When We Were Engulfed in Flames: LA January 2025
On Tuesday morning I was in Beverly Hills getting a client ready for the day. It was one of those beautifully-average days in Los Angeles, blue skies, pleasant winter temperatures. Windy, but it hardly took away from it. In the afternoon I walked to Sweetgreen and saw my friend posted a photo of black smoke looming over the beach in Santa Monica.
Came for the fresh air and found hell, she captioned it.
What? I wrote to her.
Yep. In Pacific Palisades.
It's bad.
What????
Getting out of here.
She sent me a link to a video titled, Fast-moving brush fire erupts in Pacific Palisades.
That's so scary, I said.
It's so freaky windy today too.
Fires in LA were normal though, I thought, so I continued on with my day. I went to an Al-Anon meeting in the evening and aside from the topic at hand, the only unordinary thing they spoke about was the high wind and power outages in the city.
The next day I woke up to a text from my sister in Toronto.
Heard about the fires!!! She said.
Holy crap..
Hope you're okay.
Yeah, I said. I didn't know the extent of it, other than by my friends photo from the morning before. I looked online and found out that overnight the fire had burned down homes in the Pacific Palisades including ones belonging to Heidi Montag, Adam Brody and Leighton Meester, Jamie Lee Curtis.
The Palisades was the spot I went running every weekend and I'd been only a couple of days before. I frequented its coffee shops and markets. It was this sweet, idyllic community in Los Angeles situated on a cliff at the edge of the ocean, and at the base of breath-taking hiking trails in the Santa Monica mountains. All of it was reduced to dust.
My sister asked me if I could smell any smoke where I lived, which is sort of central in the city, a little west of Hollywood. I went outside to check. Above me the sky was blue but there were thick, dark clouds coming in from the west and threatening to blot out the sun. Through cracks in the smoke you could see pink and fiery red. The darkened skies coupled with billowing winds gave me this eerie feeling, like I was at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz.
When I came back inside I checked the news and there were two fires now. Another one started to the east in Pasadena. It took Mandy Moore's house and a thousand others, tens of thousands of people were evacuating.
The public, including Donald Trump and Elon Musk were calling for a tribunal of both the mayor and the governor for gross mismanagement. It came out that overnight while the firefighters were trying to protect the homes in the Palisades, the fire hydrants had run out of water.
Fires were a normal part of life in California, so how could they let this happen?
Rick Caruso, the billionaire owner of shopping complexes like The Grove, and Palisades Village, and also Mayor Karen Bass' opponent in the 2022 election, said on television, "we've got a mayor that's out of the country, and we've got a city that's burning." His two children lost their homes in the fire, too.
When the mayor came back she insisted that the ongoing crisis was due to hurricane-strength winds that caused the fires to grow overnight and prevented aerial firefighting efforts. The winds had since gone down which gave hope that they would be able to fight the fires and prevent more damage.
But later in the day two more fires started. Hurst Fire in Santa Clarita and the Lidia fire further out of the city. The air quality in my neighborhood worsened, going from 91 to 120, to 400 (extremely hazardous) by the afternoon.
I closed all the windows and stayed inside, going back and forth between news articles, the Calfire incidents page, and instagram which was entirely saturated with photos of once-were homes and neighborhood tours through apocalyptic landscapes. One video taken by someone driving through dense smoke on the Pacific Coast Highway showed burning embers on the iconic homes along the coast in Malibu.
Paris Hilton, Jen Atkin, Eugene Levy, Anna Farris, Tina Knowles, Anthony Hopkins, all lost their homes. It's not that being a celebrity makes it worse, but it does tend to make it feel more real. We feel like we've gotten to know them for having followed their lives for so long. Even influencers on my feed like spiritual leader David Ghiyam lost his home. Makeup artists I know too.
The fires so far had burned something like 20,000 acres, downed 2,000 structures and killed 5 people. I responded to texts from people checking in from Canada. I let them know that I was fine and that the fires weren't near me, even though it seemed like there was a fire in every direction.
In the evening when the winds had gone down and the air quality got a little bit better, I decided to let myself out of the house and walk to the grocery store.
As I was walked back home I saw a fire up in Runyon Canyon. It was a bright orange light coming from the top of the hill. It couldn't have been... it was nowhere close to the other fires, but yet it was a fire that I was seeing. I kept walking and by the time I got home I watched it spread further down the hill.
I lived well away from the hills, two kilometers from the base of Runyon, but after having seen all of the destruction happening in different parts of the city already and how quickly the fires moved, I worried.
I called my friend who was staying in Silverlake and showed her the fire.
This is not normal, she said. Fires don't just start like that.
It's coming down the hill I said.
A crowd started to gather around me to watch and take pictures.
I went inside to pack a bag just in case and then made a group chat with every single person in my family. I let them know that there was a new fire not so far from me and that I was going to monitor it in case I had to leave.
I packed up my computer and my passport while watching the alerts online and going back outside to check. I packed some clothes to sleep in. I contemplated all that I should bring with me, if I should take my makeup kit, which is my livelihood.
Maybe my personal makeup bag, too, and a couple of outfits and my running shoes and food from the fridge. I stopped myself and told myself that I was only going to leave for a couple of hours until it was safe, and that if the fire did reach my house I wasn't going to be thinking about going on runs and putting makeup on.
I went back outside one last time to look and decided that it would be best to just leave and check up on it from somewhere else rather than be at the house. I loaded my things into the car and saw a person walking down the street nonchalantly with just as good a view of the enveloping fire as I had.
At my friends house I felt safe enough to sleep for the night, even though we had no idea where the next fire was going to start. We tried to play backgammon as we watched the news on a huge TV screen. All commercials and regular television programming were cancelled in order to play 24/7 footage of the fires. It went back and forth between the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire, and the new Sunset fire up my street.
The Sunset Fire in Runyon Canyon was close to Hollywood landmarks like the Hollywood Bowl, The Chinese Theatre, and the Hollywood Sign, and even closer to all of the homes in The Hollywood Hills. Reporters showed the chaos unfolding as the densely populated streets at the base of Runyon and the Hollywood boulevard area tried to evacuate. Police arrested looters moving through the Hollywood Hills on bikes as homeowners evacuated.
They showed a four story home burning down, and it was hard to tell which fire this was, if the Sunset fire was starting to take homes or if it was one of the other fires. Even the reporters were confused as they switched back and forth between scenes.
The house burning down was actually a new "Sunswept fire," which took four homes in Studio City on the other side of the mountain, not connected to any of the others.
By morning they managed to control the fire near my house so I went back home. There was ash falling from the sky and it smelled like burning tires. I tried to tell myself not to look at the news anymore, except when necessary for my safety.
I'd just stay inside and try to take my mind off by reading and working on my book. It was so hard not to be entirely consumed by it though. More celebrities complained about the leadership. Jillian Michaels describing California's proposition 1, signed in 2014 to allocate billions of dollars to the creation of new water reservoirs, which had not been built yet.
AI videos went around on instagram of the Hollywood sign burning (despite the fires never reaching it), and all of Downtown Los Angeles on fire. Just days after Mark Zuckerberg announced that they were no longer going to attempt to stop the spread of false information on their platforms.
A new fire started to rage in Calabasas, more evacuations.
An emergency alarm went off on my phone, telling me that my area was under evacuation. I couldn't understand how. I refreshed the Calfire page and didn't see any new fires in my area. I checked the news. An hour later they sent an apology for the false alarm (in the form of another alarm), and stated that it was only meant for the residents of Calabasas.
Slept for the night and told myself again that I would not keep watching the news. Hard not to, though, when I awoke to another false alarm at 4am. This time it took them six hours to clarify.
Even my bible, which I normally go to for comfort in times like these, opened to chapters in Jeremiah about setting fire to the dwelling places and all of the worthless idols. Babylon becoming a heap of ruins and an object of horror. The King of Media coming against her (!!).
Yes, Prepare and dedicate nations for war against her - the kings of Media. With their governors and commanders, and every land of their dominion. The land trembles and writhes, for the purposes of the Lord against Babylon stand, to make the land of Babylon a desolation without inhabitants. Jeremiah 51:28-29
And, I will dry up her sea and great reservoir and make her fountain dry. Jeremiah 51:35
I'd been reading through the bible for a year now, and most of it's been like a beautiful love story full of hope. But lately I've been in Jeremiah for chapters and chapters and wondering where it's all leading and what all of it's for.
The first time I'd given any thought to the meaning and relevancy of the word "apocalypse" was a couple of months ago when I heard a Catholic priest in North Bay give a sermon about it. He was insisting that even though the word normally evoked fear, it was not meant to. It was not just to be looked at as doom and the end of days, but as something that we should actually want.
Come to think of it, I hear this sometimes in Christian music. "Come in like a fire, come in like a flood." It's the idea that everything, even the most painful and excruciating times in our lives are from God and for our good. A catalyst that ultimately allows for new life, new perspectives, and new ways of doing things that draw us closer to him.
It's hard to image it right now, but it is true that LA will recover from this. The fires will come to an end. Nations all around the world are rallying in support and sending their firefighters and their planes. Communities are coming together, opening up their homes, donating their resources. LA will rebuild, even if it's not the same.
Lamentations 3:19-38
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