PACIFIC PALISADES FIRES
We lived on a ridge in the Palisades for about 22 years and moved to rural northern California about 2.5 years ago. Our old house is now gone, but the wonderful memories with friends, family and colleagues remain. Before that I lived in Venice for over 20 years, and my wife lived in the Palisades. I am unbearably saddened by the loss of the wonderful community which we so enjoyed with our friends in this small local neighborhood. Dear friends have lost their homes, while other dear friends’ homes somehow survived. It’s an unspeakable disaster for the community.
The Palisades is a beautiful place tucked between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. It backs up against Topanga State Park. You can hike (or mountain bike) on the fire roads for more than 5 miles through the mountains from the Palisades to Topanga Canyon and its little semi rustic community – no cars, no roads, just hiking trails in between the two. You can hike or bike down to the beach for a bracing swim (or surf) in the Pacific.
You can get into or out of the Palisades on only two roads – Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). That’s it. It is otherwise closed in by the mountains and the Ocean.
The surrounding area is desert chapparal and highly prone to brush fires. The canyons and ridges funnel and concentrate the powerful Santa Ana winds when they arrive during the fall. Frequently when the Santa Ana’s arrive, they topple trees onto transmission lines, and the area loses power, and the downed power lines start fires. DWP upgraded the power stations so that loss of power has been less frequent.
LA has had the following seasons: winter rainy season (green), spring growing season (green), summer drying out season (golden), fall fire and Santa Ana season (brown with occasional brush fires). With the advent of climate change, fire season starts earlier and lasts later, and rains come more erratically. This year was particularly dry (0.16 inches of rain) after several years of heavy rain and exuberant growth of vegetation in the coastal mountains and especially the canyon ravines, setting up the very tinderbox that erupted. It could have happened anywhere in the LA basin. Normally, powerful storms bearing lots of rain begin in November; they had yet to arrive.
When I lived in Venice, brush fires in Malibu were frequent during the Santa Anas; we watched from Venice Beach as the Santa Monica Mountains turned red with fire and the sorrow of people’s homes and businesses lost. The fires would start in the Malibu back-country and sweep down to the sea, burning all in their path.
When we moved to the Palisades, we were introduced to fire safety by the nearby local fire department. We needed to clear the flammable brush on all sides of our home. We cleared the gutters and swept the sidewalks, paths and open spaces from the leaves and needles. Every couple of years, the trees (particularly the fast-growing Eucalyptus, but also the big pine) had to be trimmed. We stucco-ed the house, which already had a red tile roof and replaced the wooden back staircases and porches with steel.
Topanga State Park abutted our neighborhood, making for wonderful and accessible hiking on the fire break trails, but frequent potential for destructive brush fires. I worried about this a lot each fire season. I asked one of our nearest friends and neighbors who had grown up on our street and had lived all his life (over 70 years) there about the dangers of fire. He told me of the one and only occasion when the brush fires had come down the verdant and uninhabited Los Liones Canyon below us and stopped just short of the Mormon Temple when the winds changed. It went in the fire this time.
One beautiful old home nearby designed by Richard Neutra burned a number of years ago when the EV charging system for their Tesla caught fire and exploded in the middle of the night in their garage; it destroyed their home, but it did not set fire to the rest of the neighborhood.
Quite frequently over the last decade that we lived there, brush fires started in the adjacent canyon to the east – Santa Ynez Canyon/Palisades Drive, where there was a big new development, Palisades Highlands. People were evacuated from their homes, and the fires were put out without much if any damage to homes. There is only one way out of this neighborhood; that is Palisades Drive; it is however four lanes and very fast. On at least one occasion, these fires came up the very steep hillside towards the very edge of our little community and were stopped at the crest by the local firefighters.
At the bottom of our street was one of the two fire stations in the Palisades; they were central to the community, seemed to be well staffed and well run. There were sporadic, ill advised, but unsuccessful efforts by the city to close one of them. The big Santa Ana driven brush fires were attacked from above by firefighting planes and helicopters that pulled water from local reservoirs, and when necessary pulled water out of the Pacific with a big drinking straw or big scoop. That did not work this time because the winds were so strong 80-100 miles per hour that they could not fly and do their jobs.
At least in my experience, there was no local community wide effort to promote fire consciousness, fire prevention, or fire safety. To my knowledge there were no volunteers, and no fire safety classes for civilians to help the fire department. A local contractor and many of his employees stayed to fight the fires for over a week alongside the trained firefighters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2025/la-fires-man-saved-homes-pacific-palisades/
This was quite the opposite of the Topanga Canyon Community on the other side of Topanga State Park, where our friends organized extensive fire prevention and evacuation. They had only one way out of Topanga down a narrow windy mountain road. They took their fire risks seriously because their community had burned.
One image has remained forever seared in my memory banks. We had hiked about 5 miles across to Trippet Ranch and went to benches on a beautiful overlook to eat our leftover turkey sandwiches. We encountered two young German women tourists enjoying their cigarettes and the view. After we explained the dangers of wildfires and the park rules, they ground them out in the dirt, leaving their butts and their residue of anger behind. They simply did not or could not understand that this whole glorious landscape was a tinderbox, a perception that many from tourists to locals shared.
Some early communities in the Palisades were established by Methodists who built a church and intellectual retreat there. For many years it was a middle-class community with very limited access to hard drinks and lots of different places of worship. During the 30’s it became a haven for German Jewish intellectuals, refugees from Hitler’s Reich, and developed a vibrant Jewish community. Later on, it attracted Hollywood celebrities and became a quiet destination for the well to do, quite unlike the glamour and flash of Malibu or Beverly Hills. This led to a big run up in real estate values, which were then dramatically accelerated by development of Palisades Village by local developer Rick Caruso. He replaced a small downtown area that had a comfortable tho’ outdated 50’s feel with luxury shopping and overpriced (in my opinion) restaurants – a development that many in the community liked, but I did not. The Palisades was a mixture ranging from McMansions back in the hills or on bluffs overlooking the Pacific to several mobile home parks down by the beach, from teachers and nurses to pro athletes, lawyers to celebrities, even a Governor or two.
The community had excellent public charter schools, a beloved by children rec center, and small local shops and open spaces for hanging out. It is all gone, very little survived the conflagration, yet some miraculously did.
The community had many churches, synagogues, and temples. Most were consumed by the fires; a few survived.
This devastating fire might have originated in the embers of a small fire near Skull Rock, originally started by local kids playing with fireworks over New Year’s Eve; it is way too early to tell. It wiped out the homes of the celebrities and the remnants of the local middle class alike. It took all but the wonderful memories and hopefully, the will to rebuild better, less ostentatious, more fireproof homes in a community in better tune with its environs. It has created a clean slate to rebuild a wonderful community with far greater attention to the fire safety and prevention so necessary to the survival of this community. Or scoundrels looking for a quick buck could fleece those already devastated by the fires and undone by the enormity of their losses. The community could rebuild with more affordable housing or with ever greater exclusivity. https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2025-03-03/pacific-palisades-is-one-of-l-a-s-richest-e-without-affordable-housing-will-it-get-more-exclusive
LA and CA have very strong building codes to deal with our range of natural disasters from fires to earthquakes. Many older homes were built before the current codes, but the fires were omnivorous, they destroyed almost all in their path. Several of the beautiful old Spanish style homes on our street survived the fiery crucible. At some point, local building and fire and insurance inspectors will be able to assess which if any design and construction features best enabled some homes to survive while so many others did not. https://ktla.com/news/california/wildfires/palisades-eaton-wildfire-damage-maps/ Or it may turn out to have just been random chance, a roll of the celestial dice as to which homes survived the fire storm.