’25 Jan: FIRE

(internet photos)

My plan was to pick up Sharon for lunch today at 11 and on the way up, to my amazement, I could clearly see a swath of fire running down the mountains behind her house. The fire had started around 10:30 and didn’t seem That bad. “Look Sharon, look what’s happening in your neighborhood!” She hadn’t had a chance to even notice yet. We decided to head out toward lunch but within a few minutes we got a ‘prepare for evacuation’ message on our phones, so we turned back planning to collect some things and then go to Sharon’s son’s house in Brentwood, and soon thereafter one of the neighbors knocked on the door saying ‘time to GO’. 

Sharon’s house is very near the Palisades Village and I was pretty confident ‘they’ were not going to let the Vi$$age burn down. Goodness, I was so very wrong. The ferocity of the wind created a perfect storm that doubled the size of the fire area and doubled it again every hour.

As of this minute (7:30pm), the Village is ok as is Sharon’s street and surrounding streets, but the fire is very Very close.  And the wind is so strong and so unpredictable the firefighters are often not using hoses because the wind makes them ineffective.  (Update 3pm on the 8th the wind is down some but now there is not enough water in the storage tanks to generate the necessary pressure.) Fortunately the wind is blowing away from Sharon’s house, but a slight turn in direction and her neighborhood could be very much under threat.

I just heard that containment is at 0% and the weather forecast is predicting even worse wind for the next 24 hours. What will the morning bring?!

(internet photo)

The wind is so fierce it is kicking up storms of embers that whirlwind around lighting trees and homes on fire making more ember whirlwinds and so on.

Right now at midnight the fire has been raging for 13 hours virtually consuming Pacific Palisades and now there’s an evacuation order from Santa Monica starting about a mile from my house. The fire is still more than 2 miles away but the wind is not abating. I wish I could find an update on the Getty Villa since I’ve been seeing conflicting reports. Update: 10am on the 8th, tv news is reporting except for some landscaping, the Villa is ok.

I should probably pack a bag. (So far I have my passport and my grandmother’s ring.) That’s me, in the pink circle. Below shows where the three fires rage on. Update 3pm on the 8th, now there are four fires: Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, and Woodley.

Update 6pm on the 8th, now we have to add the Sunset fire. With another terrible wind event (not predicted) the Warning zone for the Sunset fire could hook up with the Palisades Evacuation zone making its way THROUGH Beverly Hills and UCLA.

The air quality at my house is terrible btw. I could make smoked turkey in the back yard.

(more pictures from the internet)

Yesterday’s air quality, mostly very unhealthy.

What’s burning this morning.

A small section of Pacific Palisades.

When I drove home at 8pm all the ash had blown off and this is how it looked at 8am the next morning. We’re breathing this.

On Wednesday morning I woke up to find the garden table blown to bits. It was still so windy I turned around and walked away. The glass they use for these tables break into little pellets that are not like the shards of a broken drinking glass or vase for example, but there are a million of them. Today, Saturday, I took the picture below after already working two hours (but probably more like 30 minutes…) picking up what I could before wearing out. It’s going to take some time to get it all done.

On Thursday I got to have a nice lunch with the kids at a Vietnamese place, and then we ended our lunch at my personal favorite, Yogurtland!

On Friday Windy and I had lunch at Lona’s place where, after eating, Lona put us to work getting her started on a jigsaw puzzle. I think she doesn’t want to do this puzzle but feels obliged to because it was a gift with the intention of improving her mind, the intersection of desire and duty.

And in the evening Friday I took my tenants Olivia and Kristin out to dinner for a Bon Voyage to Kristin who has finished her internship and is moving on to her next placement. She’s leaving on the 16th and the new tenant will start on the 25th. I forgot to take a picture so here’s Kristin from her instagram.

(internet photo)

Last week today the fires started and at this moment things are pretty calm with more high winds predicted, but not the hurricane winds of last Tue-Wed and the air is not quite as bad but still “Poor”. The big fires are not even 50% contained but it seems no structures are threatened.

Yesterday Santa Monica retracted both warning and mandatory evacuation orders. I’ve been four blocks from a Warning zone for most of the first five days and a mile from a Mandatory Evacuation zone until yesterday.  I’m watching local news, listening to the radio, reading articles, googling constantly during every free moment, which has led me to a thought – re-traumatizing or inuring?

I’m actually feeling pretty numb over it all.  It is as bad as or worse than everything you’ve been seeing on tv and we all have family and friends who have lost everything, a lifetime of things.  It reminds me of a volcanic eruption, with almost no notice, destroying everything in its wake, and not a chance of stopping it.

Maybe I’m not so hot on America these days but I’ve always been such a fan of LA, family and friends, places to go and things to do, cultural icons, gardens-museums-sporting activities, fine educational institutions, livable weather, and more and more.  Want to do something?  Yes, you can do it here.

But I fear (oh I do so hope I’m wrong!) it could be this for the rest of my life.  It’s going to rain one of these days creating more misery, mud-lakes-rivers-falls, oh my goodness.  And Trump hates California, as he has so often threatened retribution, punishment for speaking against him. All he’s managed to say about the fires is to blame his enemies and all his surrogates have done is talk about ‘strings attached’.  The blaming is going to be incessant, and the lies.  Already with the lies, so many lies, and the more relentlessly you repeat lies, well, you know having read history.

Alan, Jo Ann, me

Goodness I should not be the one to take after-dinner selfies, how many times do I have to tell myself, and Alan would be an excellent choice because he has such nice long arms. Next time!

Another fire victim. Alan’s daughter and her two teenage daughters live in the Palisades. For an as yet unknown reason her home was spared, surrounded by total loss. Their neighbors, the kid’s friends, their schools, so much loss. Fortunately they have a very nice place to stay but what will come next? Even though their home still stands there are no utilities, no services, smoke and probably water damage. It’s bad, even when it could be worse.

You can see a very small section of the Palisades fire below, in this Still Incomplete inspection map (the inspection map has pictures of all the buildings inspected) how that happened, the red is destroyed, green is affected, and black is no damage.