Fire Storm

After the Heat, Here Comes the Burn

A little after 6 PM last Tuesday, January 7th, I sat outside the charming brick facade of Altadena Hardware on Mariposa Street waiting to pick up my teenage son, who worked after school as a stock clerk. Every day I would get there a little early and watch Steve of Steve’s Bike’s lock up his store and head home. I would admire the fantastical storefront of Wellema Hats, which was like something that belonged on Main Street, U.S.A. in Disneyland. And everyone in town went to Altadena Hardware.

My son jumped in the car and told me the store had been crowded all day with people buying flashlights and other emergency supplies, since we’d all seen the situation in the Palisades that afternoon and we knew the winds were coming to our neighborhood.

But the idea that this entire street, all the stores, and home after home, block after block, would simply disappear, obliterated by a raging inferno, was, and still is, unfathomable.

Altadena Hardware in better days.

When we got home a few minutes later, my husband told me that Pacific Palisades Village was on fire, including my childhood home on Via de la Paz north of Sunset.

Two of his cousins homes were on fire. And so was the Big Rock neighborhood of Malibu, where my mother owned a home for 25 years. She sold it last summer and moved out of state–a remarkable bit of luck, at least for her.

Thousands of others were about to see their luck run out, however.

Morada Drive north of New York Drive, 10 am 1/8/25

All seven of us gathered around the TV and watched in horror as the news was reporting on the Palisades on fire. My hometown. It’s changed a lot since my parents first bought their little ranch house on Via, but it was still the place I had marched in every July 4th parade as a Girl Scout. Texts started coming in: Methodist preschool, my old preschool, was on fire. The Reel Inn and Cholada Thai on PCH. Gelson’s on Sunset. Places I knew so well.

My parent’s first house in the Village.

Then my husband quietly showed me an alert on his phone: nearby Eaton Canyon trailhead was on fire.

Oh no.

We went out to the front yard to see if we could see anything. The wind howled. Trees were shedding branches and leaves like they were being shaken. Then I screamed—the sky above the neighborhood was fiery red already. About an hour later, we fled as gale-force winds battered us, the kids screaming in terror, in a little convoy to a friend’s house.

Not what you want to see from your street.

At dawn the next morning, my husband and son crept over to Lake Avenue at New York Drive. Everything north was lost in thick smoke and flames. “Well, I’m glad I forgot to take my shirts to Poppy’s,” my husband texted me. Poppy’s, the local dry cleaner, had vanished along with all the pressed and starched shirts, wedding dresses, and suits hanging in it that would never be returned.

Altadena is literally wiped out. The scale is unreal.

At least a dozen families at our school: displaced. 30 families from St. Philips. Eliot Middle School. St. Mark’s School. Thousands of families, homeless. My Aldi on Lake Avenue. No more watching the fireworks show at Altadena country club from the side streets.

Lake Avenue at New York Drive has become an epicenter of the disaster zone.

This is Altadena Hardware:

The loss is so totalizing that I am having trouble with it, here from my miraculously intact house on the very edge of the disaster zone. Our route to school now takes us past dozens of cross streets and every intersection is blocked by National Guard soldiers and dozens of military vehicles.

Red means you got cooked.

Desperate residents keep pulling up, whipping out their ID, pleading with the sheriffs to let them see their house. All are denied entry to the bombed-out area.

Every other corner has become a makeshift donation site with piles of old clothes, flats of water, taco trucks, and messages of prayers.

I took this just north of New York Drive the morning after the fire started.

What’s in store for L.A. now? I have no idea. The scale and scope of what just happened is going to take a long time to even accept. Just wait until people are allowed back in to these neighborhoods and see it with their own eyes.

But those that got lucky will likely stay. Covid scared away a lot of people. If you stayed, you probably had good reasons. We’ll see where people go—right now there is a diaspora and thousands are spread out all over the state in hotels and with friends, waiting to get back to whatever is left.

Altadena and Pacific Palisades are these special little enclaves and their loss hurts.

I have no “take” on the fires other than to express my anguish to everyone I know who lost homes, pets, and precious heirlooms.

Calamitous. The only way out is new and effective leadership. A DOGE for California.

Will this be enough to finally wake people up enough and get them to stop voting for incompetence and, frankly, criminal mismanagement of funds and misplaced priorities?

It’s about to get pretty hot in the Governor’s mansion.

Pray for us!

—Peachy

To donate to a family who lost everything, please check out some of these local Go Fund Mes.