“When I woke up that morning, the first thing I noticed was that there was a lot of wind. At about 10.30am, I started hearing fire engines,” says Raf Green, 59, a writer, musician, artist and surfer, recalling the day the fire started in the Los Angeles district of Pacific Palisades.
“I went outside and I could see where the smoke was coming from, just up the hill from me, a place where I hike with my dog Bug every day. There were fire engines. In retrospect, there should have been more – there were 10 or 15 when there should have been 30 or 40.”
In a neighbourhood such as the Pacific Palisades – so affluent, so outwardly polished – it’s often easy to forget it is, or at least was, home to ordinary working people such as Raf: “I have always loved the Palisades. I lived in the same rented apartment for 21 years. It had the best view in the world. I could see all of Santa Monica Bay, the pier, Malibu, Catalina. I could look out of the window and check the surf.”
Raf started out as an actor and then moved into music and art. “One day my truck broke so I took on some dog walking to pay for the repairs. I did so for a rich screenwriter friend who one day said, ‘You know those guys at Star Trek? If you make up a story, they’ll give you money,” recalls Raf. “Next thing I know, I’m writing for Star Trek: Voyager. For the last 25 years, I’ve worked on a lot of shows.” But TV work has dried up over the past two years – “Instead, I have spent the last year painting my butt off.”
And it was his flat full of paintings that he had to consider when the smoke began blowing towards his apartment building. Raf’s daughter Daisy, 23, was staying with him at the time, back from college in Brooklyn. At around 11.40am, Raf got a text message saying he should prepare to evacuate. “I went inside and told Daisy we should put some stuff in the car. We packed socks and underwear and the dog’s food and medicine. Ten minutes later and we were officially ordered to go. I looked around the apartment and saw my guitars and my artwork. There were 100 houses between me and the fire. I took one guitar and one painting. It was beyond my imagination that my house would burn.”
It’s hard, perhaps, for a British person to understand what’s taken place in LA these past weeks. I myself moved over there, to Beverly Hills, a few years ago and it took me a while to get my head around the sheer enormity of the city – its various neighbourhoods and villages segued together, all unique, all with a particular flavour.
It was through Instagram that I learnt a wildfire had started near the Pacific Palisades. And comparing it immediately with London, I thought: “That’s the LA equivalent of Notting Hill; that’s like Elgin Crescent, Blenheim Crescent and Portobello Road going up in flames and all the expensive houses, jazzy restaurants and smart shops with it.”
“This can’t be true,” I thought. Wildfires happen in LA but not in residential areas as densely – and dare I say it, as affluently – populated as the Palisades. In addition, firefighters were battling a second blaze in Altadena, another culturally rich neighbourhood in the county. Both were spreading faster than anyone could have predicted thanks to unprecedented high, and warm, desert winds (pre-warned as a PDS or “particularly dangerous situation” by the weather experts some days beforehand).
I collected my two children – Marlowe, our son, aged six, and Flyn, our daughter, aged four – from school, drove home and locked the front door. I gathered our passports and put them neatly in a pile in the kitchen. How much I cared about that neatness. I charged our electric car (we are so lucky to have a charger at home; I came to understand that queues for fuel and Tesla chargers in the city were hours long at this stage). My husband Sudhin, who is co-founder of airline Surf Air, came home and a restless night checking social media followed. There wasn’t one main reliable source of information; I had to scan X, Instagram, Nextdoor and Ring to garner how serious things were.
By dawn, we could see smoke and an eerie orange glow from our bedroom window. School, having just started the day before following the Christmas holidays, was closed. The children wouldn’t leave our sides. We waited it out that day, glued to screens amid a greyish smoky glow from outside.
Friends had received texts on their phones to say they must either prepare to evacuate or officially leave their homes by order of law. Others had already potentially lost theirs but still couldn’t be sure. That evening, a new fire broke out in Hollywood. My husband walked calmly upstairs where I was bathing the kids. “Pack what you can,” he said. “We are leaving in 20 minutes.” To where, we did not know. But with a new fire garnering strength near us, the Palisades already ablaze, the roads could get so gridlocked we might get trapped in the inferno. This is Hollywood happening in Hollywood, I thought. But this was not an apocalypse movie. This was real life.
For Raf, evacuating proved to be that living nightmare. “We drove to Sunset Boulevard. It’s the only way in and out of the Palisades,” he explains. “But even before the evacuation order, Sunset was completely jammed. We moved a quarter of a mile in one hour. Cops and trucks were trying to get through, lanes were bumper to bumper, smoke was building. Planes were flying overhead, dumping water. The sky turned black.”
Raf took a secret shortcut and he drove Daisy and Bug to his father’s house in Riverside, some 60 miles away. “We got to my dad’s and started looking up news. Daisy found an app, which showed that my building was OK. We went to sleep hopeful. All day we thought the house was still standing. Thursday morning, I opened Instagram and saw a post from ABC News, a reporter driving through the Palisades. It looked like a nuclear bomb had flattened it. He drove up from the Pacific Coast Highway, along Sunset and on he went. And then I saw it; he drove past my house and it was on fire.” Raf likens it to “seeing a friend being attacked”.
“I was kicking myself for not taking more. Or,” he muses, “you could say we left just in time.”
It’s his daughter’s artwork from her childhood that plays on his mind. “It is just stuff. Fifty-nine years of stuff. Stuff I have poured my heart into making. Stuff like my grandmother’s art, and journals I kept for many years. I had money invested in guitars and music equipment; they are all gone. But the bigger thing is that we loved living there, we loved that part of LA and that part is gone.”
I have always wondered what I would take with me if my house were on fire. When this becomes a reality, literally nothing feels important apart from the humans you are with. I took birth certificates, jewellery, my laptop, the kids’ iPads and a very random selection of clothes. Had I had more time to prepare, I could have submerged my favourite china plates on the steps of our swimming pool, a trick I later saw on X. I might have bundled my Alexander McQueen Plato’s Atlantis dress into the car, a collector’s item and one that needs to remain in the world. Or precious paintings by my late grandmother Anne, Duchess of Norfolk, which I watched her paint as a child, left to me in her will. This felt frivolous. My children struggled with what to bring. A pile of toys (rocks, a shark’s tooth, sparkly make-up from Father Christmas) soon grew next to the bag I had allocated them. Packing those felt more important than anything I owned.
So we left. We stayed with friends in nearby Palm Springs. We spent three days there staring at the media, having Covid lockdown flashbacks, trying to keep the children occupied. We have since returned home. We are the lucky ones. Our house is still standing and the Anne Norfolk paintings live to see another day. I walk around in shock, continuing with daily life – relieved, and guilty that I have a home when others do not.
Nicole Diaco Burgess, born and raised in Palisades, has just lost her family home, as have her parents. Simultaneously, her husband’s immediate family have also lost theirs.
She’s a talented and renowned florist and runs her own business, LA Native Florals, just around the corner from the home she lived in with her cinematographer husband Michael Burgess, their two children, daughter London, 10, son Donovan, seven, and their dog Pearl.
Nicole and her children are now in Richmond, London, where her husband is working on a movie. They chose to join him in England, she says, because “we didn’t know where to go but we wanted to be together”.
Currently her days are spent working out precisely what to do next with what funds. “It’s surreal talking to insurance companies from here, trying to keep the heartbeat of where we are from. A lot of people have a perception that the west side of LA is all about the affluency but it is also filled with generations of families who have lived there for decades and built family businesses there.”
She was with her mother at her business premises, just six minutes from her home, when she learnt of the fire nearby. Having grown up in LA, Nicole had experienced several fires before but with this one, she instinctively felt the need to drive home.
“I felt a sense of urgency that I have never felt before,” she states. “I grabbed passports immediately. I took jewellery given to me from my deceased father, passed down through generations. My mother grabbed a piece of art which we had growing up. I wish I could have taken more of my husband’s work.
“My sister-in-law also showed up to help; she walked out of her house on Sunset with nothing as she didn’t believe the fire would come to her house too. She grabbed pyjamas for my children and my mum grabbed a quilt, which she thought would comfort them. I had just taken down the Christmas decorations and took two large boxes of ornaments and put them in the car. I had been collecting them for years, it’s a tradition we have. I kept thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But I am so glad I did.”
Before departing, Nicole hosed down her roof and put her sprinklers on in the garden but the winds were so strong, the water kept blowing back in her face. Her mother begged her to leave. But then her phone rang with an automated alert from her children’s school confirming that they were evacuating. “I knew they were under imminent threat by the geography of the fire. I knew I needed to be with them and that I needed to get the hell out of there.”
Reunited with her children and with their dog Pearl, she drove, amid chaos on the streets, to a friend’s house in the more “inland” streets nearby. Standing on that roof surveying the fire, it became clear this was not safe so they drove on to a nearby ocean-front beach club.
The beach club was not refuge enough. She drove further on to her sister’s house in Mar Vista (“she is now the only person who has a home in our family”).
Nicole waited 48 hours, not knowing if her house had gone or not. “Then through the Nextdoor app on my phone, I ended up seeing a video of my street and I saw just my chimney standing. My son lost it. He started hitting his head, screaming out, ‘Not our house, not our house’. I was trying to comfort him, saying, ‘We’ll get it back, we’ll rebuild it’. It’s so hard to say those words because I don’t know if and when we can.” Nicole feels displaced but relieved the family is together. “I told my son last night that our home is where the four of us are. The rest is just walls.”
Before the family flew to London, Nicole was able to return to the ashes of her home. “I ran back to the property – all was closed off but a district attorney friend took me; I wanted to check if everything had actually burned, I wanted to see it with my own eyes,” she explains. “I went to my in-laws’ house first and grabbed some things off their property that were salvageable – a wind chime and a little ceramic snail that one of our kids had painted for them. At our home, I found our safe. A neighbour drove by on bike in a hazmat suit; he had a crowbar with him and helped me get some things out of that safe – precious mementos from my husband’s movie career.”
But now, safe in Richmond but thousands of miles from home, she is in survival mode. She talks of the incredible generosity and outpouring of love and support from the Palisades community and how she knows of so many people in her exact position (“Is that devastating or comforting?” she wonders) but she is also angry about “the lack of resources of our town”.
“I have joined a class action lawsuit against the city and the Department of Water and Power,” she says. “Let’s get what is meant for us – what we pay in our taxes and our insurance premiums.
“I have been trying to will this to play out the way I think it should go – that we get what we are meant to get, in a time that is relative to our lives. These homes were equity for the future. That’s all many have. This isn’t just about memories and comfort, this is about financial security.”
Raf, too, is unsure if the situation was managed well. He still questions the lack of fire trucks he saw that day. “I don’t want to point fingers. But in the past I would have seen more fire engines for something like this.”
And like Nicole, he’s unsure of what the future holds, explaining that his apartment was so close to the start of the fire, it’ll be one of the final places people can return. “I have friends whose houses are still standing and they can’t go back.
“I lived on the west side next to the ocean for a reason but those places are gone. If they’re renewed, I couldn’t afford them. I was paying rent set 21 years ago.”
Yet, there have been upsides. “We have been so loved and so taken care of. Everyone volunteering, everyone wanting to help, it’s overwhelming but beautiful,” he says. Daisy has created a GoFundMe page for him. “She wrote the most beautiful thing, I read it and that is the only time I have let myself cry.”
For Nicole, alongside riding the waves of devastation, managing her children’s education, their distress and the inevitable fatigue, there is also hope. “I will do my best to create the same feeling of what we had,” she says, “but insurance money cannot buy us health and us being together.”
LA is a place of creative invention and reinvention. It will rebuild. But it needs to do so with thought – and urgency. And those city planners, governors and architects who get to repaint the blank canvas that will emerge need to be bold with their ideas. This is a city of dreams; everyone here will keep on dreaming. But the climate is changing and it is clear that we humans must adapt to that very quickly, wherever we might be in the world.
Lady Kinvara Balfour is a British expat, writer and entrepreneur
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-raf-and-daisy-rebuild-after-fire
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-michael-and-nicole-rebuild-after-fire
2025-01-21T14:33:56Z