he said. After the 1961 fire, people kept building in Bel Air and into the hills. My father grew up one neighborhood over and, in the 1970s, bought a plot of land in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, overlooking Malibu, where I grew up. And all of the ignition points that humans brought in—power lines, heavy equipment, cars, cigarette butts—started more fires than the land was adapted to handle. Southern California's chaparral needs fire to regenerate, but historically, it burned only every 30 to 100 years, Alexandra Syphard, a senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute, told me. More frequent fires meant it no longer had enough time to recover between burns, so non-native grasses—far more flammable—filled the gaps. Over time, the landscape has become more and more fit to burn. When a wildfire came through my neighborhood in 1993, it traced a similar path to a fire from 1970, and traveled through burn scars from seven other fires. That 1993 conflagration lapped at the windows of my childhood home; the Palisades Fire finally burned it down. California has tried to build for the inevitable. After the Bel Air fire, Los Angeles updated its building codes, outlawing wood-shingled roofs and mandating that homeowners clear the brush around their house. Since 2008, the state has required that new homes in extremely fire-prone areas—such as my childhood neighborhood and much of the Palisades—have fire-resistant siding, tempered glass, and ember-resistant eves and vents. Many homes in the Palisades were constructed long before 2008 and, when they're rebuilt, will be brought up to those standards. Fire can consume even the most defensible house, but if everyone designs less flammably, the whole neighborhood is less likely to go, Emily Schlickman, a fire-resiliency researcher at UC Davis, told me. In her ideal world, high-risk communities would have a ring of cleared land around them as a firebreak, robbing the flames of fuel. The local government in Paradise, California, which was destroyed by the 2018 Camp Fire, is trying to buy up land around the community to do precisely that. But many vulnerable places forgo such measures because they could do everything right and burn anyway. Los Angeles is still trying to decide how to remake its destroyed neighborhoods. A commission of volunteer experts will give the county recommendations on reconstructing (and retrofitting) the area for future disasters. Steve Soboroff, the real-estate developer whom Mayor Karen Bass appointed chief recovery officer, has promised that the Palisades will be rebuilt resiliently (and, also, somehow have their Fourth of July parade this year). And the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power recently pledged to put all of the Palisades' power lines underground. In the days after the fire, some Angelenos and experts also advocated for dramatically remaking the Palisades—to be denser, for instance, with firebreaks around the community—but those notions may already be more or less moot. Many residents simply want to get home as quickly as possible, and the city and state have waived certain permitting requirements for those who want to rebuild essentially their same house on the same lot. Every time these fires wreak this level of damage, people look at the melted cars, curled stucco, and thousands of displaced residents and ask: Should human beings return to these places at all? 'When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade,' Mike Davis wrote in his famous essay 'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.' (You can tell what he thought of our whole shrubland coastal-living experiment.) Taxpayer dollars helped rebuild these areas, many occupied by rich people, again and again and again. Why not just accept that this coastline is kindling and move on? But abandoning these landscapes altogether just isn't realistic, researchers told me. Almost a third of all housing in the continental U.S. is already in places where settlements and wilderness intermix. All those people can't just move. And abandonment isn't always the best way to manage fires, either. Move everyone out of these half-wild places, and you may have taken away the people who were clearing brush and otherwise reducing the fire risk for the city nearby, Miriam Greenberg, a disaster researcher at UC Santa Cruz who studies the wildland-urban interface, told me. Leaving these areas untouched, Greenberg said, means 'the potential for future disasters increases significantly for those adjacent urban areas, which is most of California.' People have chosen to live here, with fire, for generations. My classmate and her father attended the same middle school; my friends' parents and grandparents have been in Malibu for decades. A friend recently walked me through his home, which was severely smoke-damaged in the Palisades Fire and which, he told me, was a rebuild: The house had burned down in the 1993 fire. I asked if he'd ever leave, and he laughed: 'When I die, I guess.' Most displaced residents I spoke with want to come home. Ginny Wiley, now in her 80s, grew up in her grandfather's store, a wooden shack called Wiley's Bait and Tackle, and took it over decades later. She used to live behind the shop, in what had once been a cottage-style motel for the construction workers who built the Pacific Coast Highway. When the state bought the bungalows to preserve as a historic site, Wiley moved into an apartment in the Pacific Palisades. The fire leveled Wiley's Bait, the bungalows, and her apartment; she lived in her car for a month and then in a temporary Airbnb. She told me she hopes to rebuild: 'I'm going to stay with the store as long as I can.' Insurance helps. But in my community, the difference between 'good' and 'okay' coverage is already determining people's futures. Lisa Machenberg and her husband are going to rent nearby while building a home with enough room for future grandchildren; the Amirani family, whose daughter I used to play softball with, hope to live in a trailer on their burned lot, if they can afford to rebuild. Their private insurer dropped them a few years ago—one of the many companies that stopped writing policies in California—and the Amiranis estimate that their coverage will foot only about half the cost of construction. Renters like Jennifer Champion and her family have no guarantee that they can return to the neighborhood. The Champions asked their landlord if they could purchase his burned lot, but he doesn't plan to sell. Jennifer's eldest daughter reminds her that, by the time the Palisades take form again, she will be away at college. Still, the Champions have added themselves to a directory, Protect Pali, that matches people looking to live in the Palisades with residents who want to sell their land. Because not everyone wants to come back. Jane Warden refuses to rebuild. In 2018, when the Woolsey Fire came through the western half of Malibu (spared by the Palisades Fire this year), it burned down the home where she'd raised her children and spent 10 years growing a garden of eucalyptus, palm trees, and pine trees—highly flammable plants that are everywhere in this part of California. Nick Tinoco, a sociologist at UCLA, followed people in Woolsey's aftermath and told me that most people he'd spoken with had initially planned to rebuild. But only about 40 percent of the homes lost in that fire have been. The reality, Tinoco found, 'was two-plus years of them trying to rebuild and then reaching a point where it was either better for them financially or psychically to let go and move on,' even if only to the next town over. (Trees in the canyons are still black from Woolsey; my prom date's house is now an overgrown lot of mustard and jimson weed.) People tend to think climate migration is driven by the desire to flee a hazardous place, Tinoco said, but really, it is a by-product of 'the long process of trying to stay.' Warden had originally planned to rebuild too, but she got so fed up with permitting that she sold her lot; the buyer quickly built a giant house, and sold it for four times what Warden had paid for the original, she told me. She moved to a neighborhood on the other side of Malibu so her kids could stay in the same school. She started a new garden of less flammable native plants and made a five-foot hardscape perimeter of sand and gravel around her home. The Palisades Fire burned down her house again anyway, and most of her neighborhood. Her HOA is talking about using factory-built homes when their community rebuilds. 'It makes sense, right? Because then you can replace your house easily, if we start thinking of housing as more semipermanent,' she told me. But she personally plans never to live in Malibu again. Losing a house to fire 'twice is okay, but three times starts to feel like carelessness,' she said. She will replace her Christmas ornaments for the second time, but she has given up on keeping a personal library and has been leaving books wherever she finishes them. She and her husband are considering moving to the East Coast or to nearby Santa Monica, where the fire risk is generally lower (although portions of it were evacuated in January). Fire is a brutal sorting mechanism, deciding who can actually afford to live in a place and who can't. More money generally enters an area after a fire, because they tend to happen in coveted landscapes, Kathryn McConnell, a disaster sociologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. Five years after Northern California's Camp Fire, home prices in Paradise have gone up, and so has the number of houses sold that were built on spec, according to a study published last month. Only about five of the area's 30 mobile-home parks have been rebuilt. The Palisades and Malibu are already extraordinarily expensive places to live; the fires will likely make them more so. The median home price in the Palisades is north of $4 million, and the median income is a little less than $200,000. Some people have been living in the homes their grandparents bought years ago or, like my parents, in mobile-home parks (two of which burned in the Palisades). But after a fire, rebuilding an old house can be financially impossible, especially if it was underinsured, and mobile-home parks might never reopen if the owners decide to sell and move on. So far, investors have been the earliest buyers of the burnt lots that people have put on the market. The first one sold in the Palisades belonged to an art teacher, who asked for $999,000 and got about $1.2 million. Richard Schulman, the real-estate agent who brokered the deal, told me that the buyer is a real-estate investor who plans to either build a spec home to sell or just sit on the land for a few years until more people move back and the property values rise. Schulman is bullish on the Palisades. 'This is very valuable land to be on,' he said—secluded yet convenient, with ocean views and a sea breeze. Last month, I stood with him in a leveled townhouse complex along the road where, during the fire, evacuating residents abandoned their vehicles and ran. A mudslide had since closed the lower half of it. 'I'm 99 percent sure this is the unit here,' Schulman said, indicating some undulating stucco indistinguishable from the other undulating stucco. He told me that this particular pile was a condo he'd recently listed—a great buy, he said, for a highly speculative investor. A small patch of grass on the burnt hillside was still alive. Schulman pointed at the unburnt bit: 'If you look at it the right way, it's like, This is beautiful. There's trees; there's green.' The air smelled of eucalyptus and dead fish, which were lying on the walkway beside us. They had survived the fire, only for the recent rains to wash them out of the community pond. Schulman made a picture frame out of his thumbs and forefingers and held it toward the hill. 'If you ignore the burnt hillside back there,' he said, 'this is a great place to live.'
