On Tuesday night, my phone lit up with a text from the Los Angeles Fire Department: ‘Those in the Palisades Area evacuate now.’
While I work in New York City, I keep a home in the Pacific Palisades in the city of LA. It’s where I raised my kids, and where some of my family’s fondest memories were made. To me, it’s the most special place on earth.
I immediately called my neighbor Andrew and asked him to gather my ‘Go Box’ (important documents, a few religious icons and paintings) from the house.
In Southern California, natural disasters are a fact of life. We’re always ready to run. But we always made our way back to our sweet grid of a neighborhood. This was the Palisades! Nothing bad could happen here.
Next, I called Kathy, one of my best friends, who lives nearby. We met at the Palisades Bluffs when we were both big and pregnant 20 years ago.
We were hearing that nearby buildings and stores were already consumed by flames. Her house is perched high on a bluff above a trailer park that was reportedly burning. Her home has alarms on the windows, so she’d know right away if they were shattered by heat.
Another friend said Palisades High School had been engulfed. Pali High is just two blocks away from my house.
Another girlfriend, Trish, was told by her neighbor to expect the worst. He had just clawed his way up a dirt embankment, evading police and firefighters, hoping to get a glimpse of his house. But it wasn’t there any more – consumed by cruel orange flames and smoke.
On Tuesday night, my phone lit up with a text from the Los Angeles Fire Department: ‘Those in the Palisades Area evacuate now.’
In Southern California, natural disasters are a fact of life. We’re always ready to run. But we always made our way back to our sweet grid of a neighborhood.
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso reamed out Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass (whom he ran against in 2022 and lost) and all the idiots in charge of the city, who failed to diffuse the ticking timebomb that sparked this inferno.
‘It’s a disaster to the 100th degree…it’s devastating,’ Caruso raged Tuesday night, ‘There is no water coming out of the fire hydrants… we have a city that’s burning and we have no resources to put out fires. This is a disaster waiting to happen. What is predictable is preventable.’
Overgrown dry brush, fire hydrants empty, crowded evacuation routes and no plans in place when the ‘what if’ catastrophe became a ‘what now?’ nightmare.
Kathy and I downloaded a few fire-tracking different apps – Watch Duty, Firespot, Cal Fire. The apps showed a circle of fire closing in on our little street like a noose. Horrifying videos flooded social media showing abandoned cars along evacuation routes and beloved landmarks reduced to unrecognizable ash.
Neighbor John, a builder, who erected a lovely craftsman for his young children decades ago, was the first to realize his house had burned. His life’s work disintegrated in minutes.
Kathy was next. A friend snuck down the street on a bike and captured video of her home reduced to a chimney and two Mongolian trees. She had once been assured that the succulents her husband had so meticulously planted in their yard over the years would act as nature’s firewall and she’d be safe. The heat was too intense.
‘It’s all gone,’ she told me. ‘All the footprints and art projects, Eagle Scout medals and baby blankets. Everything from my dad. It’s burned. It’s ash. It’s nothing.’
She broke the news to her son who flew back to college the day before the fires. ‘I’m so sorry’, she told him through tears, ‘the only thing I got from your room was the sweater your coach crocheted for you and two stuffed animals from your bed.’
‘That’s ok, mom. That’s all I would’ve taken,’ he said. That absolutely broke my heart.
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso reamed out Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (pictured above with California Governor Newsom) and all the idiots in charge of the city, who failed to diffuse the ticking timebomb that sparked this inferno.
My girls, 15 and 19, and I sat transfixed in front of the TV – flipping back and forth between weather and news channels – desperately searching for any glimpse of our neighborhood. We made chocolate chip cookies, something familiar and soothing, as the world they knew burned. Local reporters on the streets wearing gas masks and exasperation in their eyes begged, ‘Where are the firefighters?’
I laid awake most of the night checking the apps for anything, good or bad, texting neighbors, praying for a miracle, and watching. And by morning, still no word – and the fires still raged, unabated.
I was kicking myself for not taking more baby pictures, my grandmother’s cross, my grandfather’s Army saber from World War One. Why didn’t I think to pack those irreplaceable things?
I reached out to Fox News colleague Jonathan Hunt who was reporting just a few blocks away from my house – and asked him to please check on the house and save my keepsakes. He and his producer Nikki bravely raced there and got everything on my short list in two minutes.
I was praying all day that Trish’s house somehow made it through. She’s a single mom who works as a photographer, taking pictures at the local schools to make ends meet. Her home is all she had.
The app said it was spared, but it said the same thing about her neighbor house which lay in ruin. I called her, hoping beyond hope that God would smile on one of my friends. But again, not today.
‘It’s gone,’ she said. ‘I can’t breathe because I don’t know how you rebuild this, I don’t even know where to start. My daughter doesn’t have a school, the Palisades simply doesn’t exist.’
As of this moment, my home is safe. But it’s a sickening feeling being so relieved and so utterly heartbroken at the same time.
People rebound. New memories can be made. But as long as we’re being led by incompetent cowards who can neither predict nor prevent tragedy, we have no choice but to start anew… far, far away.
