Dispatch from Pacific Palisades: A harrowing view of California’s competency crisis

Good morning from Los Angeles.

The sky above Sunset Boulevard is black, bleeding into a band of vivid orange at the horizon. “Looks like the cover of ‘Hotel California,’” says the guy at the local coffee shop.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass rode out the fire in Africa, where she was part of a Biden delegation attending the inauguration of Ghana’s president.

The smoke is probably from the 2,227-acre Eaton fire to our northeast, raging through Altadena and Pasadena.

Or it could be from the 75-acre Woodley fire to our northwest, or from any number of smaller fires that have erupted since Tuesday morning.

Matt Himes

A family home destroyed

I’m with two of my children (the eldest went back to boarding school Monday morning; my wife is on a business trip in New York) at a friend’s house in West Hollywood, just off the fabled Sunset Strip. We arrived here yesterday, after fleeing the fire in Pacific Palisades.

My friend and I take a quick drive up Mulholland to a scenic overlook in the Hollywood Hills. The gardeners are out with their leaf blowers.

My mother-in-law calls from Venice, where she and my father-in-law — along with my sister-in-law and her toddler — have been staying with my brother-in-law. Their house, the one they bought in 1976 and in which they raised five children, has burnt down.

Unprecedented devastation

Decades earlier, my father-in-law stood on the roof with a hose, waiting to put out any stray embers, evoking (certainly unintentionally) the famous picture of Richard Nixon atop his house during the 1961 Brentwood-Bel Air fire.

This fire is much worse. He and my sister-and-law managed to make it to the house last night, but there was far too much smoke to see or breathe.

“Aggie is probably gone,” my mother-in-law says, referring to their beloved cat.

Also destroyed is much of the nearby Palisades Village, as the small town center is called.

The local Starbucks, housed in one of the center’s few “historic” buildings, is gutted. It was there, early one morning almost 15 years ago, when a gravelly, vaguely menacing voice shook me out of my pre-coffee stupor.

Remembering Ray

“Awww, she’s beautiful!” I turned my head to see the late Ray Liotta admiring my then-infant daughter, lolling in the Baby Bjorn strapped to my chest.

It’s not uncommon to run into celebrities around here. “Police Academy” and “Three Men and a Baby” actor Steve Guttenberg is a longtime resident. This summer, he was grand marshal of the town’s July 4 parade.

MEGA/Getty Images

Yesterday, he was helping first responders move vehicles abandoned by panicked residents as they fled their homes in the hills.

At the time of my Liotta encounter, we were staying with my in-laws, having recently moved from New York. We ended up staying for a year and a half, during which time various other siblings — buffeted by their own crises — moved in and out.

It was that kind of house. It’s that kind of family.

We ended up buying a house of our own about a mile to the west, on a sleepy cul-de-sac perfect for learning to ride bikes. We’re still not sure if our house is intact. Many friends have lost theirs.

Roughly between the two houses is the Episcopal school my wife and all of her siblings attended; my mother-in-law taught Latin there. My youngest still goes there (his sisters did too but are now in high school).

The church famously burnt down in the 1980s, but they rebuilt it. Since then, the general influx of the rich and famous to the area has resulted in some notable upgrades to the campus, while still letting it retain its bucolic charm. It’s not uncommon to spot deer in the hills near the principal’s office.

We’ve heard part of it has burnt down.

Climate-change scolds

Most of my information I’ve been getting from social media. I was grateful for the reporting of CBS News reporter Jonathan Vigliotti, who posted footage of the devastation to X this morning.

He lost me when he turned it into a “call to action” to fight climate change.

What’s energizing me at the moment is a call to action closer to home. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass rode out the fire in Africa, where she was part of a Biden delegation attending the inauguration of Ghana’s president. She should be back in town any day now.

Gov. Gavin Newsom stood for a few photo ops (it’s impossible for him not to look creepy and smug) but said nothing heartening or useful.

Like the majority of wildfires here, this fire was most likely man-made — a drug-addled, mentally ill vagrant building a campfire or simply wanting to watch things burn.

Misplaced priorities

California’s failed homeless policies — an endless cash grab by cynical professional advocates for the “unhoused” — have combined with years of poor forestry management and woefully inadequate fire preparation to enable this inevitable disaster.

Two years ago, the Los Angeles Fire Department made the much ballyhooed decision to hire its first “female and LGBTQ” fire chief. In her official bio, she says her priority is “creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of firefighters have been risking life and limb to save what they can, but the hydrants are empty.

I’ve been visiting this beautiful town since 2003; I made it my home in 2009. It’s always struck me as a small-town refuge in the sprawling heart of the celebrity-industrial complex.

As the T-shirt displayed in the local barbershop reads: “If you’re rich you live in Beverly Hills, if you’re famous you live in Hollywood, if you’re lucky you live in the Palisades.”

Yes, I’d say we’re very lucky indeed — blessed, even.

I expect we’ll demonstrate why in the coming months, as common sense and good old-fashioned community spirit prevails in the long, hard efforts to rebuild.

Pray that we succeed — and in so doing inspire a long-overdue reckoning for those whose feckless stewardship has brought this beautiful state to the brink of destruction.